Hey!
Since when is tenderizing the meat not a reason to paralyze my prey with terror?
-Rocco
Well, that’s not exactly cruelty for their own pleasure, is it? It’s got a practical purpose. Sort of like how whalers used to keep big tortoises from the Galapagos Islands on their ships without feeding them or giving them anything to drink for up to a year so they’d always have fresh meat.
Any kind of predator can probably cause pain or torment to another animal, but in order to be capable of “cruelty,” wouldn’t they have to have some kind of empathy first?
Sure, but the “taunting” was on your part, not theirs (you could have reached in and helped it out). Perhaps they were fanning it, or at least expressing anxiety or confusion.
There was a National Geographic program called “Lions and Hyenas: Eternal Enemies” which depicted the rather brutal competition between the two species. The brutality was not unnecessary–both were competing for the same prey animals and the same waterholes–but it was hard to watch the fights and not use the words “warfare” and “genocide”.
Our closest relatives, the chimps, commit murder, on chimps and humans alike.
Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir is an account of his years spent researching baboons in central Africa. One thing he frequently noted was how when one baboon lost a dominance confrontation, the loser would almost always then go look for a lower-ranked baboon and take out his aggression on him or her. The attacked baboon would then go look for an even lower-ranked baboon and beat up that one, and so on down the line.
Oh, gibbon me a break…
I had a cat who hated dogs, other cats, and small children. I can still remember a friend’s two-year-old running down the hall screaming his head off as the cat chased him, batting him with her paws. But I don’t she was unnecessarily cruel, she was just psychotic.