Imagine checking your security-camera footage and seeing this:

The nighttime CCTV video, captured August 11, comes from the village of Thordi in the western Indian state of Gujarat, home to the world’s only remaining wild Asiatic lions. The footage shows two male lions squabble with a pair of dogs on the other side of a cowshed gate, which the big cats swipe and bash with impressive force.

Those dogs, it must be said, show plenty of mettle, though the presence of that iron barrier might explain at least some of their courage. The gate actually comes open during the course of the altercation, but it’s not clear that the lions notice; either way, they melt away into the darkness shortly thereafter, perhaps hearing the man who appears at the end of the video, investigating with a flashlight.

Lions and dogs don’t exactly get along on a normal basis. Gujarat lions have tussled with, scattered, and been (literally) hounded by domestic dogs in the past. In Africa, lions pose a significant threat to painted hunting dogs; dog packs sometimes attempt to mob lions, but even against a single lioness the odds don’t always tilt in their favour. Presumably when the so-called northern lion – Panthera leo leo, the subspecies to which the Asiatic lion belongs – roamed a much vaster Eurasian range, from Greece and the Middle East to eastern India, they conflicted in one way or another with various wild canids, including the grey wolf. Then there’s the well-known dog breed, the Rhodesian ridgeback, historically used to bring African lions to bay.

The longtime modern stronghold of the Asiatic lion is the dry woods-and-scrub complex on Gujarat’s Kathiawar Peninsula known as the Gir Forest, located within the Gir Protected Area. Though the entire lion population here endured an extreme bottleneck between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conservation efforts helped it recover, and for some time researchers have considered the Gir Protected Area at or above carrying capacity for these big cats.

As a result, in the past several decades, lions have spread out from the Gir Forest into its heavily human-impacted surrounds. Thordi village, where those lions and dogs clashed, is about 76 kilometres (47 miles) from Gir National Park.

Riverine corridors from the Gir to the Arabian Sea have allowed lions to recolonise some coastal areas of the peninsula, where sightings of the great tawny cats on the beachfront have become increasingly common (and evoke visions of the dune-prowling, seal-eating African lions of the Namib Desert’s Skeleton Coast). A 2022 study showed that forest patches, scrub, and even mangrove tangles and saltpans shelter these unique coastal lions (which, though mainly hunting nilgai antelope or “blue bulls,” wild boar, and cattle, have been recorded at least in one case noshing on a nesting sea turtle).

Scattered swaths of natural habitat, including island-like protected sanctuaries and reserves, can serve as stepping-stones for lion dispersal out of Gir. But much of the so-called Asiatic Lion Landscape of Gujarat, including Greater Gir, is composed of villages and agro-pastoral countryside, and friction with humans – from squareoffs with dogs to livestock depredation and even occasional attacks on people – put the big cats’ long-term viability here at risk. The Asiatic lion’s conservation status – while improved enough to have warranted a downgrade on the IUCN Red List from “Critically Endangered” to “Endangered” in the 2000s – is also plagued by low genetic diversity and inbreeding effects stemming from the past population bottleneck it endured. These issues raise the spectre of reduced genetic fitness and amplify the potential impacts of disease outbreaks – not least canine distemper that, along with a bacterial malady called babesiosis, has lately ravaged Gir lions.

Establishing other lion populations – as at such proposed translocation sites as Gujarat’s Barda Wildlife Sanctuary some 100 km (60 mi) from Gir National Park, where a few lions have naturally dispersed, and Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno-Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary – and safeguarding and expanding dispersal corridors are priorities for India’s Project Lion, a conservation initiative launched in 2020 (and modelled after the country’s long-running Project Tiger).

Also critical to the initiative is reducing conflict between lions and people, a task that is particularly challenging in the world’s most populous nation, where Asian elephants, Bengal tigers, leopards, sloth bears, and, yes – in one small corner of India, anyway – Asiatic lions try to survive alongside more than 1.4 billion people.

That also means these wild animals live alongside a whole lot of dogs, including the healthy numbers of strays calling India’s cities, towns, and villages home. Lions and tigers are one thing, but if you could ask these pooches which native big cat they fear most, there’s a good chance they’d bark in reply: “leopards.” Studies suggest stray dogs compose a large proportion of the diet of Mumbai’s urban leopards, which may benefit the city’s human population by reducing dog bites and rabies transmission.

Leopards are not an uncommon sight at Sanjay Gandhi National Park in the Indian city of Mumbai where they often hunt stray dogs.

Header image: Sumeet Moghe