There are no happy endings in wilderness
I have recently binged on a few Netflix documentaries from BBC. “Life”, “Planet Earth”, “The Blue Planet”, and a few more. I have always loved nature documentaries, and David Attenborough, but this is the first time I have systematically watched entire seasons of nature documentaries instead of just watching them if I caught them serendipitously on TV.
A lot of the episodes show animals’ various mechanisms of survival, thus, there is lots of predator & prey thing going on. You know the drill, African Savannah, zebras and antelopes, lions and cheetahs. Of course, sometimes the prey gets away, and sometimes the predator grabs a meal. And usually, as we watch these wild scenes, we tell ourselves “ah, poor little antelope, but hey, one had to pay”, and the documentary simply flicks to the next story, and we are quick to forget that whole herd of antelopes.
Here’s one excellent example — a nice and fluffy lovable stoat, from “Life” series. Cute stoat! Please watch it, there is no blood or nasty scenes, but do watch it for your education, it’s quite short.
This is nature. Little fluffy stoat, and little fluffy rabbit, and then one is killed by the other. And an entire field of other rabbits around them. By the way, the totally oblivious other rabbits are really something to ponder about. Are they even aware that one of their brethren is being chased to death? They all look peaceful and chill. Except that one who is running for his dear life, being slowly drained of energy, and as lactic acid builds up in his muscles he can see the stoat happily bouncing behind him, stoat being built for endurance running slowly gaining. Silly rabbits. But I digress.
So one of the rabbits had to pay so a family of fluffy cute stoats could eat.
One of them, right?
Let me burst a little bubble now.
No, not one. All of them. All of the rabbits you have seen in that video will eventually die some form of gruesome death. A hawk, or an owl? A snake perhaps? Another stoat, or the same one once the family gets hungry again? There is no happy ending for any of these rabbits!
*Pop*, the bubble bursts.
For prey-level animals (which is the majority of the biosphere), gruesome, painful, fearful death is, as a rule, the only way out. Do you really think that some of those rabbits die a nice dignified death deep in their cute rabbit holes surrounded by friends and family? No. All of them die violently.
Think about it.
A herd of antelopes on Africa Savannah. Cheetah approaches and through natural selection, and survival of the fittest chases down the oldest and the weakest antelope. But a week from now, another antelope will fit the same description — the weakest and the oldest.
Let’s see what death options antelopes in the wild have:
a) Die shortly after being born. Still weak and powerless, young animals are easy prey. Gruesome death, poor little thing just took its first steps, and there’s cheetah gnawing at its throat.
Provided they survive into adulthood:
b) Starvation. Simple one, food source for some reason is diminished, and animals starve. However, it’s rather unlikely that such energy deprived animal would not simply be hunted down by a predator before actual death by starvation. Not good either way.
c) Natural but unpredictable cause. Fire, getting stuck in deep mud, something falling onto the animal, being wounded perhaps even in a fight with own species, etc. Not nice in any case.
d) Simply getting hunted down and killed by local predator species. The stoat & rabbit story, classic.
Where option D provides the longest life enabling the animal to procreate the next generation during each reproduction cycle. And as the animal is getting older, there will simply come a time where it can no longer keep up with the herd. Where the strength fails and a cheetah simply outruns it. Where dexterity of tired muscles fails, and instead of zigging — it zags, and ends snatched up.
When you see a herd of herbivores in that nice BBC documentary, remember — all of them, one by one, as the time moves on, will be “that animal”.
Nearly every day of their lives they will at least see one of their herd members, one of their friends, being sliced open by claws & jaws. And the clock is ticking. There are no nice deaths. No happy endings. Just claws, teeth, blood, and terror.
And if you think all the predators do the prey a favour and mercifully first kill them before starting to gnaw on that sweet sweet tender flesh, oh boy, do I have a bridge to sell to you.
Warning, extremely gnarly and bloody video:
Yes, that’s a lion eating still-alive buffalo. I mean, why would he bother to kill it anyway? It’s incapacitated enough, it cannot run away or defend itself, so why would the lion care? For all the lion cares, it’s actually better to keep the buffalo alive, it won’t go into the decomposition process! Fresh meat has a whole new meaning, right?
The next time someone mentions to you how animals in the wild live nice and chill lives, just show them the Stoat & Rabbit video. Then ask them what do they think happens to the rest of the rabbits in that field as time goes on. Watch their cogs spin as they realise the terror:
