Firefilm said:
Best Animal Ever
In honor of Thanksgiving as well as Chris' birthday tomorrow, we present 7 + minutes of Chris ranting about his favorite animal. Show your family, they'll thank you.
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i am kinda sorry, but chris is allmost completly wrong about lions & hyenas.
you know the reason why lions can be this lazy? they are the scavengers, in fact they use their strength to chase away other predators from the game thoose predators hunted.
you know the reason lions "hate" hyenas? it is because hyenas are actually the ones that are the hunters, the lions just chase them away to steal the food the hyenas hunted.
you know the reason why male lions have to be so vigilant about other male lions? it is this way because if a male lion takes over a "pride", he will kill every single little lion baby so the genes of his predecessor will not survive, he also does it to hasten the reproductive cicle of the females, so essentially 'kill babies to fuck the moms', very classy -.- Now, if a male hyena tried to pull the same stunt in a pack, the females WILL kill him and serve his body as a happy meal to the lions.
also, while we are discusing the social differences between hyenas and lions, if a pack of hyenas kills an animal, the first members of the pack that are allowed to feed from it are the young hyenas who can't hunt by themself; if a pack of lions succesfully steals something from other animals, the alpha-male will bully his way to be the first to feed from it, sometimes even to the detriment of his own children. also, female and male hyenas hunt together as equals, so if you want to stress the "equalist" angle, in the lion society, the male is a lazy, child-murdering rapist while the females have to do all the work; in the hyena society the burdens of life are equally distributed between the genders as far as that is possible (yes, the males of the pack also have to tend to the children and protect them, instead of being lazy like a lion).
in a nutshell, the most acurate despiction of a lion in the media was scar, mufasa and simba are the glorified, humanized versions our own cultural bias produced.
another thing about hyenas: the so-called "giggeling" of hyenas is actually a method of communication, think of it as a form of military short-talk to tell the other members of the pack where you are, which direction you are heading, what you smell and see in the vicinity and in which direction a possible target is heading. it is also used to coordinate the attack on the animal your pack intends to hunt down, and lastly as a warning mechanism to inform your pack when thoose pesky FEDs err lions come to steal your hard earned money err meat ;-)
sidenote: hyenas are actually not wolfs, they developed from the same ancestors that cats developed from, their evolutonary line just split very early from the other cats.
it says a lot about human society that we choose to glorify lions and try to give hyenas a bad name...
i apologize for any gramatical or ortographic mistakes, english is not my first language.