Lamar Hunt Quotes

Vulnerability--not hunger, not anger, and certainly not spite--is the key to predator-prey relationships. The skill and viciousness of the hunter matters less than the size, speed, strength, health, and ferocity of the hunted. Vulnerability explains why large predators tend to kill the old, young, and sick members of prey populations. Predators eat the mild and weak because those are the animals they can catch and kill.

As Richard Slotkin has argued, frontier cultural forms that stressed regeneration through violence excused all kinds of nasty behavior. The myth freed colonists to chop heads, fire villages, and torture animals. This was wholesome, conservative brutality; atrocities committed in the name of order, authority, and decorum. Travelers’ tales and circle hunts made wildlife abuse socially acceptable. Regeneration through violence rested on the assumption (many times the delusion) of powerlessness. Wolves never threatened humans physically, but they devoured livestock, and colonists identified with their animal property.

Wolves attack the hindquarters of prey first, biting into the animal's meaty rump or ham. They stay away from the tendons near the hooves. People hamstring wolves, wolves do not hamstring prey. Hard, sharp, and lethal, hooves are the last things wolves want near their heads. They aim for the flanks, grasping for a hold in the large muscles, hoping to bring the mammal down. A trip, a stumble, a fall, and the wolves go for the throat. The animals in the rear begin feasting as their partners crush and remove the herbivore's windpipe.