O babuíno matou o leopardo

Yesterday a student and I had a discussion in Portuguese about baboons and leopards (very productive for a German class!) and he said that when baboons are in groups, they are bold enough to go after their natural predators and kick their asses, but that was not the case with two youths of the baboon and the leopard family he saw in a Discovery documentary. He said the young leopard saw a baboon, charged against it and due to all the stress of the fight, the baboon, who was pregnant, delivered a beautiful baby. At that point (I don't know if I was paying much attention or just spaced out) I said Mas quem matou a quem? (Who killed whom?) since he had said O babuíno matou o leopardo (The baboon killed the leopard or The leopard killed the baboon). The problem with that sentence is, since Portuguese is a language with a very free word order, which is normally subject (S) + verb (V) + object (O), but can also be SOV, VSO and VOS, among other possibilities, I was left clueless who was the killer and who was the killee. That especially happens when you have two nouns in the same number (in this case singular). What could my student have done to avoid that ambiguity (I'm sure the ambiguity was only in my mind, not in his)? He could have used the preposition a, normally translated as to, before the direct object and there would be no chance for misunderstandings: O babuíno matou ao leopardo (The baboon killed the leopard), Ao babuíno matou o leopardo (The leopard killed the baboon). This problem wouldn't have arisen if the conversation had taken place in, let's say, Spanish, since the language requires the direct object to be followed by the same preposition a in that case, not so in Portuguese, which may or may not use it. In Spanish you'd have El babuino mató al leopardo. Al leopardo mató el babuino.

This is the kind of misunderstandings that you may sometimes have in a language that doesn't have declensions and allows for a free word order, since cases tell you exactly who did what to whom. In Czech, Polish, Russian and German, for instance, languages that have cases, you have Pavián zabil leoparda. Pawian zabił lamparta. Бабуин убил леопарда. Der Pavian tötete den Leoparden, respectively. You could play around with these sentences and say/write Leoparda zabil pavian. Lamparta zabił pawian. Леопарда убил бабуин. Den Leoparden tötete der Pavian and you'd still have the baboon as the predator and the leopard, the prey, at least in the realm of language.

Just to finish my story, it turns out that the leopard was overcome by an irresistible motherly love and took care of the baby baboon in the absence of his or her (just to be PC) mother, who had been slaughtered mercilessly by the feline.