The duties of a NPS ranger or park police can be summed up as:
“Protect the park from the people,
the people from the park,
and the people from the people.” (One of many unoffical mottos)
Nowhere in that is, “protect the park from the park.”
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Not quite as moronic, but nothing to be thankful for at the end: An old acquaintance at work took a day trip to a wild animal park here on the west coast. He went with a friend of his who has just acquired a new BMW. (I’m sure you see what’s coming.) The proud BMW owner decided to take the BMW for that trip and drive it through the park. They noticed a stationary baboon in the distance, stopped to watch it…then watched in horror as it made a mad dash into the driver’s door leaving a huge dent. The baboon then did a 180 and rocketed off in the opposite direction. As if the baboon planned its day around that event. New BMW. Wild, loose animals. I could only smile.
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I used to own it. I was relieved to not find any of my relatives in it.
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I don’t think I’ve heard Jesus invoked that often outside of church or a religious-themed horror movie!
It’s interesting to consider how different the audio could’ve been if the people filming had been English. “With the cheetah in pursuit, unless the mother can successfully carry her young out of danger and return to the safety of the vehicle; sadly, there can be but one outcome.”
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Most predatory animals are “cowards” if you want to put it that way. They’ve got to weigh the risk of being injured (without human tech/medicine, which makes any significant wound potentially a source of deadly infection, or may limit mobility/hunting capacity). That’s why a lot of small animals have developed the “batshit aggro” response to predation rather than just fleeing. If they can convince a predator that the potential nutrients aren’t worth a potential injury (even if the fight is fairly one sided), then the “coward” predator may just decide to go for an easier target.
I’ll tell you this though, when I worked Zoos, it was always amusing to watch the big cats watch/stalk the toddlers that people inevitably let run amok back and forth in front of the enclosures. That was more “environmental enrichment” than we could ever have provided in an enclosure…
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Time for this old clip. Despite what the title says, that is a leopard not a cheetah, and I have no idea what magic she used to survive this and many other encounters with wildlife:
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“Our cave looks more homely with the meat hanging up.”
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We don’t have a wildlife park near me, but the fact that the river valley I live in in western Chicagoland is recovering from decades of pollution, lots of wild animals are turning up the last 10 years.
Coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions. Even a bear.
This is good, but we may see encounters in the suburbs eventually.
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As long as they don’t drive on the I-90.
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I work in a callcenter, I know what you are talking about. I and everybody else working there have lost all faith in humanity.
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It’s interesting that immature Homo sapiens L. seem to have lost any evolutionary baggage about big cats and most other large predators, but keeps the parts about no-leg and many-leg critters.
Pity that evolutionary psychology of such a shitshow.
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Idiots were very LUCKY those were cheetahs and not leopards…
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There is—but the Dutch expression (godverdomme) probably feels like more of a taboo curse, whereas the English F-bomb so readily thrown around by stand-ups and tv series feels like more of a generic expletive. I wonder if many Dutch would even know that it alludes to the act of procreation.
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I can assure you they do.
Just FTR, I picked up my first English on Dutch TV. They don’t dub.
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We visited the zoo in Washington DC once. At the tiger enclosure, a tiger was intensely and unnervingly interested in us. I seriously got a low-key adrenaline rush from how it looked at us even thought it was across a moat and down in a pit.
I don’t get how these people were so obtuse…
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While the Dutch do of course have their own curse words, in my experience they often favor English words for that purpose.
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Good thing the cats were arguing among themselves whose turn it is to pick up the bill for take-away.
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It’s everybodies choice in life; take five seconds to shout a warning to a moron, or watch them and their kids get killed for the lulz and the views… 
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