海角大神

Have you ever wanted to own a pet lion, but your wife won鈥檛 let you keep a 500-pound cat of prey in the house?

Well, Nicaragua鈥檚 national zoo is offering the next best thing. For a slight sponsorship fee ($35,000 to build a lion pit and $100 in monthly cat chow bills), the Nicaragua Zoo will let you name their new lion after yourself 鈥� and they鈥檒l take care of cage cleanup for free.

鈥淲e鈥檒l send photos and letters to let the sponsor know how their lion is doing,鈥� says Marina Arg眉ello, director of the Nicaragua Zoo. As an added visitation perk for the benefactor, Ms. Arg眉ello also seems open to the idea of waiving the 15 c贸rdoba ($0.64) park entrance fee.

The unnamed African lion, which came to Nicaragua thanks to a transoceanic cat swap that sent a pair of local tigrillos to the Berlin Zoo, is the newest resident of Nicaragua鈥檚 surprisingly engaging zoo and animal rescue center on Kilometer 16 of the Carretera Masaya.

Related: Think you know Latin America? Take our geography quiz!

The globe-trotting feline also has the delightful distinction of being one of the original 23 passengers on Blue Panorama鈥檚 lonely from Italy last week. That alone, perhaps, explains why the flight was so empty (if you had an African lion sitting behind you on the plane, you鈥檇 also want to put about 200 empty seats between you and it) and why the in-flight meal offering was 鈥渞aw gazelle flanks and a side saucer of warm milk.鈥�

The cat鈥檚 passage here on the first commercial flight from Rome to Managua also means that, for the time being, a statistically curious 4.3 percent of all visitors who have traveled to Nicaragua directly from Italy fit into the amusingly unexpected category of 鈥淎frican lion.鈥�

A Lion among Ladies

The 14-month-old male lion will soon be pleased to learn that he was brought here to mate with a couple of fetching lionesses donated by the Guatemalan Zoo. To set the mood, zookeepers are already dimming the cage lights and piping in the song 鈥溾�� from the Lion King soundtrack. 聽

If the romantic rendezvous are successful, it will be the first time African lions have been bred in captivity in Central America, according to Arg眉ello. A previous attempt in Nicaragua to breed a pair of elderly ring lions rescued from a traveling circus produced sad results, Arg眉ello says.

But with a virile young lion king and a couple of flirty feline friends, the zoo is expectant about the love-connection possibilities. Still, considering the zoo doesn鈥檛 have enough money to provide for one lion, much less a plentiful pride, Arg眉ello says the number of conjugal visits will be limited until some sort of sustainable financial plan or foster-care program is put into place.

Given Nicaragua鈥檚 financial limitations, scraping together another $35,000-plus in lion money won鈥檛 be an easy task. The government, historically, has not taken too much interest in providing for its animal friends. In 2003, the National Assembly temporarily cut all funding for the zoo, forcing the animals to take an unexpected hunger strike that ended after public outrage shamed lawmakers into once again providing a modest food stipend for their more loveable counterparts in the animal kingdom (Some pundits suggested that an acceptable 鈥� and perhaps preferred 鈥� alternative to congressional funding would have been to let the animals loose in the National Assembly, to thin the herd, so to speak. Then, as the big cats licked their whiskers and slept off a heavy meal, the monkeys could try legislating for a while and Nicaragua would welcome an unprecedented moment of peace, prosperity, and rule of law.)

The government currently provides about 40 percent of the zoo鈥檚 annual operating budget of $435,000, according to Arg眉ello. The rest of the money comes from the private sector and other friends of the zoo.

Still, Arg眉ello is hopeful that someone 鈥� or some business 鈥� with a fondness for felines will come forward and sponsor the new African kitty and his leonine appetite, before he sets his sights on the tapir鈥檚 cage.

To sponsor a lion, write zoo director Marina Arg眉ello at sacasamarina1@yahoo.com.

鈥� A version of this story ran on the author's site, .