Alternative title: Im in ur pride, stealin ur noms
Consider a pride of lions. Standard practice is for the womenfolk to work together to bring down the big game, and then the entire pride - including the slacker males - shows up afterwards to share in the spoils.
Suppose one day one of them lionesses sees all this going on and says “WTF, this is bullshit! We’re doing all the work, and the men just show up and eat after we busted our asses to bring down this wildebeest? Enough! From now on, I’m not helping with the hunting; I’m just gonna show up after the hard work is done, just like all the men do!”
So what happens to this uppity lioness? Will there be prohibitive hostility when she tries to eat after having not helped to bring home the bacon? Or will her genes be more likely to get passed on? Afterall, hunting is a hazardous affair: you may get trampled to death, or kicked in the face or something, so if you don’t hunt, you’re likely to be in better condition for reproduction - as long as you have access to the food the other lionesses bring down.
the slackers get to eat only the leftovers and they may end up lower on the totem pole, stuck with chores like taking care of the cubs, sweeping the floor and throwing out the trash. they’re not exactly welcoming when they share the kills, so perhaps hierarchy count for how much you get to eat. also, numbers alone do count. when you’re in a big enough group, hunting itself becomes easier and being in a big family means that much security over another pride.
A PBS special I saw made it pretty clear – the male isn’t so much a slacker, he defends the cubs and lionesses from other threats. As mentioned before, other male lions and in the special I saw, hyenas.
Also, a male lion is huge. I mean really big, and very muscular – his shoulders come up to the head of a lioness. That is sexual dimorphism that does not match up well with human male/female size and strength differences. I saw a female lion roar in desperation when faced with hyenas, and she seemed doomed compared to their size. Then the male responded as he came back. I saw that he had, or at least it looked like it to me, an erect penis. I don’t know what excited him – season, pheromones, the cries of his mate or excitement at the chance to stomp some hyena, which he did. Most of them scattered but he caught one, grabbed and threw it, and caught it on the way down. Important enough to the pride or not, a guy like that will get what he considers his (extra) fair share of meat whenever he shows up.
So you can see, the whole slacker male vs. girrrl power paradigm you came up with, might not have a chance to evolve in lions as it has in humans. At least until selective pressures show up that are different than they are now.
Excerpt here showing Ntwadumela (“He Who Greets with Fire”) taking down the hyena matriarch.
“It was not always easy for us to witness these struggles for life, but at the end of it all, perhaps, we came to know more about ourselves, and the struggles that rage within our own, savage souls.”
Are there cases where packs of social animals get so big that a slacker can even exist? Seems to me that if there’s a dead weight eating ANYTHING then the pack would starve and whatever gene that gives rise to slackerism would be extinguished in fairly short order. Furthermore, as predators are pretty intelligent, should one try slacking, he and everyone else would get pretty damned hungry and then the motivation to pitch in would overcome the desire to watch MTV.
Hijack: I’d always thought hyenas were about the size of dogs and thought, "What’s the big deal? Then I saw one in the zoo a couple years ago. They’re almost the size of lions and can get up to 200 pounds. And they’re demonic-looking, creepy, sneaky bastards. I think lions are fairly unattractive as cats go (and in my world, animals should always be attractive), but I love it when the Lions beat the Hyenas.