Whilst it's certainly true that a male lion was selected for the advert due to gendered societal expectations, it isn't true that male lions don't hunt. Young males unattached with a pride would have to hunt to survive, and would be more likely to do so alone than female lions.

So...the talking Antelope wearing night vision goggles wasn't what separated the commercial from reality, it was a possibly (sure, female lions do most of the hunting, but that doesn't mean that males do no hunting) inaccurate portrayal of a male lion as a hunter?

I agree with Huxley.  Implicit bias may be present but male lions without a pride do tend to do their own hunting (or hunt with a related male).  They could have dug themselves deeper into the the stereotypes like showing the failed male hunter coming "home" to a single female lion. I also imagine the commercial would have felt had they used a huntress or a larger pride of females.

I wonder how much of this can be attributed to the distinctiveness of the male lion vs. the female lion in the public imagination.

Cardinals (small birds, the males of which are bright red with black markings on their heads; the females are mostly brown) were among my favorite birds as a little girl, but it wasn't until I was a late teenager that I realized, hey, those are just the males!  And to this day, though I know what a female cardinal looks like (more or less), the term "cardinal" still evokes the image of the male first and foremost.

It might be the case that for many people, a female lion is almost indistinguishable from something like a puma, and certainly not laden with all the cultural brouhaha associated with "lions."

The issue seems to be that an animal's actual behavior deviates from that conjured up by the human imagination. Bejamin Franklin touched upon this issue when he wrote a letter to his daughter decrying the choice of the Bald Eagle as our national symbol:
"For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.“

More and more male lions are taking female lions role in the home. Damn this economy and it's gender role shaking effects!

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HDf-Qu8biBI/UA5xkOX4KzI/AAAAAAAANMs/gqQmi5IHkbU/s1600/Lion2+-+Copy.jpg

You are a dumbass.

If the commercial had depicted a female lion, then the anthropomorphic scene playing out would have been of two men taunting and ridiculing a woman. We'd probably see an equally critical post about it here, titled with some pun about 'catcalls.'

Male lions in pride hunt. Male lions out of prides hunt. All adult lions know how to, and do, hunt. 

Doesn't surprise me.  The people at Geico can't tell a gecko from an anole, either.  

One thing I find interesting with the comments is that, in order to avoid having to imagine the way our cultural setting might structure and shape our stories/texts/media, and the way those stories/texts/media then in turn feed back into the same cultural narrative, many commenters are having to use a lot of imagination to explain alternative reasons as to why this advert has the content it does. Imaginary motivations of the scriptwriter, imagined fear of an imaginarily inevitable imagined reprisal, etc.

All of which could, plausibly, explain this individual advert and its content. But not the repeating pattern we see iterated through the rest of the culture.

Reverse-engineering a perspective out of their comments, it seems to be one that is working very hard to ignore patterns and reject structural/cultural explanations. It's interesting to see.

Wait, what? Since when do we assume a humorous anthropomorphized depiction of animals for the purpose of selling a product is supposed to be,  intends to be, or cares about being in any way accurate in its depiction of those animals? Do camels smoke cigarettes? Do tunas truly want to be made into canned tuna fish? This is just a ridiculous criticism; I don't expect Bugs Bunny to accurately reflect rabbit behavior, either.

Through their own disinterest in vox-populi understandings of lion behaviour,  Geico stumbled onto a predator-prey dynamic that isn't really all that inaccurate - save maybe the nocturnalism. While it is very true that media constantly depict specific dominant social patterns in the anthropomorphism of animals, this specific piece isn't a particularly egregious example, as the male lion is not implicitly attached to a pride group.As other commenters have already said, Lions do hunt. A minority of (male) lions manage to form the breeding core of pride groups, and while they don't necessarily need to find their own food, what do you think all the other males do to survive?This protestation reveals blind spots that have at their core the same ignorance of biology that dictated those faux-nuclear families you object to in the first place. As we can see in this argument, scholars are still projecting human notions of morality onto nature. In this case, it is simply in a different ideological direction, bolstered by half-understood primary school level notions of animal behaviour.
Feminist Biology is a fascinating and valuable field, but we should never look to nature to support any ideological position -much less so if our knowledge in the particular topic is limited.

The whole time watching I kept expecting the punchline was going to be the lioness sneaking up from behind to take these two out thereby reminding us who the real hunter is. Wrong.

This blog is way better than an SNL skit.

It's clearly a maned lioness. Named Karla. Just a slip of the tongue, that's all. http://animalworld.tumblr.com/post/3583875155/lion-on-the-right-is-a-female-maned-lioness-c

As a biologist, I hate Bee Movie. It makes me rage.

FFS male lions hunt. They have to in order to survive. The alpha male in a pride may or may not routinely but he WILL eat what is brought and he WILL fight for his place at the top of the ladder. Would you prefer a commercial about that?

You people are deranged when you can pick apart a funny commercial due to your perceived issues.