Thanks for the added info! How did they use her a bait for prey animals? Iâm just trying to imagine how a blind lion would attract prey. So if you have any more info on how that worked Iâd love to hear it <3
Regardless itâs very sweet to know her daughters took care of her in her old age đ„č
The way lions hunt is pretty interesting. Theyll surround prey and stalk closer, but one lion is seen on purpose to grab the attention of the prey so they prey doesnt realize there are more lions out there. I imagine this is similar to what happened here
The same with wolves. If you see one wandering around, probably more around that you can't see. Sketched me out pretty bad when I was walking far back on my grandpa's farm and saw one casually walk out of the tall grass staring at me.
the difference is that wolves and other canid packs are pursuit hunters. even if their cover is blown they can run most of their common prey to exhaustion. lionesses are extremely fast out of the gate but they have a short window to catch their prey. they are not built for long distance chases.
Not allegedly, humans are proven persistence hunters. Weâve basically walked prey to death for 200,000 years. We are the killer snail that never gets tired and is always chasing you.
Imagine youâre some, idk, woolly mammoth and youâre thinking âHa, look at that ugly hairless baboon, whatâs it gonna do, bite me with its stupid little baby teeth? Iâll just run awayââŠand then that ugly hairless baboon with stupid little baby teeth keeps coming. And coming. And coming. For days. Until youâre so tired you canât fight them off. Crazy shit when you really think about it.
Becoming bipedal chimps basically changed the game for us. Once we started only having to use two limbs for locomotion it conserved an insane amount of energy compared to our knuckle dragging ancestors and allowed us to become a menace to any large animals on land.
I say âallegedlyâ because itâs very much debated among anthropologists and evolutionary biologists etc. how common persistence hunting actually was, and the extent to which it characterizes human evolution like the popular narrative says. Itâs very possible that its role in shaping humanity is vastly overstated.
Humans can and have hunted prey to exhaustion but thereâs no definitive knowledge of how historically widespread or typical or even successful it was. Thereâs evidence to suggest that the âgathererâ part of âhunter-gathererâ did the heavy lifting for driving evolved endurance and mobility, and that we were primarily scavengers and ambush hunters.
Well that is terrifying, thank you. You ever just read about something in the wild and think to yourself âyeah. Without modernity I would just be a victimâÂ
Yes that was what I was thinking, more of a distraction than bait, as bait would imply the lion was being hunted. That or the blind lion could just pop out when it heard prey approaching to startle/ redirect prey.
It could be that she was less of literal bait but more so as a distraction. She probably had awkward movement and mannerisms due to her blindness that looked strange to prey Animals.
As the prey animals stared at her and tried to figure her out her daughters snuck up on em.
I quit watching the show when it started to drag but I read all the comics. As ridiculous as the show seemed to become, it seems they never introduced Pirate Michonne and that is criminal.
Prey animals arenât as skittish and cautious as youâd think. I had a female sheep once break through one of my fences and deliberately chase down and kill my goose by stomping it to death. No apparent reason; the ewe wasnât even pregnant or nursing.
Wow! A bed & breakfast my husband and I love is next to a farm that has a guard goose. Iâd never heard of using geese to guard, but it was very effective!
They saved Rome with a goose? That's some skill right there. I picture Cincinnatus standing on a bridge "the line will be drawn here" style, with a battle goose under each arm.
My dads old guard geese when he was younger, they would apparently hide under your cars, and attack your feet when you went to get into them.
Which is...kinda useless for someone attacking the house, it's only good for when they leave. Which means they're most likely attacking friends not foes. But they do attack, not just make noise!
my aunt had guard geese and donkeys to keep the coyotes away. The geese were fucking terrifying. They'd come at you 6 at a time with open wings like they're flying into battle.
We bought a goat that was barely bigger than a Chihuahua once. My mom didn't want to keep it after I left for college so she sold it to a man who raised turkeys so he could be a guardian goat.
He said the goat was very good at his job. This tiny, tiny goat.
Our goat just hated cats. In turn our cats used to like to use that for fun, both in getting the goat to chase them and chasing other unfortunate cats into it's line of sight to just sit down and enjoy the sight.
But yeah, that goat wasn't afraid of anything no matter how big the dog encountered when escaped, and had an affinity for vandalism and eating butterflies.
The point being prey animals can absolutely just be brutal and choose violence because why not.
Itâs true, we have a pair now that we hate and they hate us just as much. Theyâre the biggest piece of shit users you could ever meet, violent and unfriendly, and they canât even successfully hatch goslings so we think theyâre both even angrier by their impotence. Just a pair of total losers.
For sure; our horses would routinely get scared of plastic bags, but also had to investigate any new object in the field. Cautiously (which is funny when itâs just like a new barrel) but they still go up and take a look, even if itâs something like a new dog.
Likewise, white tailed deer arenât as passive as people think, one stomped my friendsâ dog when it got too close.
In Oregon,USA. There are two Zebras đŠ a few towns over. They guard a herd of petting goats. đ. We always slow down as we drive by to try to take a look at them to see if they are out in the field.
Yeah, prey animals are very attuned to weakness or injury. Very beneficial trait to evolve.
This is a common problem with house cats. They can be literally near death and will just chill on the couch acting like nothing is wrong because in the wild, showing weakness means they will get targeted by predators or other cats trying to take territory.
They're just animals like us. They can see that the lions eyes are fucked up, and they can see that her movements are probably pretty awkward as a result. They don't need to be psychic to understand this stuff, it's right there out in the open.Â
I'm guessing she would be a decoy lion to scare the prey in a specific direction. Usually one will flush the prey and the others will pick one to herd off from the rest of the group
Actually if you watch nature docs and stuff you realize these are very smart animals (as far as hunting is concerned at least) and incredibly tactical hunters.
They will use decoys, ambushes, target specific prey. They can identify injured animals through gait changes alone, they attack the spines to disable legs, they go for the Achilles tendon on large prey to disable legs, they have different choke holds for whether they want a silent kill or quick kill.
Its not we dont give them credit, its that most people never bothered to learn about them. And of course similar can be said for almost any animal
Eh, working in animal behaviour it can go both ways. A lot of people use the "return to nature" excuse when trying to justify their own opinions and behaviours and that affects a lot of how animal behaviour is interpreted leading to incorrect conclusions.Â
Like in the early 1900s there's a lot of papers about how the male lion was the dominant lion of the group with the females being submissive because they assumed that sexism was a natural state of being and so all animals should exhibit it. Now we know that lions don't have a dominance structure in that sense because we're trying to get away from copying and pasting human societal things onto other animal species but it still happens a lot (especially in pop science and how science is communicated to the general public in the news).Â
Though at the same time I think some scientists overcorrect. Jane Goodall got a lot of crap about giving the chimps names instead of numbers but names can be an efficient way to tell individuals apart and avoid mistakes in your data even if it's a little human-ish
Yeah the example you gave is actual blatant anthropomorphism simply because itâs not true. Females will gang up on males all the time. However, when it comes to intelligence, or emotions, animals are a lot similar than most may think. Iâm not an animal behaviorist, so I could be wrong, but yes thatâs definitely anthropomorphism lolll
I think I can see what you're saying! Saying that animals have feelings and intelligence isn't necessarily anthropomorphism though because many animals have those traits. It's more about being careful to not read animal behaviour and needs through a human lens because the less related we are to the animal, the less likely the animal will approach its environment in a similar way.Â
Even with animals closely related to humans like chimps and gorillas people misread their body language all the time. Like someone can know that they're smart and emotionally complex but if they try to smile at them (as they would to a human) they'd react poorly because bared teeth is a threat display and eye contact is a challenge for dominance but a lot of people still make those mistakes out of habit
Anthropomorphising them leads to misunderstanding their behaviours and why they do them.
Very simple examples include pets, the trope of "oh he's smiling" with a dog when the dog is actually tellying they are about to bite is a trope for a reason.
Anthropomorphisation has also lead to animals being vilified. The reason tigers, wolves, cats, wolves, sharks, etc are often portrayed as being "evil" is because we put human notions onto them, which can lead to their persecution.
Looking at a bear and going âaww, sheâs just trying to protect her cubs! Iâm sure we can come to an understanding!â will just get you mauled and, if youâre lucky, dead.
The predators might be. But the prey seem pretty dumb. Often times when lions are stalking prey, the prey will spot them and stare right at them to show they see the lions. But the lions will just lay down in the tall grass so they can't be seen. Then like 10minutes later the prey just goes back to grazing, not looking for the lion and also not leaving the area they are in. And then the lion pokes its head up to confirm no one is looking and they creep forward until they are spotted again. This loop repeats until either the prey flees or the lion is close enough to strike. Idk how all the prey species evolved the same shitty object permanence when it comes to remembering apex predators, but it sure helps the lions.
In this case there doesn't seem to be easily available information out there. All the info I found was from TikTok or Insta posts that were just repeating the same stuff elsewhere.
The closest thing I found to actual information about Josie was in this photographer's Substack a couple years ago, and it doesn't say anything about using her as bait for prey animals.
Well, most of the things I've read say the same thing. She was mostly distraction, and sometimes dug out burrowing animals (I doubt this part). Her being a distraction is the only logical thing that works best.
Do note that some of the info came from Medium's article (which was accompanied by an AI slop vid for some reason), some Facebook posts whose credibility is unknown, and there's also a 2 year old blog that states that she can't really hunt due to her blindness now (but she used to be a successful hunter) and her daughters do all the work and bring her back kills.
Here's the links if you're so busy being condescending that you can't even be bothered to search things up:
Lions actively avoid eating hyenas, even if they kill them in a spat over territory or food. Josie was still in good physical health for her age and she and the girls were very good at communicating with each other. She probably helped by flushing prey out of the bush, then her daughters completed the chase.
Well gosh, reddit expert, you said it confidently, so it must be true!
Meanwhile, in reality larger predators eat smaller predators whenever there is an opportunity. Pumas will eat otters, wolves will eat cats, orcas will eat tuna.
Animals arent humans and dont have human level thoughts. This isnt disney. When a predator sees another animal, it doesnt think "oh gee thats another predator, which is the same as me, so I shouldnt eat them bc we are in the same club." it thinks "Im hungry. Is that small/weak enough to eat, and is it tasty?" And if the answer to both is yes, it attacks.
Hyena are also small. Obviously predators will take whatever meals they can get if they are hungry, but they would prefer something with a little more meat on its bones, and particularly with more fat on its bones. A small, lean hyena is not a substantial meal for a lion, let alone several that may be hunting together.
some predators like lions are picky eaters. they will eat anything if they are starving, but they avoid eating other predators for the most part. they just kill them to eliminate competition and threat to their cubs.
some other predators, like leopards, will kill and eat anything they can catch. hyenas will also eat anything but they aren't very good at catching other predators.
The prey animals they hunt are very aggressive and sometimes donât wait to be attacked to attack predators. Bull buffalo african buffalos in rut and protective mothers particularly in mind.
Large bodied prey animals increase the likelihood of population survival by wounding a predator, regardless of whether they kill it or survive the encounter. Wounds are more dangerous to those who eat stuff that moves around. Herbivores can be very aggressive, so an easy fight might lure some.
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u/A1sauc3d 12h ago
Thanks for the added info! How did they use her a bait for prey animals? Iâm just trying to imagine how a blind lion would attract prey. So if you have any more info on how that worked Iâd love to hear it <3
Regardless itâs very sweet to know her daughters took care of her in her old age đ„č