Tam has dropped a few winners, so much that I feel obligated to repost:
And for Snarky Cynicism:
Sadly Tam much like Authors writing about 20-ft Flying man-eaters (often breathing fire) and people spending HUGE money to go to Africa to hunt the big five (and the amazingly extensive anti-poaching laws out there to keep people who are hunting to keep it fair for the critters, and to keep us from over-hunting them.
If there was an honest-to-God keystone predator that eats people, they’d probably get hunted to extinction before they made too huge a dent in the Nation’s hobo and lay-about population.
Hell we beat the bejesus out of the Blue Whale population so much that the whole damn world simply banned commercial fishing of whales (Japan is currently the ONLY nation that harvests whales, and they do that under the guise of “Scientific Research”), Its the biggest damn creature on the planet, and its even bigger than the mo’fuggin dinosaurs, and the big fucking thing hides under the ocean and has no interest in people in the least, and we still came damn close to wiping them out, and frankly if we set the goal at killing all the fucking whales, rather than just keeping us tits-deep in blubber, baleen, and whale-burgers we’d have made a pretty good go of it.
I don’t think a 20 foot flying predator that hunts people would fare very well. If they were VERY plentiful they’d get a WHOLE lot of us, but in the end I suspect we’d get ALL of them. We’re just too damn good at killing stuff.
“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.”
— Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
Ah, Neal Stephenson I love his collections of essays he calls novels.
I’m afraid I can’t find the source, but I’ve read that the only surviving animal that actively and consciously hunts humans is the polar bear. That is, it considers humans as a part of its normal diet, as opposed to the occasional tiger that can’t hunt its normal prey and resorts to hunting humans, or the alligator that will basically grab anything that gets close enough to it.
For this I respect polar bears. But when I’m in their neighborhood I’m still going to carry a really big gun and kill them first if necessary. The only reason they’re still around is that every few people share space with them, and there are plenty of delicious seals for them to eat instead.
-Mark
I never get the stories you see from time to time along the lines of “THE EARTH WITHOUT HUMANS” or whatever. I mean, c’mon, we’re the only species that has built habitations from the jungle to the polar caps, and from space to underwater. And we kill everything that gets in our way. We’re here to stay, Mr. TV Producer, and no amount of dreaming can wish us out!
Well we’re REALLY good at killing off big critters and manipulating our environment, but when it comes to LITTLE critters, like insects or bacteria we don’t have the skill. We wiped out the Dodo by total accident. Oops, and entire species gone by mistake, we didn’t even THINK we could kill off the passenger pigeons. Meanwhile all the warfare we have against pest insects and crop destroyers, not to mention disease, infections, parasites, and contagions, we haven’t even TOUCHED their populations.
It won’t be a Tyrannosaur, nor a tsunami that gets us, it’ll be a super virus or bacteria, better yet spread through an insect vector. We’d have no hope!
Nah, we’ll just make ’em protected like wolves and bears and cougars. You can only shoot them in self-defense.
Or give the .gov a healthy check for a “Hunting Permit”
Is “he was trying to steal my picnic basket boo boo” considered self-defense?
I accept: “I was hungry and he was filled with yummy meats” as an adequate reason for killing one of God’s creatures!
Jesus Weer’d have you never seen “Reign of Fire?”
Not only have I, Mathew McConaughey stole my shaved head with full-beard look!
Fucker! 😉
I’d like to see the shotgun that would take down a 20 ft flying raptor…
Seems like the best (and most exciting) way to hunt them would be in a fighter plane.
A-10 Warthog! 🙂
From what I’ve read, polar bears consider ANYTHING on the ice that they can catch food. Tigers, for the most part, turn maneater when old or injured in some way. Lions sometimes discover humans are a lot easier to catch and kill than antelope and Cape Buffalo, and then tend to specialize. Leopard, when they do try people-munching, seem to consider humans just an expansion of their normal buffet, to be grabbed when opportunity arises.