Rooting for the Prey

Man is a predator. Are you?

One of the last wild red wolves watching its prey, somewhere around Galveston, TX. They have been extinct from their natural territories since the 80’s. Most reintroduction efforts have failed due to poaching. One day, we will let wolves be wolves!

Something that the wide variety of nature documentaries that have popped up over the years feature, particularly Planet Earth, is the “chase scene” - a long-winded, suspenseful capture of a hunt. Sometimes the hunt ends with a bloody meal, others don’t. These documentaries do a good job of both enticing the viewer through drama and displaying the ecological stakes.

One smaller documentary I watched, which I forget the name of, followed a nursing cheetah for weeks as it struggled to hunt and produce milk for her newborn cubs. It made it clear that through no uncertainty life must be killed for.

Have you ever caught yourself rooting for the prey to escape, even though you know all of the stakes? I have, you probably have. I wouldn’t read into this too much, most of it is TV coaxing you to root for whoever has the highest risk. Being eaten alive is usually the highest. But if you do, reading into this will reveal more about yourself than it would the actual event that occurred.

Rather than watching it, try performing the hunt yourself, becoming the predator man is, and you’ll see that it immediately renders away these dramatic instances for what it is - a constant, ceaseless struggle, with no room for pity. One of the first animals I’d ever killed was a small whitetail doe. Interestingly, she had sent her fawns into the clearing first, finally emerging roughly 5 minutes later. For 13-year-old me, there was not an ounce of pity. By the time the smoke and ringing had cleared, revealing the body, I felt pure exuberant joy. You can hardly contain yourself, the obligatory 15 minute waiting to let the woods settle and to let her bleed is an impossible one. There is something incredibly primal about these feelings, you had done a good thing, you’ve done what you sought out to do and what you ought. And yet, at the tree line is her two fawns watching you drag their mother to some shed.

Maybe I could have rationalized my way into pity, into some gay ass “respect the animal” native mysticism that people buy into as a racial courtesy ala “blacks are good at sports”. No. The body compells, so powerfully that you have to shut off every sense and enter a world of platitudes and ideals. Your reaction to death and carnage is pure joy, because it benefits you, and for billions of years has life been rewarded by such carnage. It learned the game, you’re not escaping it.

In nature, there in fact is no good or evil. There is simply is, and the will to remain as such. There may instead be a “good” and “unfit”, where the unfit lacks the will or the ability to remain as such, and the good does. A pack of wolves who descends upon a calf who just hit the ground from the womb, there is no “bad” to be found here, only opportunity - for the wolves, at least. All are called upon by their genes, their will to exist, to take from others to give unto themselves. Utilitarian and hedonist ideologies like to toy with the concept of removing away “zero sum fallacies”, but the conservation of energy is the mother of all zero-sum games.

Deviation from here ends immediately in death!

It is important to not root for the prey, because you are not prey. Are you? A lot of people act like they are. Women will tend to root for the prey because they possess an inborn inclination towards the attitude of prey, especially in the sexual sense, for a number of evolutionary reasons.

Man is a predator, or at least he ought to be. Most people watching these documentaries have forgotten their place. To them, heat comes from the thermostat. Food comes from the shopping cart. It appears at a card swipe, and that’s it. Men who have chopped their own wood, skinned their own animals, and have spilled blood - relishing in each and every act of such - know their place. They know that they are predators, and that to survive they must kill. And there’s nothing wrong with that.