The Meaning of the Story?

Okay.  For my ASL class I have to perform a fable.  I would say interpret, but it's not interpreting.  It's story-telling.  It's performance.

You know how I suck at story-telling in English?  Well, I'm pretty good at it in ASL.  Go figure.

Anyways, the fable is called The Sick Lion.  It goes like this:

A Lion had come to the end of his days and lay sick unto death at the mouth of his cave, gasping for breath. The animals, his subjects, came round him and drew nearer as he grew more and more helpless. When they saw him on the point of death they thought to themselves: "Now is the time to pay off old grudges." So the Boar came up and drove at him with his tusks; then a Bull gored him with his horns; still the Lion lay helpless before them: so the Ass, feeling quite safe from danger, came up, and turning his tail to the Lion kicked up his heels into his face. "This is a double death," growled the Lion.

Moral of Aesops Fable: Only cowards insult dying majesty.

 

I understand the moral just fine, but the last statement by the Lion is kinda throwing me.  Does it mean that the Lion, in his final moments, ate the Ass?  Is the Lion implying that the animals who have insulted him have cankered their souls by insulting and injuring him in his final moments?  Or does it mean something else all together?

 

So I'm asking for your help.  What does it mean?

 

(Also, there's another version of this story that makes SO much more sense to me.  The Lion isn't actually sick, he just says he is.  When the animals come one-by-one to see how he's doing, the Lion eats them.  Genius.)