  In two recent papers the authors study the existence of weak solutions and
the hydrodynamic limit of kinetic flocking equations with strong local
alignment. The introduction of a strong local alignment term to model flocking
behavior was formally motivated in these papers as a limiting case of an
alignment term proposed by Motsch and Tadmor. In this paper, we rigorously
justify this limit, and show that the considered equation is indeed a limit of
the Motsch-Tadmor model when the radius of interaction goes to zero. The
analysis involves velocity averaging lemmas and several $L^p$ estimates.
