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    "headline": "Baby warthog sidesteps waiting lions and sprints past them in a clip shared on Reddit",
    "description": "A baby warthog sidesteps crouching lions and sprints past them in a Reddit clip; lions hunt in short bursts and need to be close to catch prey.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-15T06:24:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Common warthog, Lion, r/Damnthatsinteresting, Reddit",
    "articleBody": "A baby warthog runs straight at a crouching lion, cuts sideways at the last moment and keeps going. The clip, posted to Reddit’s r/Damnthatsinteresting under the title “Baby Warthog Does the World’s Best Side Step Past Lions,” spent this week near the top of that community and left the cats staring down the road. The thread treated it like sports footage. “Lion thought it was slick crouching for an ambush the warthog just ran straight at it,” one commenter wrote. Others called the piglet a running back and reached for The Lion King, quoting “Hakuna Matata” and pointing to a widely shared voiceover version of the same footage. One person complained that the repost had stripped out the clip’s original sound. Why a sidestep can beat a lion The move works because of how lions hunt. A lion is built for a short, explosive rush, not a long chase. It runs fast only in bursts, at about 48 to 59 km/h (30 to 37 mph), and it needs to be close before it launches. Its heart makes up only about 0.57% of a lioness’s body weight, against almost 1% for a hyena, which is one reason lions tire quickly. So they stalk, crouch and try to catch prey that starts running unprepared. A crouched lion is set up for one decisive lunge in one direction. A small animal that changes direction at the last instant forces it to brake and turn, and a predator that relies on surprise rarely gets a second, clean start. A calculation: the race on paper Common warthogs can run at up to 48 km/h. Divide by 3.6 and that is about 13.3 meters per second. Film analysis puts a lion’s initial acceleration at about 9.5 meters per second squared, so on paper a lion needs roughly 13.3 ÷ 9.5 = 1.4 seconds to match a sprinting warthog’s top speed. That is an eternity in an ambush. A piglet is slower than an adult, but a well-timed swerve can steal exactly that kind of head start. Warthogs are a regular lion meal The escape is not a fluke of a rare encounter. Lions take common warthogs often, even though they are much smaller than the buffalo and zebra that make up most kills. Warthogs survive mainly by sprinting, tails held straight up as they run, and they back into burrows rear first so their tusks face the entrance. Piglets become mobile quickly and stick close to their mothers, who will defend them aggressively and have been seen charging and even wounding large predators. Lion behavior keeps turning up in Badiyaa’s animal coverage, from why only lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars can truly roar to the water buffalo calf freed from its mother’s horn in Brazil. What the clip does not show The Reddit post does not say where or when the footage was filmed, and Badiyaa could not confirm the original videographer. The piglet clearly gets past the lions in frame, but the clip ends there. Common warthogs live 7 to 11 years in the wild, and this one has at least bought itself a head start. Further reading Wikipedia: Common warthog Wikipedia: Lion Image: Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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