Please Tip Your Predators
Irradiated by LabRat
Brought to you by Bill Maher and Jeff McMahan.
An increasingly common misconception as more and more of us are functionally raised in relentless modernity and civilization is the idea that “naturalness” is a state of health and harmony, in which God or Gaia’s true master plan is reflected in everything in its place and everything according to its role. This basic, if unspoken, sentiment underlies a breed of vaccination and germ theory denialism; the idea that if it weren’t for the poisons of misguided civilization and evil technology, we wouldn’t need vaccines or antibiotics because our immune systems obviously evolved to cope with diseases and if we just lived according to the natural plan, everyone would be healthy and happy.
Those of us fortunate enough to live in an age and a place where we can have serious concerns about colon cancer and get our primary exposure to nature from the National Geographic corporation tend not to realize it, but while our immune systems indeed evolved to cope with diseases and parasites, diseases and parasites also evolved to cope with our immune systems. The natural state of man or any wild animal is to exercise frequently, eat a healthful diet, have a constant stream of attrition to the population from disease and injury, and cope with a constant load of parasites.
This is natural:
So is this: 
And this: 
Why are National Geographic and the majority of nature hikes free of sights such as this? Because for most of these animals with very high parasite loads, diseases, or crippling injuries, something quickly happens to them: they are killed and eaten by predators. Predators are nature’s hard-working landscape beautification and comfortable illusion maintenance service.
To the extent that I have sourcing for the “disease” images above, all of those that I do are from American states in which large predators have been mostly or completely extirpated. Mange is a fairly normal furbearer problem for predators and prey alike, it’s just rare to see a live animal in which things have advanced that far.
Not being eaten by hyenas every time you get a sufficiently slowing case of the sniffles is one of those major motivating forces for having civilizations, which is a point that has usually never been fully appreciated by people writing posts about the dangers of thimerosol in vaccines on an iPad. Not being eaten by hyenas is also a rarely recognized but truly essential ingredient for producing people whose full-time profession is philosopher or pundit.
Far from condemning predators for their ruthless lifestyle of daily re-enacting the murder of Bambi’s mother, we should all try to have a heartfelt sense of appreciate as warming as our chai lattes for our continued ability to regard the natural world as a handsome theme park inhabited by Platonic ideals.
Thank our predators. Not only do they give animals an excellent exercise program and remove the ugly ones, once you get right down to Early Man and the problems highest on his list to solve they’re the reason we were eventually able to develop the internet and have this conversation.
September 30th, 2010 at 7:00 am
Wow, I kept staring at that poor mangy black bear thinking it was a poor hyena.
OK, I’ll thank the predators, but still keep a gun handy lest they try to take the tip out of MY hide.
I especially loved this line: Not being eaten by hyenas is also a rarely recognized but truly essential ingredient for producing people whose full-time profession is philosopher or pundit.
September 30th, 2010 at 8:34 am
Wow, yea that bear threw me for a loop. I figured it was a hyena too. Who would have thought their structures were that similar; I always figured they were the odd creature out in nature (though they are still pretty freaky).
Nicely put all around though. It always struck me that people who say that kind of crap never allowed outdoor cats. Growing up we pretty got used to the fact that the barn cats would have random limbs of rabbits, squirrels and what looked like a bit of groundhog under the back porch and shed. The old Mama Cat would quite happily attempt to murder any thing roughly her size that looked tasty, and would attempt to maul just about anything bigger that rubbed her the wrong way anyway. After seeing her handy work on some local Labradors and the local fauna, it made you plenty nervous about what her larger cousins would visit upon you. Most certainly not a purring rub against your legs to suggest you give them some kibble.
September 30th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Fat and fuzz are so central to our mental picture of bears that seeing their underlying structure is usually a bit of a surprise. Bears and hyenas do have a similar structure despite being way out on distant branches of the Carnivora tree; bears are closer to dogs and raccoons while hyenas are closer to cats and mongooses. It’s just a good setup for power and, surprisingly, stamina.
Mousie- “If someone tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back.”
September 30th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
I can’t resist this line from the often deranged George Leonard Herter, whose “guidebooks” (and cookbooks) were required reading at Casa Q when Peculiar was growing up: “Being eaten by hyenas is less painful then you think”.
Ask Mr P if you don’t know, or Chas, who also knows about Herter classics like the Virgin Mary’s spinach, Spam Beethoven, and (in season!) Doves Wyatt Earp.
“It’s a well- known fact!”
September 30th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Never had the pleasure of directly reading Herter myself, but his legend has more than reached my ears…
September 30th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
I just finished reading “Into The Wild,” and all the controversy about how and why Chris McCandless failed at his returning-to-nature deal. But in a sense, he didn’t fail. Because random ugly death happens all the time in nature.
Also, what the hell is that polar bear eating? It looks like a goddamn whale. (I’m guessing walrus or large seal?)
September 30th, 2010 at 3:41 pm
“a state of health and harmony, in which God or Gaia’s true master plan is reflected in everything in its place and everything according to its role.” I just want to know what they’re smoking…
Holly, that was a small whale in all probability, you can see part of the backbone running left to right at it’s feet…
October 1st, 2010 at 7:48 am
“I just finished reading “Into The Wild,” and all the controversy about how and why Chris McCandless failed at his returning-to-nature deal. But in a sense, he didn’t fail. Because random ugly death happens all the time in nature.”
That’s pretty funny. I have kind of wondered about that, along the lines of if you took a bunch of people and tried to return them to a “natural existence” by somehow brain wiping them to some arbitrary hunter gatherer level (with SCIENCE!) and dumped them on an island, what would happen. It seems to me that state would last about 1 month before a large percentage died or started thinking “You know, I bet if I used this flexible bark to tie this stick to that stick I could make a better house!” and you had a more advanced cultural group. Sort of along the lines of “human action is by definition natural” but it seems that the arbitrary back to nature state is not maintainable for any significant length of time.