The white lion is an extremely rare animal. He is not an albino, but the product of an unusual genetic disorder
Now there are only about 300 of them all over the world. Once there were much fewer of them, but they have been known since ancient times. In South Africa, the white lion was worshiped and revered as a kind of magical creature, calling him the King of all Kings.
There is an ancient and rather unusual legend about how white lions appeared. It was a very long time ago, around the time of Ancient Egypt. There was then a small tribe in the east of the Transvaal. The queen of the tribe was an old woman named Numbi. One day a huge luminous ball came down from the sky and from the place where it fell, a voice was heard calling to the Queen of the tribe: “Numbi! Numby!"
Queen Numbi obeyed the call and entered the very middle of the ball and disappeared. But after a while she came back and it was a completely different Queen. She became much younger and more beautiful. And then people began to observe a strange thing, in the place where the luminous ball fell, white lion cubs with blue eyes began to be born in ordinary lions. In nature, the white lion, due to its too bright skin, is not able to hunt successfully. It's too visible. Taking this into account, it is all the more surprising that individuals with such a mutation did not degenerate, but managed to survive to our time.
Now white lions are mainly born to their white parents, but sometimes the appearance of white lion cubs is observed in the most ordinary lions, and this is not one cub, which could be attributed to the case, but several white babies from one lioness of the usual color. The last time the appearance of such lions in the wild was noted in the 70s in the Kruger National Park near Swaziland. And from those cubs, almost all white lions in the zoos of the world descend.
The official version of scientists about the gene for the white skin in lions says that this gene has been preserved in them from those lions that once lived around the globe, in Europe and the Americas. In those days there was an Ice Age, everything was covered with snow and the white color of the skin gave great advantages in hunting.