A few days ago, in a popular Safari Park in the Netherlands (one of those places where you can drive around and see wild animals roaming around), a French family stopped their car in the middle of the traject and went out, along with their very young child, to have a closer look at the cheetahs.
The cheetahs, obviously, went towards them, making a bee-line for the kid. The mother scooped him up, and they made it back to their car relatively in the nick of time.
I guess that they were lucky enough in that probably the cheetahs had just had being fed or something and were not running real fast. Possibly more curious than hungry, but … HOLY FUCK, YOU IDIOTS…
The whole thing was filmed from the car behind theirs. The people taking the video can be heard, really anguished. I do not think that they could have been able to help or warn the imbeciles without spooking the cheetahs and making their behavior unpredictable.
And, before you ask, yes, there are signs very clearly indicating that it is strictly forbidden to get out of your car.
Link to the BBC website, where they have the video in question:
Make them pay a hefty fine. Why should they traumatized other people, including the people who will have to clean up the carnage? Even though it would have been entirely their fault, the park would be affected negatively if they’d been hurt or killed. That should give them the right to levy some kind of penalty to my mind.
It could have been worse; the mom could have thought, *“Aww, look at those cheetahs coming at us so rapidly to welcome us. Here, Junior, want to say hi to Mr. Cheetah? If you stand here maybe he’ll lick your face the way Fluffy does at home.” *
Along with stories of bears mauling people or bison trampling tourists trying to “pet” them, this has me wondering if maybe the “cute-animal-memes” culture is to blame. Some people seem to have viewed so much about cute animals, people getting along with animals, animation movies in which people and animals are friends, that they start to think *all *animals are harmless and friendly.
I used to see people in Florida feed animals of all kinds, including alligators. Ever see what a pissed off & frightened squirrel can do to a kid? How about a family of raccoons vs a 5 year old with bag of bread? Once saw a kid get bitten by a freaking possum he was feeding; who feeds a nasty-looking scraggly possum ffs? And I couldn’t tell you how many times I saw little kids get overrun by swans, geese and those weird-ass freaky Muscovy ducks.
In any case, people not understanding “nature” and “wildlife” isn’t anything new.
And even the “harmless and friendly” ones aren’t, under the right circumstances. The often and plentiful right circumstances…
:: looks at dog nearby ::
They were just thoughtfully getting out of her way so she had an unimpeded path to safety!
Right as she reaches the car one of the cheetahs feints at her to see if she’ll panic. That’s the moment that looked closest to actual tragedy, as it might have ended in the unnecessary destruction of a cheetah.
Y’know, a million years in the Rift Valley getting to evolve into what we are by learning and imprinting that the large, fast, and/or fangy creatures need to be given wide leeway unless you and your buddies have stout pointy sticks, then a hundred thousand more doing the same elsewhere, and cutsey memes undo it? Let natural selection retake its work.
