Your Lion Eyes

For some reason, I just love this story; black-maned Ethiopan lions rescue an abducted girl:

A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday....She was beaten repeatedly before she was found June 9 by police and relatives on the outskirts of Bita Genet, Wondimu said. She had been guarded by the lions for about half a day, he said.

"They stood guard until we found her and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest,'' Wondimu said.

Of course there's a rational explanation for it; the girl's crying may have prompted the lions to think she was a cub of some sort.

Whatever. It's still a cool story.

The girl, missing for a week, had been taken by seven men who wanted to force her to marry one of them, said Sgt. Wondimu Wedajo, speaking by telephone from the provincial capital of Bita Genet, about 350 miles southwest of Addis Ababa...Kidnapping young girls has long been part of the marriage custom in Ethiopia. The United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia are by abduction, practiced in rural areas where most of the country's 71 million people live.

The American Civil Liberties Union has reportedly filed an injunction against the lions, claiming the duress involved "torture on a scale equal with the Nazis and the Gulag".

Still, an amazing story.

Posted by Mitch at June 21, 2005 12:56 PM | TrackBack