We, any of us, can answer with confidence as long as we don't get too ambitious with our reply. Let's look at the lion rationally, and see what we can deduce about its purpose. I said earlier that you have to stop somewhere in your search for perfection. Every living thing tries to survive. After all, if a living thing didn't try to stay alive, it would die.
Life presupposes effort.
Of course, death being what it is, none has ever succeeded for long. So all living things we know of do the next best thing, they reproduce younger versions of themselves, and therefore, at least the species survives. The lion survives in order to procreate, since it's the best the lion can do to stave off death. However, something happened in the geologically recent past, which changed the way we define our purpose in life. Humanoids were competing with reptiles, other primates, and just about everything else that lived, and we were only doing a mediocre job of it.