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Comment by hdersch | Hacker News Reader

What is definitely wrong in this article is the claim, that only bears eat living prey. Also wolves do that. There are many cases where wolves attacked animals (cows, sheep, deer), and as soon as those are immobilized, start feeding. Sometimes these animals survive with horrible wounds. Many images and videos can be found via google.

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Nature is brutal, we should all be really thankful that we get to die in a bed being made as comfortable as possible. For every other animal in history death was almost guaranteed to be something scary and painful.

Nature’s like living in a 24/7 horror movie for most things that aren’t humans.

All those pretty birds you see are like one mistake and bit of bad luck from being ripped to shreds—at all times. Yikes.

I've personally witnessed both wild dogs and lions in Botswana starting to eat their prey before it is dead.

I doubt that statement was meant to be some kind of absolute rule, big cats will definitely eat you alive if they feel like it. But at least you are perhaps more likely to get a quick death..

The advice I grew up with (in swedish bear country) is to do these things, in order:

1. Make noise while in the woods, bears will generally avoid you if they know you are there. You don’t want to startle a bear.

2. If charged, stay calm, make yourself big and talk to the bear, move slowly.

3. If attacked, play dead.

With luck, the bear will lose interest once it doesn’t perceive you as a threat. If it’s hungry, well, bad luck. There have been cases of people scaring bears off by punching them in the nose, so as a final resort I guess that’s something to try.

Grizzly: play dead. Black bear: fight back. Polar bear: make your peace with God.

If it's brown, lay down. If it's black, fight back. If it's white, good night.

If it's jelly, put it in your belly. If it's teddy, take it to beddy.

Sedges have edges, rushes are round. Grasses are hollow and grow in the ground.

In the hierarchy of fucking with things and getting fucked with ,think of yourself as one of the first. If your solution to problems is sentences that start with so, you are food. What can help is a warmup to kill display. Means,you show a little magic show of dexterity while moving forward. Throw a knife up and down,raise internal doubts.Suprises kill the predator mood.The predator being used to your presence is thus bad.

> What is definitely wrong in this article is the claim, that only bears eat living prey. Also wolves do that.

And horses¹. And deer².

1. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnYNmGMsU18>

2. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQOQdBLHrLk>

I think it is extremely common in the animal world, if not the default. Thinking of other biomes Fish and reptiles almost always do it. I suspect anything which a substantial size difference does it and it is only avoided when you have pretty that is very dangerous to the predator.

Hyenas too. They sometimes chase their prey for hours until it drops, then leisurely consume the softest parts first, like the genitalia.

Yep. That keeps happening e.g. in the mountains in northern italy. Cows with huge wounds stumble back from the field, it's horrific. And when the farmers kill a wolf it's an outpour of indignation from animal welfare :/

Mastiff dogs are the real culprits in more cases that people would expect. Had been videotaped doing exactly this. A wolf pack will kill the prey, two mastiffs just bite, sit and wait watching the cow die. They can't kill the cow efficiently.

They will respect animals in their "family" herd, but don't have this restriction against cattle from other herds or species that are not defending, specially when not feed accurately by the owners (If they guard sheep they can still see young cows as fair game).

The main difference between wolves and shepherd dogs is that dogs aren't neither afraid to cows or men.

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