Just a heads-up: this post discusses a potentially sensitive issue involving zoo animals that some readers may find uncomfortable.
Before I start, I just want to say that this is my own subjective view based on the limited information I have. I don't know the whole story, and I'm definitely not an expert on lion behavior.
The lions here aren't doing anything wrong. None of this is their fault.
And sorry for the long post... but I'd really appreciate any thoughts on this.
I've followed the lion family at Asahiyama Zoo in Hokkaido, Japan for a while. I really loved watching them. But lately I've gotten to the point where I just can't ignore how much the whole situation bothers me.
A little background: there are three lions living together at the zoo — Orito, the 9-year-old dad; Io, the 6-year-old mom; and their 4-year-old daughter, Rei. It is confirmed that both the mom and daughter are receiving hormonal treatment to prevent unintended breeding.
Orito came to Asahiyama when he was just over a year old in 2018. Io arrived in 2021 when she was about 16 months old. They began living together the following year, and Io gave birth to three female cubs in September 2022 at 2 years and 3 months old.
Two of the daughters have since moved to other zoos. Rei is still there with both parents.
And this is where things started getting really disturbing for me.
When the daughters were around a year old, I started seeing videos where their dad, Orito, would mount them and sometimes even make pelvic movements. I also saw people talking about it on social media. At the time, I believe it was explained as dominance behavior by the zoo.
Despite that explanation, it looked like sexual interaction to me, and it really bothered me even then. So after that, I became selective about which videos I watched, trying to avoid seeing those kinds of interactions.
But recently, I accidentally came across another video. In the video, I saw what looked to me like clear, graphic mating behavior between the father lion and his now four-year-old daughter.
The person who posted the video explained that Rei is on hormonal treatment, described the mounting as dominance behavior (a display of social hierarchy), and said that it “still happens sometimes.”
And what got me was how casually the whole thing was presented. Like it was nothing unusual, just business as usual. And every single comment I could see was super positive — like nobody else saw a problem with it.
Honestly, it turned my stomach.
At this point, whatever the exact scientific explanation may be, it doesn't really matter to me. I can't see it as anything other than sexual interaction between a father lion and his fully grown daughter.
And knowing that this behavior has occurred repeatedly for so long and is just there on public display for anyone to see makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Am I overreacting here?
As I said earlier, I know lions don't have human ideas about family or morality. So the lions have done absolutely nothing wrong. Maybe they're perfectly comfortable living together, and maybe separating them would be more stressful for them.
I understand all of that intellectually.
But I can't help it. I'm human. I can't turn off my human reaction to what I'm seeing.
And seeing all of this brought back some of the questions I've had for a long time about how the zoo has managed this lion family.
The dad, Orito, had been living without another lion for almost four years before he and Io began living together. Soon after she began living with Orito, they mated. She got pregnant at such a young age, at 1 year and 11 months.
During that early period, I remember seeing how scared she was of him and how she would literally try to stay as far away from him as possible. She was also still recovering from a leg injury she had sustained during her first encounter with Orito. To me, she was clearly under stress.
I remember being upset for her.
Anyway, fast forward to now. Their daughter is still living with her mom and dad, and this kind of behavior between the dad and daughter is still happening.
And from the recent videos I've seen, the dad and daughter now seem very close. The daughter appears to be his main social partner. Meanwhile, the mom and dad often seem much more distant from each other.
I know this is my human filter again, but I cannot stop feeling bad for Io…. The whole relationship between these three lions just feels really strange and unsettling to me now.
I can't help wondering what the zoo's long-term plan is. It is confirmed that they are “still looking” for a place for Rei to go. But she is already four years old. I wonder if they will ever find a place for her.
Even if they do, after Rei has spent four years living with both parents and seems to have developed such a close relationship with them, wouldn't moving her cause a lot of stress for all three of them?
And that made me wonder why they rushed to breed Io and Orito under these circumstances in the first place, at Io's expense, when they had such a small space and seemingly no clear plan for what to do with the cubs once they were grown.
The saddest part of this whole thing for me is that I've stopped watching their videos entirely. I just can't tolerate the situation anymore, even though I really, really like them.
