frick nature is brutal - Nat Geo show "Game of Lions"

Watched this show called Game of Lions on Nat Geo this evening and I wish I hadn't.

A female lion leaves her 3 small baby cubs (2 girls and one boy) behind to go hunting. While the mom is gone, the 3 cubs are visited by their 7 of their older adolescent cousins. They all take a fondness for the cubs and start playing really rough with them. The cubs are obviously too small to take the beating and rough play that goes on for more than 5 hours while the mom is gone.

The two girl cubs then try to escape and fall down a cliff face into a river valley and get caught in some bushes near the water line. They hang on for dear life as the water level keeps rising. The poor girls have no strength left to pull themselves to safety. The bigger teenage tigers can't reach them and eventually they lose interest in them.

Meanwhile the lone male cub is now caught alone among the bigger adolescent lions and they play so rough with him for so long it saps his energy and he loses his will to live and fight, and eventually his heart just gives up and he rolls over and dies. They show the little cub literally take his last breathe while he is surrounded by his cousins. They then proceed to eat the little guy

Meanwhile the mom returns and promptly and heroically saves her two little girls from the cliff face, with one of them half submerged in the water and seemingly seconds away from drowning and drags them both to safety. Then she watches the adolescent lions eating her little boy from a distance and let's out a huge roar in anger. It was so visceral.

The narrator then went on to say how the mom was now going to drive the adolescent lions away from the herd in the coming weeks as they can no longer be trusted and it was time for them to leave the herd and go elsewhere to make their own territory.

He then went on to say that there is no particular reason why the one cub died and the other two survived (falling down the side of the rock face was dumb luck and actually saved their lives in hindsight) and as in many things in life it's all a bit random and sometimes just comes down to how lucky you are on a particular day on who makes it in the wild. He also mentioned that of the 7 adolescent lions that were fixing to be driven out of the herd, only one would survive to become a full grown lion, so surviving in the wild is not easy by any stretch of the imagination.

Anyway, I still can't remove the image the little boy cub being thrown around like a rag doll while being so helpless. I don't think I can forget that scene any time soon.