So here’s the inside skinny: on February 1st, 2020, safari operators at Johannesburg’s Kruger National Park observed a group of baboons nabbing a lion cub from a rocky area utilized by big cats as a daycare for their young when the adults go hunting. According to the Associated Press, the baboons did what baboons do: they played pass-the-alpha-predator for a little bit, then got bored and moved on to other projects.

When the excitement had died down, a male baboon grabbed the baby lion, which park employee Kurt Schultz described as “showing signs of dehydration,” and carried it into a tree. There, the primate “moved from branch to branch, grooming and carrying the cub for a long period of time… the cub seemed very exhausted,” as would anyone in the throes of a potential Harambe reboot.

By Schultz’s reckoning, the event should have ended disastrously, as baboons generally see lions as an imminent threat and tend towards smashing any unaccompanied babies into a fine paste. This time, inexplicably, one denizen of the South African wildlife park decided instead to just groom the little big cat, presumably ushering in a new and terrifying age of lion-baboon cooperation in which none of us is safe.