I added another useless bit of trivia to my collection this week: Polar bears will happily eat their own kind.
It's the male bears who indulge in such gruesome grotesquery and they pick off baby polar bears, since grown polar bears aren't so easy to dispatch.
This is supposedly a higher species, a creature of great intelligence, not some google-eyed fish with a brain the size of a booger, that could be expected to do such a thing.
In fact, the big boys will stalk a cub for hours through snow and storm, until the exhausted little thing drops to the ground, unable to go on.
Doesn't seem a wise idea for the survival of one's species.
Then again, lions kill lion cubs, too. Not for food but to ensure that only their specific genes get passed on.
Sometimes, life is beautiful, breaktaking. Sometimes it's disgusting.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Nasty Nanook
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2 comments:
Cannibalism. Grizzly, isn't it? There are even lots of human cannibals in Russia, Africa, and in the jungles of Indonesia and Borneo.
I suppose preying on members of your own species is a decent strategy providing your species is doing well numerically, and that your pack has no serious natural predators which you need assistance from your fellow species to defend yourself against. Like polar bears and lions, top of the food chain.
Nevertheless, polar bears, I'll never look at you in the same way again. I hold you dear polar bears up to higher moral standards haha :). Now imagine a creature smarter than a human holding us humans up to moral standards :)
Yehhh I heard about chimps like that in the documentary "The Demonic Ape". Chimps and humans seem to be the only creatues who as yet have been proven to be capable of taking pleasure in another's suffering.
Animals do feel bad when they do things, in both a domestic setting and in nature towards their fellow animals. It's just positive and negative reinforcement, be it from a human or from the rest of the pack of animals. My dog looks ashamed of himself when he breaks a rule that I've set for him and which I reward him for keeping and punish him for breaking. Sometimes animals seem to show 'mercy' on animals (within their own species) that they've attacked, and give them a slow lick after having ripped in to them and made them submit.
And my dog also seems to get a cheeky smile on his face when he breaks a rule of mine...he knows how fun it is to run away faster than I can chase him. So he was outsmarting me haha, now I don't run after him anymore
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