Mythical Zoo Excerpt: Nemean Lion

Here is an excerpt from one of my writing projects, "Mythical Zoo." It's a fictional guidebook on how to keep creatures like the Minotaur, Cyclops, Sphinx, and all sorts of other mythological creatures in a zoo.

Nemean Lion

Size: 4 feet tall, 8-9 feet long

Diet: Any large meat, preferably man

Habitat: Deciduous forest, prairies

Attitude: Aggressive

Suitable Zookeeper: Centaur

         

Nemean lions are a complete and royal pain in the rear. In the original Greek myth, this larger-than-normal lion (albeit physically identical in pretty much every other way) was slain by Heracles in the city of Nemea, in the first of his twelve tasks. This was hard, even for the super-strong Heracles, because the skin was impenetrable to any sword or bow, so the only way he could kill it was strangling it with brute strength. He wore its fur as a coat, which he managed to skin off the lion by using its own claws after he killed it.

In the modern day world, mythologists irritatingly discovered that Nemean lions aren’t just immune to any swords or bows: they are also bulletproof, missile-proof, tank shell-proof, pretty much impervious to any modern day weapon you could think of. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would repopulate the Earth with the cockroaches after a full-scale, apocalyptic nuclear war. Their claws can also go through any metal, which unfortunately means that they can go through any fence as well.

Your best bet for containing these unstoppable felines is to keep them in a large, deep pit, and reinforce the walls with concrete, electricity, and possibly lava if you can manage to find any. While if it really wanted to, it could still probably escape from that, all animals, even mythical ones, hate electricity and fire, especially together. Hopefully, after sensing those obstacles in its way, it won’t even bother.

Now, seeing as Nemean lions, except for being slightly larger and more muscular, look pretty much identical to normal lions, you need to find ways to make the exhibit popular with your guests, who will probably pass up the boring-looking lions, instead going straight to the five-headed Hydra exhibit. There are several ways to keep the guests entertained, and several ways of letting them know this is no ordinary lion. For instance, you could have a show where it goes through an impossible obstacle course, and make it so that it intentionally doesn’t get through and gets shot, burned, and stabbed. Don’t worry, this won’t do anything to hurt the animal—it actually has a lot of fun showing off how indestructible it is. However, my personal favorite way is having the guests be able to shoot the animal themselves with special machine gun emplacements on the pit walls (make sure they can’t shoot each other with it, because guests can sometimes be homicidal maniacs). The Nemean lion won’t be bothered about this in the slightest: the bullets will just bounce off his fur, without him noticing.

Fortunately, despite their near-immunity to anything, Nemean lions are very easy to take care of once you have them confined. They’ll eat normal lion chow, and they’re really just super-tough lions in general. However, this doesn’t mean you can use normal zookeepers for them: they’re still incredibly dangerous, so having centaurs, which are used to those kinds of creatures, is still your best option.