This one is not about a lion.
It is about a mountain lion, which is a different animal on a different continent, and the difference matters, because everything that follows only happens to a predator living close to people.
A famous dog is killed. The dog belonged to a radio host who is loud and angry and very good at being loud, and he decides the local mountain lion did it. He starts a public campaign to have the cat declared a nuisance so that it can legally be hunted. Teddy Fitzroy, FunJungle's unofficial zoo detective, gets pulled in by an activist who thinks the cat was framed. It is the fifth FunJungle book and the angriest one in the series.
The science it actually teaches
Be straight about this one. The animal biology here is thinner than in the poaching book by the same author. What Lion Down teaches instead is wildlife management, which is the part of conservation that happens in meetings rather than in the field, and almost nothing written for a fourth grader goes anywhere near it. It is why the book sits on our Stealth Science shelf.
Start with the word nuisance. It is a legal category, not a biological one. Once an animal has been labelled that way, the rules about killing it change. The label does the work. The animal's actual behavior barely gets consulted.
Then the tracking collar. Researchers fit big cats with collars that log where the animal has been, and that log is data. A story in which an animal's alibi comes out of its collar is teaching your child what telemetry is for without ever using the word.
Then range. A mountain lion needs an enormous territory, far bigger than most people picture, and that requirement does not shrink because a housing development turned up inside it. That single fact accounts for most of the encounters that make the local news.
Then risk. Mountain lions avoid people. Attacks do happen and they are rare, and the gap between how frightened a town gets and how dangerous the animal actually is, is the whole argument of the book.
And evidence. What kills something leaves marks. Bite spacing, tracks, how the body was handled, where it was left. A predator can be identified if anybody bothers to look, and the plot turns on somebody bothering.
That is five real ideas and not one of them is about how a cougar's body works. If your child wants big cat biology, this is the wrong book. If you want your child to understand why a wild animal near a town is in more danger from a microphone than from a rifle, it is the best one I know at this level.
The child it lands with
Think about whether you have an arguer in the house. The child who wants to know why a rule is a rule, who spots a grown up being unfair and will not let it go, who will keep asking after everyone else has moved on. This book was built for that child, because the villain is not a criminal mastermind. It is a man with an audience.
Younger animal lovers can struggle here, and it is worth saying why. The animal in danger is not being chased by anything you can see. It is being endangered by public opinion, and that is a harder shape of threat for an eight year old to hold onto.
Mystery readers at the top of the band get something the earlier books do not offer: a crime that is a lie rather than a theft.
One place to stop and talk
One question, right after the campaign against the cat gets going. What would it take to prove an animal did not do something?
It is a much harder question than it sounds, and the fact that it is hard is exactly why the cat is in trouble.
What to know going in
A dog is killed before the story starts and its death is discussed throughout. For a child who has recently lost a pet, that is a real problem and worth knowing in advance rather than meeting cold on page four.
The radio host is written as a caricature of an inflammatory talk show personality, and the book is not neutral about him. Families who hear their own media in that portrait will find it pointed. I think it is fair game and you may not, and either way it is better to know before it arrives in your living room.
The comedy is the standing warning for this author. Gibbs writes big, physical, frequently gross humour for nine year olds, heavy on animal waste, bodily noises and adults being humiliated, and book five is no gentler about it than the rest.
There is also a hunt on the table for most of the story, which means the threat of an animal being shot hangs over the entire book and is not resolved early.
Where to get it
It is $9.99 at Lion Down, a dollar more than the earlier FunJungle paperbacks, which is just what happens to a series as it goes on. The moment to hand this one over is after a news story about a bear or a wolf or a cat near somebody's town has come up at dinner, because it will give your child the vocabulary for the argument the adults are having. If they have never read Gibbs before, the crude jokes arrive long before the ideas do, so go in knowing that.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Curious World of Calpurnia Tate: Wild Is Not a Pet
The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Julie of the Wolves: The Science and the Caution
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
