Meet White King, the white lion cub whose mother didn’t want him
- 10-day-old ‘teddy bear’ gets milk and cuddles at Spanish zoo following rejection by lioness after traumatic birth
- Cub suffered from dehydration, hypothermia and hypoglycaemia, but is now recovering
His name is White King, he is 10 days old and the zoo says he is a real “teddy bear”. But the lioness who bore him rejected him after a traumatic birth.
Born on May 31, the cub is the first white lion born in a Spanish zoo.
Curled up in the arms of Juan Luis Malpartida, director of the Mundo Park zoo near the southern city of Seville, he is getting no shortage of cuddles and even a bottle of milk.
“It was a bad birth,” the director said, adding that the mother, a white lioness brought over from Thailand four years ago had “laboured for 14 or 15 days before giving birth”. And when he finally emerged, he was a hefty little fellow.
“Just imagine what she went through, I don’t know how she got him out,” said Malpartida, a 73-year-old who has spent his life surrounded by animals.
In the first three days, he did not feed, and after realising his mother “wasn’t paying him any attention”, zoo staff pulled him out of the compound, dehydrated and suffering from “hypothermia and hypoglycaemia”.