Life eating other life.

[Brian37]

Well, yeah, naturally learning to procur food for one's self via means of hunting and then cleaning the kill is a time honored virtue lacking in the apathetic supermarket experience.

If you want to argue pace of concumption and packaging, that is an arugument to be made. But long before big cities humans still ate other animals.

[arewethereyet]

Well, yeah, naturally learning to procur food for one's self via means of hunting and then cleaning the kill is a time honored virtue lacking in the apathetic supermarket experience.

If you want to argue pace of concumption and packaging, that is an arugument to be made. But long before big cities humans still ate other animals.

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

[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.

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.

  

If you want to argue pace of concumption and packaging, that is an arugument to be made. But long before big cities humans still ate other animals.

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.

---

It happens a lot, but the bleeding heart, left wing, liberal, Jew-controlled, fake news media suppresses it.

Boru

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.

---

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....

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”.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

Life....doesn't have to eat other life to survive.  Autotrophs are the basis of our food chain.  Life eating life is an optional and highly effective strategy.  Does that make you feel better or worse about it?

Hell...ideally.... you want to eat the strong, not the weak. More meat on the bones. The weak are just more convenient.

[Anomalocaris]

yes life may not need to eat other life to survive, but predation sure seems fundamental to the complexity required for intelligence to evolve.

[The Valkyrie]

Cannibalism is good on long weekends when everything's closed and you can't get supplies.

[onlinebiker]

Cannibalism is good on long weekends when everything's closed and you can't get supplies.

That sorta depends on which end of the fork you' re on.

[Anomalocaris]

Hell...ideally.... you want to eat the strong, not the weak.  More meat on the bones.  The weak are just more convenient.

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

[The Grand Nudger]

I wouldn't rule out autotrophic intelligence entirely. I think it might be more the case that earth has no smart plants because it has a ton of smart motile predators. There are predatory plants here - but none of them appear to be any more or less intelligent than the other plants they prey on (though they're all probably a hell of alot more intelligent than we would generally credit them for).

We, the grand we, might be a hard ceiling to intelligence like ours in the case of plants or autotrophs in general. Effectively, we've shut the door behind ourselves - and probably did so long before we were intelligent..ourselves. There has to be some way to manage the risk of the expensive structures we associate with intelligences like ours. A plant growing a "brain" to have it nibbled on by every passing insect has a problem that we don't.

[Anomalocaris]

Intelligence depend on complex behavior.   Complex behavior and predation go hand in hand.    But any Complex behavior on the part of autotrophs would likely be driven by predation avoidance.   Predation itself require behavior more complex than simple autotrophism.

But more subtlety, motility and complex behavior in autotrophs, even if not driven by predation, would tend to open up better better opportunities than autotrophism for the former autotroph, thus again reinforcing the association between predation and complex behavior.