Life eating other life.

[The Grand Nudger]

Not ideal.   Dying trying to eat defeats the purpose of eating.

Yeah, def not going to die for a t-bone.  It was more to help Brian plumb the shitty depths of the relationship, lol.  If it's uncomfortable to think of the weak as being food for the strong, well....the weak and strong alike are food for us.  We breed animals for muscle, to eat, and mostly not because we have too..but because they taste good.

Being strong, even, isn't a talisman against predation. Sometimes, especially for animals like us, it only makes us want you more. Our world grinds the strong and the weak into burger, together.

[Anomalocaris]

I really do hate the fact that life has to eat other life to survive. I don't care if it is Seagull eating a fish or whatever. In reality I accept, that even I eat other life. But sometimes in watching nature documentaries I hate the narrative.

Just today I was watching a BBC nature documentary which included the hunting habbits of Orcas or "killer whales". And in it they tracked the habbits of a pod of killer whales targeting the calf of a sperm whale. 


I get that the Orcas need to eat like all life. I simply don't like the thought of the weak being food.

Every complex organism is a big package of exploitative opportunities for other organisms.     Even the strongest apex Marco predator is but an ambulatory meat locker for parasites and pathogens.

So there seems to be nothing more than particular squeamishness in picking out macro-predation as more distasteful than infection or any other exploitative inter-species relationship. 

We might think we, by virtue of intelligence and technology, are the ultimate apex predators,  but nature guffaws loudly at our pretenses and fabricated numerous different organisms designed to feast exclusively our species.   By all indications most of these, as species, are prospering as never before.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Look at it this way: Predators are actually doing the natural world a great service. Without being eaten, prey animals would soon outstrip their own food supply and consequently suffer malnutrition, disease, starvation and death. Being eaten is a relative quick, painless way to go.

Boru

1.  I believe it has been observed that on a typical ecosystem, even with predator species present in their normal numbers, majority of the members of most prey species still die of malnutrition, disease and starvation rather than predation.

2.   In any ecological catastrophe,  it is the obligatory predators that go first.  If the ecological catastrophe is severe enough, often only prey species remain. 

3. If the predator species are removed,  prey species would only outstrip their own food supply for a short time while their feeding, breeding, and migratory habits and other ecological adaptions still remained powerfully influenced by the former presence of the predators.    

If predator-less condition were to persist for a long period of time, then the   prey species would tend to evolutionarily adopt by diversifying into more specialized species that subdivide the available food and environmental resources.   The more particular food requirements and narrower ecological niches of each daughter species then serve to keep the numbers balanced with resources.   

If predator-less condition were to continue to persist, eventually some of these daughter species will diversify from herbivorous niches into the predatory niche to address the lack of predators.

  

Did you feel your hair rustle as Eleven's point flew right over your head?

His hair rustles all the time so he has become inured to the condition and ignores it totally.

---

I dunno
..

I think I' d rather eat my gun than have a lion eat me.

Better yet - shoot the lion and eat a pizza....

But lions are merciful.  They will euthanize you by crushing your windpipe and choke you first so you won’t even feel it when you are eaten.

---

Would you rather die from having a lion break your neck and asphyxiate you, or spend months/years in pain from debilitating cancer, every breath an agony?

Boru

It has been suggested some behavior of sick or injured animals is “looking to be eaten”.

I don’t disagree, but 37 seemed to have been especially distressed (or at least triggered) by a particular pod of orcas hunting a particular whale calf. My response was in regard to that.

If a single animal (a deer, a whale, a monkey) could express a preference for a manner of death, they’d likely prefer a quick one to a lingering one.

But, as I said, I agree completely with your description of predation at the species level.

Boru

[arewethereyet]

It's a pretty simple concept that weak prey is going to be easier to catch. And then we can go down the whole discussion of how the weaker traits get bred out and stronger traits passed on to the betterment of a species.

Animals who are differently colored...such as albinos...have a shorter life expectancy in the wild because they don't have the camouflage that helps to keep them safe from predators.

I feel a weird need to break into "The Circle of Life" but I would think that most people are bright enough to get that concept.

But we probably need another thread devoted to the weak and bullied because we don't have enough of those.

[no one]

Life is cruel, get over it.

[The Grand Nudger]

The whale did, eventually.

[Rahn127]

The idea of life eating life was my first clue, from a very early age that an all powerful, all wise god did not exist.

I could do a better job of creating life and if I can do a better job, then this idea of a god doesn't exist.

For me it was all really that simple.

[Anomalocaris]

The idea of life eating life was my first clue, from a very early age that an all powerful, all wise god did not exist.

I could do a better job of creating life and if I can do a better job, then this idea of a god doesn't exist.

For me it was all really that simple.

While that is nowhere as delusional as believing a god, wise or not, does exist,  I would be hard pressed to name something that is not a belief in such a god, and yet is more delusion than this.

[Brian37]

I really do hate the fact that life has to eat other life to survive. I don't care if it is Seagull eating a fish or whatever. In reality I accept, that even I eat other life. But sometimes in watching nature documentaries I hate the narrative.

Just today I was watching a BBC nature documentary which included the hunting habbits of Orcas or "killer whales". And in it they tracked the habbits of a pod of killer whales targeting the calf of a sperm whale. 


I get that the Orcas need to eat like all life. I simply don't like the thought of the weak being food.

Every complex organism is a big package of exploitative opportunities for other organisms.     Even the strongest apex Marco predator is but an ambulatory meat locker for parasites and pathogens.

So there seems to be nothing more than particular squeamishness in picking out macro-predation as more distasteful than infection or any other exploitative inter-species relationship. 

We might think we, by virtue of intelligence and technology, are the ultimate apex predators,  but nature guffaws loudly at our pretenses and fabricated numerous different organisms designed to feast exclusively our species.   By all indications most of these, as species, are prospering as never before.

Humans unfortunately DO widely think we are an "apex" species. But this current pandemic should teach us a lesson.

[Anomalocaris]

Every complex organism is a big package of exploitative opportunities for other organisms.     Even the strongest apex Marco predator is but an ambulatory meat locker for parasites and pathogens.

So there seems to be nothing more than particular squeamishness in picking out macro-predation as more distasteful than infection or any other exploitative inter-species relationship. 

We might think we, by virtue of intelligence and technology, are the ultimate apex predators,  but nature guffaws loudly at our pretenses and fabricated numerous different organisms designed to feast exclusively our species.   By all indications most of these, as species, are prospering as never before.

Humans unfortunately DO widely think we are an "apex" species. But this current pandemic should teach us a lesson.

If we learn whenever something should teach us a lesson, this current pandemic wouldn’t have happened.     If we learn the lesson this pandemic teaches, the next pandemic that absolutely will happen also shouldn’t have happened.