There are no official figures regarding lion versus hippo fights. We have to go to the Internet for a gut feel. Sometimes a couple of lions will bring down a hippo, perhaps a young hippo. In one video a wounded hippo fought off five lions. The general trend is that hippo’s defeat lions in a fight. It’s their massive size, their thick hide, their aggressivity and their large and powerful jaws containing enormous teeth which make them a formidable foe.
There are two links to photographs on this page. The more dramatic one (the first) with the male lion in the mouth of the hippo is a fake. It is photo-edited in my considered opinion. I am certain that I am right. But it looks plausible. The other one is real and shows a lion jumping onto the back of a hippo, instinctively attacking the animal but with little chance of successfully bring down it for a meal.
Please click on these links (the red text) and you will be taken directly to the images. I can’t put the images on this page because there are adverts on this page too and the advertisers might find these images a bit difficult and unwilling to associate their product or services with the images. I’m sorry about that. The images are in the public domain in my view.
Who wins in a hippopotamus versus lion fight? Hippo nearly all the time, if the hippo bothers to fight. This image looks plausible but it is a fake. It’s an amalgam of 2 images: one of a lion and the other of the hippo in the road.
Hippo versus lion. Lion attacks a hippo by jumping on his back. They hope to bring the hippo down and kill it as a meal. There’s pretty well zero chance of that happening.
THERE ARE MORE PAGES ON LION PREY AT THE BASE OF THE PAGE.
A lot of websites say that the hippo is the most dangerous animal on the planet, killing 500 people annually in Africa. This sounds like anecdotal evidence as they say; in other words, it is what people have been saying. The Internet does tend to recycle the same information forgetting about the source of it. One website said 3,000 people are killed by hippos every year. Once again, no firm evidence. A genuine report tells us that at least 27 people were killed by hippos in Uganda in 2 months (July 2021 – aa.com.tr).
I don’t think you will find hard statistics. This may be because most incidents of hippos killing people are unrecorded. So, these numbers are estimates.
But some of the basic statistics regarding hippos are very impressive. For example, the lion has a bite of 650 PSI whereas the hippo has a bite force of 1,825 PSI. They can run at about 30 miles an hour and they can be aggressive, as mentioned.
A full-grown hippo is about 11 feet in length, 5 feet tall at the shoulder and weighs between 3,300-7,000 pounds. Just way too large under normal circumstances for a lion to successfully bring it down.
Some amateur experts say that the hippo would win every time. I don’t think that is true. What about an old, infirm hippo or a young, inexperienced hippo? What about two lions confronting an old hippo? There are circumstances which evens up the fight.
And of course, I’m sure some lions are killed by hippos after they have unadvisedly attacked one as a prey animal. Perhaps most lions give up and the hippo frees themselves from the lion attack.
One man, Terry McCullough who lives in Michigan, comments on Quora.com that he has seen footage of four lionesses trying to take down a large bull hippo. The hippo wasn’t trying to fight but to escape the lionesses and take refuge in a river. He succeeded. The lionesses could not bring him down. That pretty well sums up what might happen on an average day in the brutal world of lions attacking hippos on the African continent.
