A few striking episodes come to mind when one thinks of the early 14th century romance Richard Cuer de Lion: Richard eating the raw heart of the lion he has just confronted barehanded; Richard’s beehives released from the mangonels to wreak havoc among the enemy during the siege of Acre; and the two episodes of cannibalism during which the plucked and cooked heads of the Saracens replace the meat on Richard’s table in the “a” version of the text. If the latter occasions demonstrate the relation between territorial and alimentary digestion, the former two illustrate, but by no means sum up, the importance of the animalistic discourse in the romance. Be they alive or dead, real or symbolic, accessories to warfare and nationalistic propaganda, as well as recurrent topoi in the narratorial discourse, animals are overwhelmingly present in this romance, as though the lion’s heart had permeated the fundamentally zootropic poetic expression. This hybrid narrative, chronicle-like but hugely romanticised, also explores animalistic and human- animal forms of hybridity, notably but not solely via the exchange of insults, from the well-known English “taylardes” to the treacherous “Gryffouns” (the Greeks). The exploration of the zootropic phraseology reveals that animals are never “simply there”, never contemplated for and as themselves from a hypothetical non-anthropocentric perspective: from edible goods to food for thought, they are always tamed, processed, ornamented or occasionally reduced to their stereotyped value in proverbial expressions. The analysis of the discourse on animals and with animals in the romance thus participates in our understanding of the mentality of conquest, down to the very fibre of poetic language: the lion, eventually, remains the underdog.