An Australian zoo is home to a couple of pals that clearly have never heard the old adage about cats and dogs.
Honey the dog and Kwanza the white lion cub have become best friends at Darling Downs Zoo in Pilton, Queensland, as is apparent in a new video of the frolicking pair posted online.
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The odd couple first bonded when Kwanza’s mother stopped producing milk and so workers at the zoo had to step in and feed him. Honey took an immediate interest and they soon became inseparable, reports Yahoo News.
The clip shows the mismatched duo playing with each other with Honey tending to dominate her younger feline friend. Kwanza, in turn, doesn’t appear troubled by the good-natured roughhousing — in just a few years time he will weigh around 400 pounds and have no natural predators in the world.
Kwanza — the name means ‘first’ in Swahili — was born on Nov. 12 weighing just three pounds. His parents Shaka and Shenzi are also housed at the facility, situated around 100 miles west of Brisbane.
White lions are exceedingly rare in nature; the first recorded sighting was in 1928, and two white cubs were seen in 1959 near Tshokwane in South Africa’s Kruger National Park (an area which gives the subspecies to which the white lion belongs its Latin name, Panthera leo krugeri). According to Yahoo News, their existence wasn’t officially confirmed until 1975, by animal biologist Chris McBride. Their pale complexion is the result of a recessive gene and so they are not true albinos, reports the Daily Mail.