Najakcharmer
Posts: 2121
Joined: 5/3/2004
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster
Ehh, I don't know about that. Yeah, the animal felt threatened, was defending itself; that was its instinctive reaction. I understand all that. If you think of "attack" as a word with moral connotations, then OK, this wasn't an attack; if it just means "using a weapon to cause damage," then I don't see what's wrong with calling it an attack.
I think that the word gives a connotation and a context for the animal's behavior that is misleading, perhaps dangerously so.
I hear people claim all the time that a snake "attacked" them. When I ask, "What were you doing at the time?" the answer is generally something like, "I was beating the snake with a stick to try to kill it, and it ATTACKED me." These people are totally convinced of their own innocence and righteousness. They aren't to blame at all, no sirree. The fact is that if they had simply refrained from attacking or closely approaching the animal, no one at all would have gotten hurt. But you can't convince most people of that, so they continue to deliberately initiate encounters with wildlife that both humans and animals are the worse off for.
As Samuel L Jackson puts it in a different context, I am motherfucking sick of snakes on a plane. More specifically, I am sick of the constant media hype about how aggressive and dangerous wild animals are, and how likely they are to "attack" people. In the majority of recorded encounters between humans and wildlife in North America that have resulted in injury or death, the human deliberately initiated the encounter. In short, the human is far more frequently the attacker or the aggressor when it comes to wildlife encounters, and it is both unfair and dangerously misleading to believe otherwise. In some other countries these statistics get skewed because we have people living in much closer proximity to the animals, and more genuinely accidental encounters. These accidental encounters still don't usually qualify as "wild animal deliberately attacking human", but tend to be more on the order of "oops, I stepped on it barefoot".
Leave the wildlife alone and it will leave you alone. It is comparatively rare for a wild animal to initiate an encounter of any kind with a human, since we don't match the criteria for being prey for most species. There are a few exceptions among the big carnivores and with human habituated, semi-domesticated or feral animals. But as a general rule, if you behave yourself calmly and rationally and avoid attacking or closely approaching the animals, you are in considerably less danger walking quietly among so-called dangerous wild animals than you are in a dubious neighborhood in New York. Wild animals very rarely attack people. People very frequently attack or harrass wild animals, which inevitably leads to a defensive response. If more folks realized that basic truth, fewer people as well as animals would get hurt.
< Message edited by Najakcharmer -- 9/6/2006 9:16:28 PM >
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RE: 'CROCODILE HUNTER' CELEBRITY KILLED BY STING RAY - 
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