very idiosyncratic I admit, but for me it totally depends on the animals involved. Big cats I always root for and I have no problem, for example, with lions taking down some type of antelope. I have a slightly bigger issue when it’s a baby elephant or giraffe for instance being killed. And certain predators can fuck right off, like hyenas. It infuriates me to no end when a couple lionesses make a kill and then a pack of hyenas bully them off and steal the carcass.
What on earth is this proving? Do you… do you think there are people who don’t know that beef comes from cows?
The guy went on a safari and learned something about himself: that he doesn’t enjoy seeing (baby) animals get killed. That’s fine.
I know a lot of people who foster kittens. Do it long enough and eventually one of them will die in your house. It’s inevitable, it’s natural, and it’s upsetting every single time.
What’s completely ridiculous is shitting on somebody for deciding they don’t enjoy violence, even if that violence is perfectly natural.
And yes, I think lots of city folks would have trouble eating a steak from a cow they’d watched get slaughtered. It’s a bit privileged to not have to think about the transition from animal to meat in our day to days, but it’s not a ludicrous reaction.
For my part I think I’d have enjoyed the spectacle, but maybe not! I’ve never seen something like that in person and maybe it would make me sad. Hard to say until you’re actually experiencing it.
Oh no am I being ridiculous?
(Bigger-picture, many frogs are also somewhat seasonal in their mate-calling patterns, as well as being less likely to call when a predator is present. Also, garter snakes themselves frequently get eaten by predators, and often move around within a range of a few to several miles. So just because all the frogs went silent over time and then the snakes vanished doesn’t necessarily mean that all the frogs got eaten. Undoubtedly a lot of them did, though.)
Well, we’re used to procuring our slaughtered animals neatly packaged in a supermarket, but the fact is that their lives were ended so we could eat them. That’s why watching natural predatory behavior doesn’t upset me. I don’t understand “traumatized” because I can’t imagine an adult person who doesn’t understand this and who hasn’t see this in nature films, TV shows, or Internet reels.
I have hunted and fished most of my life, I have slaughtered animals for food and it still bothers me intensely to see an animals die a slow painful death, Often times the only part of the animal soft enough to penetrate is the anal or sex organ area. So they rip that off first and for the next 20 or 30 minutes they continue to rip at it until it finally goes down. It upsets me and I often regret that I watched it. That doesn’t mean I am ignorant or don’t know how nature works.
When we drove past later, a lion was moving in, apparently intending to take the cheetahs’ kill from them.
I don’t know why, but I have a fondness for hyenas. My understanding is that they are not strictly scavengers, but kill a lot of their own food.
On one occasion we saw them circling around a kill with a couple of male lions. But those 2 had such distended bellies and were belching in a manner that I assumed they would stumble off as soon as they loosened their belts a couple of notches.
Sure, our reactions are all personal and not necessarily rational. But to me, scavengers following predators is still very much a natural process. It is curious the way folk feel towards certain charismatic megafauna…
As I’ve expressed - and been criticized for - many times around here, I think far too many folk these days claim to be traumatized by far too little. So, his use of the word struck me as curious, but not beyond what I encounter regularly.
Most of us are completely divorced from the process of harvesting and then eating our food. i.e. We don’t see the bloody side of slaughtering animals nor do we know what it’s like to toil in the soil to grow our vegetables. I’m not surprised there are a lot of people who are off put by seeing such a thing. When I was a kid, most of the nature documentaries I saw featuring predator vs. prey had the prey getting away. It was so frequent I wondered how predators weren’t starving to death.
I’ve met people who told me I wouldn’t be able to eat meat if I had to kill and slaughter it myself. Oh, boy. Were they wrong. I can only thing they couldn’t imagine anyone being able to do do that which is odd given that our ancestors were eating meat long before homo sapiens showed up.
Understood with empathy, but the OP’s point was “traumatized”. That’s extreme.
The first time I went fishing with my father-in-law he found a frog in the live well. He threw the frog in the water and as the current carried us downriver we watched that little guy get ever closer to the shore. I was rooting for the little guy and my father-in-law said, “He’s not going to make it.” A few seconds later a bass (probably) gulped that poor little frog down and that ws the end of it. So sad. Who doesn’t like frogs?
It would bother me. My empathy for creatures varies wildly. A video of a polar bear strolling into a herd of walrus and impudently snatching a calf depresses me. Catching a 14” fish doesn’t bother me, whether it’s caught by me or a kodiak. Killing a mosquito gives me pleasure.
I’m no townie, but I can’t say I’d especially relish the sight of it - I’ve seen it on many a nature documentary and I completely accept that’s how predators stay in the predator business, and all that, but that doesn’t mean I specifically want to spend time watching it happen.
I mean, sure it’s ‘only nature’, bears shit in the woods too; that’s ‘only nature’, but I don’t particularly want to watch a turd being extruded out of a bear in exquisite HD closeup detail.
I’ve watched enough nature documentaries. Hunts are fascinating to watch.
Still, I prefer prey other than wildebeest. Personally.
Lions and hyenas occupy almost identical niches in the ecosystem. Lions steal the hyenas’ food just as often as hyenas steal the lions’ food.
And each species kills the other’s offspring whenever they get a chance.
If the video were playing “Yakkety Sax” in the background, I’m sure someone could make it entertaining. 
The only incident that ever bothered me was when I “escorted” a small spider from my bathroom to the front porch. The moment I deposited the little guy on the ground, a bigger spider shot out from a crevice and pounced on it. I felt like I had escorted my former house guest to its doom.
This is pretty normal. I’ve poisoned entire civilizations of ants and yellowjackets, and I’m indifferent to the thousands of insects that splatter on the fronts of my car and motorcycle when I hit the road. But the more similar an animal is to us in terms of scale and form, the harder it is to not empathize with it.
Who knows? Maybe two was enough for him to say “two days, two kills, I’m not interested in seeing what day 3 brings.”
I dunno, man. Something like this squicks me out considerably more!
Funny you say that. We saw so many animals shitting and pissing prodigiously that our car had a bit of a competition to see who could catch the most impressive evacuation on film.
Shoot, in Alaska, the gift shops have wooden bear and moose statues that poop chocolate candies.
I know all of this. It’s not logical, I don’t claim it to be. Some animals just seem more endearing to me…maybe it’s from watching The Lion King one too many times
I think they also sell moose poop jewelry. Dried, amd maybe lacquered, feces, to wear around your neck.
To answer the O.P. I own two snakes, a ball python and a corn snake. I also breed a species of rodent called African soft-furred rats (which are not very closely related to the rats you commonly see in pet stores) for a specific reason one can easily guess.
So no, it doesn’t bother me to see Pretzel or Charm get their lunch. However, they both are fast & efficient in their kills, and the rodents absolutely have no idea what’s about to happen. (They often wander up to and sometimes onto the snake out of sheer curiosity.)
But addressing the topic, to me, seeing any sentient creature in mortal terror of what’s gonna happen, or worse, twitching in prolonged and deliberately inflicted agony, is a totally different thing.
NOW we’re talking! That sounds like my kind of trip!!