You read that title correctly. Especially lions and eagles. Almost every country on earth incorporates lions or eagles into their logo or coat of arms or whatever you want to call it. Gigantic groups of people trying to live together in lawful harmony, for mutual benefit, and to symbolize that endeavor we choose the nastiest, most violent creatures on earth, who live by tearing other animals apart with their talons or teeth and consuming their flesh, usually in front of their mothers. That’s right, the predators usually target baby animals. Don’t believe that “old and the sick” crap in your biology textbook. How often do you see the predators taking down an “old” gazelle in the videos? How often are they grabbing the baby animals?
But humans seem to adore these monsters. Coat of Arms, flags, sport teams. The American Eagle. The Russian Bear. The British Lion. Lions. Eagles. Tigers. Bears. Ravens. Wolverines. Panthers. Hawks. Raptors, for god sake. Raptors! Dominant Alphas. Apex Predators. Richard the Lionhearted (He was a crappy king, by the way). The Lion of Judah. The American Eagle. Year of the Dragon. Griffindor (Griffins are a combination of Lions and Eagles).
And of course everyone’s favorite dinosaur, the Iguanadon. Ha ha, kidding of course, you’ve met Tyrannosaurus Rex, dubbed King of the dinosaurs by some overexcited scientist. Because that’s everybody’s ideal King, right? A giant eating machine who relentlessly hunts his people for food.
You have to wonder about scientists sometimes, although there are fantastic and heartwarming examples of scientists who spend their lives studying mollusks and humble creatures. But you still get these old style Nat geo types with the open shirts and the safari hats, crowing over sharks, orcas, tigers, panthers or cheetahs and their kills. I’ll never forget a conservationist type ad in a nature magazine calling for preservation of lions. The ad was sponsored by some sort of save the lions group led by some demented old husband and wife team. The ad featured a horrible photo of a group of lions attacking a baby elephant. Like lions on the baby elephants back, biting it’s ears and back, and the baby elephant had its mouth open in a scream, and you could see one of the baby elephant’s eyes wide open with terror and horror. How do I know it was a baby elephant and not a grown up elephant? The ad used the words “photo of a pride bringing down a baby elephant”. They seemed quite pleased with the ghastly scene, like it was neat and they wanted their friends to see.
Now I know there are people who practice a kind of Nature Worship and believe in a kind of magic line between human construction and Nature and that anything that happens in Nature is beautiful and okay and that humans are a kind of devil spawned cancer that has invaded the perfect natural world. Well, I kind of believe the devil spawned thing. But Nature is not heaven. Disney movies are not real. I’m quite certain the baby elephant did not enjoy being eaten just because the lions were part of Nature. Nature sucks sometimes. I kind of feel they should have shot the lions and saved the baby elephant. Of course the lions probably had baby lions at home that were going hungry, so if the lions didn’t bring their kids slaughtered baby elephant flesh to eat, the baby lions could starve to death. Nature is fun that way.
But Nature has spawned many wondrous amazing creatures, like elephants, who eat leaves instead of other creatures. Antelope, Buffaloes, giraffes, bats, lemurs, dolphins, octopuses… well some of those eat insects and fish, but they don’t eat any creatures I care about. You can even be a vegetarian and eat fish according to some religions, I believe. And definitely insects. Humans should eat more insects. Why don’t we? Are they poisonous? If they are poisonous, what about all the spiders we eat at night?
So why not worship these fantastic vegetarian or insectivorous beasts? I think it’s because they run away from fights. Humans perceive a lion as never backing down from a fight, so they admire the beast as a symbol of courage. Of course this perception of any animal is based upon lies.
I won’t bother deconstructing the Lion Mythos in this post because I believe Mark Twain completely eviscerated the species in a brilliant essay published in the New York Times. I think it was Mark Twain. It might have been Ignatius Reilly. But it doesn’t matter who did it, the point is that Lions are just a big animal with teeth and claws and they hardly ever have to fight a bigger animal with teeth and claws, so how is that brave? Weasels are much much braver than lions. I know I’m not the first person to point this out. I often allude to a personal experience to illustrate this point:
At one time in my youth (early 30s) I shared an apartment with a weasel owner. She kept the creature in a cage in our shared kitchen and repeatedly cautioned me to keep my fingers away from the bars of the cage because the adorable little specimen would bite your fingers. Eventually the weasel got loose and I encountered it in the bathroom where it was attempting to abscond with a bottle of hand lotion and I grabbed a broom to defend myself and this minuscule little animal dropped the bottle of lotion and there it stood facing me, and I was at least five times its height and a hundred times its mass, and this little weasel raised its tiny forepaws and hissed at me with a level of menace that I will never forget, and I yelped and tried to hit it with the broom and it rose in the air like yoda and bit my hand.
I guarantee you that if a lion ran into a creature five times its height and a 100 times its weight, it would not rear back and offer to fight it, not a chance.
But truth: I’m really just paraphrasing Mark Twain’s essay about the bravery of predators. Look it up. I can’t be bothered to google it right at the moment because I’m busy with a client
