Recently returned from a trip to Kenya. One of the highlights IMO was when we got to see 2 cheetahs take down a mother and baby impala. The following day, one member of our group eschewed the game drive, saying he was “too traumatized” (his words) by what he had seen the previous day.
Just struck me as totally weird. One of the big things about taking such a trip was spotting wildlife including big cats, and it isn’t as tho someone is placing out big bowls of cheetah chow for them.
Just seemed like such a fortunate opportunity to see such a natural process. If the cheetah on impala action I describe would bother you, how about seeing a grizzly snatch a salmon out of a stream? Or a hawk or fox grabbing a squirrel or a rabbit? Birds eating insects?
That group member was being ridiculous. Is he the kind of person who’d get outraged to learn that the beef steak on his plate came from a cow who was killed? Nature is nature.
If anything, I’d consider it a highlight of the trip to get to see nature doing its thing.
We live in the country. We feed the songbirds and squirrels, so their populations rise. In turn, predators eat well and sometimes we are witness to this. I’d rather see a Coopers hawk taking a songbird than seeing a Coopers hawk dying of starvation.
My gf will sometimes try to intervene. She saw a garter snake eating a toad and made him spit it out. She released the snake but was sad top see the toad did not hop away. I explained that garter snakes are actually a little venomous and that her intervention was not a good thing.
I could see some folks being disturbed by the extreme violence inherent in predator prey interactions.
Do you want to watch a pack of wild dogs wear down and pick at a wildebeest until it’s too exhausted to defend itself and just submits to being eaten alive? Not killed, not a relatively quick death, just having dogs take bites out of it until it stops living. I don’t really need to get a big bowl of popcorn and a comfy chair to take advantage of such a wonderful viewing opportunity.
Of course, if I’m in Kenya and have the opportunity to see wildlife doing their thing, I’m going. Maybe I decide not to watch the dogs, and check out the scenery or a different group of animals, while they do their thing. My neck still works and I don’t have to watch if I don’t wanna.
I was eating lunch with a couple of field biologists and I told them this true story:
One spring my tiny pond was filled with frogs by the hundreds. Spring peepers maybe, they were so loud at night you could hardly hear your own voice.
Wow, cool! said the biologists.
Then a garter snake had her babies, and twenty-odd bitty little garter snakes moved in on my pond. Every night the frog chorus got quieter and quieter until it went silent. Then the snakes left.
Wow, cool! said the biologists in exactly the same enthusiastic tone.
Lesson: biologists do not have teams they root for.
It’s the way of things.
The food chain exists
I’m more upset watching herbivores starve from loss of food resources because humans, higher thinking humans🤔 can’t quit cutting down their habitat.
I watch a lot of nature videos, and it is heart wrenching to see an animal slowly being ripped apart because the predators are not big enough to make a clean kill. Since I have gotten older, I find it harder and harder to watch even though I know it is the natural way of things.
It wouldn’t bother me and I agree the person on the trip offended by seeing that is being very oversensitive - you are in a wild area, in Africa, so the potential to see such things is non-zero. Hello!!
But…I would probably avert my eyes as I am not all that interested in seeing the blood and guts. I am more bothered by seeing random smushed animals along the road, or over the weekend the dead doe I saw alongside the road and her dead fawn alongside the center divide - such a waste.
While it’s startling to see nature in action, it doesn’t bother me. We also saw a cheetah make a kill in Botswana, when it took down a red lechwe. We also saw wild dogs chasing a warthog, who gave as good as it got.
I’m not so bothered by watching predators take down their prey, but I am disturbed by videos of lions taking over prides by slaughtering the cubs while their mothers watch helplessly.
I don’t think he was being ridiculous, and I don’t think there’s any particular connection with the moral outrage of someone learning about the death and suffering engendered by their diet. For someone who has never been an eyewitness to lethal animal-on-animal violence, it can indeed be a traumatizing thing. The fellow in the OP knows himself better than anyone else knows him, and if he felt he wouldn’t enjoy the next day’s game drive because of apprehension about possibly being witness to the violent death of another prey animal, then he was wise to bow out.
Everyone has different limits. Seeing a hunt/takedown is one thing, but watching in person while a prey animal get vivisected isn’t high on my list of priorities. A couple of years ago I watched a video of a hawk eating a rat 12 inches from a traffic camera (search YouTube if you want). I kind of wish I hadn’t.
It’s natural, but I don’t see it as entertainment.
Would you enjoy seeing animals (or humans, for that matter) being swept up and drowned in a “natural” flood or a “natural” fire? Why not? It’s what happens in nature.
I object to the term “take down.” If you’re going to watch it, then call it what it is: “kill.” I also object to euphemisms like “harvest” when referring to hunting and killing. If you are okay with it, then own it. Don’t deflect or soften it by calling it something else.
There was no vivisection. Cheetahs are pretty weak in terms of big cats. They trip their prey and then grab its throat, strangling it to death. So, the death itself is a somewhat protracted process, but not much blood and gore. We left while both cheetahs were working together to finish off the mother.
The same guy had been on a drive the previous day, in which we say lions lifting their gore-laden faces from 2 separate kills. That didn’t seem to bother him…
But then why go on a tour to see predators in the wild?
If the kill was a slow kill, I can understand looking away. But if you’re going to really freak out, I don’t think you should go on such tours in the first place. Some people are really ignorant of such things, though – maybe when people sign up for the tours they should be warned.
I expect I’d be upset at seeing a predator take a cat, even if it wasn’t a cat who I knew, and even if it was a cat of a wild species. But I fairly often see hawks and cats take mice; if the cats are playing with a basically unhurt mouse I’ll try to rescue it, but if they’re making a fast kill it doesn’t bother me. And the hawks don’t bother me, though again they would if they were taking a kitten (the ones we have here aren’t big enough to take a grown cat.)
I am not at all thrilled with neighborhood cats killing birds at our feeders. That has nothing to do with “natural prey in the wild.” I’d be perfectly happy to see those cats meet up with a hungry hawk or coyote.