Lions

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Brett Westwood explores how lions have been harnessed by humans as a symbol of strength and power throughout the ages. For hundreds of years two beasts lay beneath the mud of the moat surrounding the Tower of London. Only when workmen dug them up in 1935 did the sun warm their bones once more. They were once kept as fearsome gatekeepers, reminding people visiting the king exactly where power lay - or that was the idea. In reality they were diseased, malnourished and died young. From the exquisitely depicted lions painted on cave walls in the Palaeolithic through to those kept in the Tower of London and the lions sitting around Nelson's column this programme looks at how we have used lions. Lions are used in literature to represent authority and majesty, and C S Lewis used a lion - Aslan - to be the figure of Christ, a mysterious, wild presence that cannot be tamed. However, this attention has come at great cost. Barbary lions, the magnificently-maned North African species most used by the Romans for gladiatorial combat and dispatching Christians, were so over-exploited they are now extinct: the first documented example of mass extinction on the mainland at the hands of humans. We might be able to breed them back again from lions in zoos that have Barbary genes still present, but should we? Would these magnificent beasts become just a curiosity, no different to those in the Tower? Maybe they had best remain as a poignant example of how power can destroy.