Oh man, I hate seeing footage of animals in distress. Oddly, it affects me more than seeing humans in a bad situation. When that commercial comes on where the bearded guy asks for money to help feed starving kids, I barely bat an eye. But… as soon I see the commercial that features caged dogs in shelters while Sarah McLachlan is singing in the background I’m scrambling to change the channel because i turn into an emotional wreck.
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Given that humans have hunted chimps for bush meat, I don’t find it surprising that they hunt other monkeys. They’re omnivores, after all, just as we are.
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Yeah any creature that attacks you in the genitals or face first gets a down vote from me. And then there’s the cannibalism… Chimps are hateful creatures.
The disturbing part for me was hearing the young primates screaming. Standing on the forest floor, that would be pretty loud and almost completely surrounding you. You may have been following the hunt for hours and you would be fully aware of what was going on - and so would the colobus monkeys, who are running and screaming for their lives. The fish and pigeons would have a relatively quick, painless and quiet death in comparison, and would not have the same similarity in appearance and behaviour to humans.
I’m not sure I see what is disturbing about this.
Crotch is thinnest skin, and has critical blood vessels close to surface. It’s a fairly common place for predators to start opening up their prey.
“And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”
Film maker Werner herzog on grizzly bears.
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I find it pretty funny that people keep bad mouthing the chimps for eating other primates, as if humans are somehow above that sort of thing. Humans happily murder other primates (including other humans) for fun, food, and profit. Omnivorous primates eat things made out of meat. I have hard time seeing the evil in that. The fact that a very small handful of humans have decided to cut down on of noming on other living animals might be virtuous, but I have a pretty hard time seeing hunter/gatherers (primate or human) as being evil just because they are eating one of the foods they are evolutionary built to eat.
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This morning as we were getting ready to leave, I heard my partner downstairs praising our “brave hunter kitties.” Apparently one or possibly both of our boys(*) had found a new toy last night. Of course they do complain about these toys as they have a tendency to break, no matter how carefully they bat it around. Yeah, I think cats (animals in general, really) are cute and adorable, but I have no illusions about their natures. Besides, I suspect that was the same mouse that I saw in the garage last week and I gave it fair warning.
(* - While I suspect the queen cat could give a mouse a thrashing if she wished, usually leaves such things to the males. She’s the oldest and is quite comfortable in her role as the old lady of the house. Someone else can do the grunt work, she’ll be on the nice warm bed with the humans, thank you.)
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A lot of patience and time. Watching the documentary about how they filmed the Planet Earth documentary series was even more fascinating than the series to me.
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The one that got me was a BBC show demonstrating how buffalo will stamp on lion cubs, rooting them out till they’re all gone. Or the flamingos in the salt lakes that dry up, the weak / stupid ones ending up with salt weights around their ankles so they can’t fly away. Or the bambi being hunted by five lions, stuck on its own in a thicket and surrounded.
But the one that really got me was watching the news about chads in Florida. That was bad, really bad.
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I don’t know what is more disturbing, the video, or the phrase “in and of itself” still being used…
Seems that Saxton Hale had the right idea after all. He makes an ape die on every page!
Chimps also fight wars over territory, in a manner very similar to many human hunter-gatherer societies. The males all march out silently, with a clear sense of purpose, since they don’t stop to gather food, into a neighboring band’s territory, and when they find a male alone, they gang up on him and kill him. Eventually, their territory increases at the expense of the other group’s, presumably giving them access to more resources, so that their males will be bigger and stronger for the next round.
I saw this exact video when I was fairly young, and have hated chimps ever since. They’re vicious animals that too closely resemble humans for me to be comfortable with this behavior. I have a dislike for basically all apes. Monkeys aren’t much better though.
Big cats, all the way!
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But then…nicepeter weighs in.
We are a bunch of bastards. No doubt about it.
