Quotes About Predation

Now, you might think to increase those numbers, you might add thousands of fish. Think again. Fish live a Darwinian existence. A female walleye can lay 50,000 eggs in a single night, but in a stable population, all but two will perish before adulthood from predation, starvation, and other perils.

My feeling is, we ran from animals for three million years. It's our time now. If a cow could eat you, it would. And it wouldn't care how comfortable your truck ride over was, either.

To eat or be eaten, to escape or be takena matter of utmost importance to the one concerned, yet it happens all the time and we don't even notice.

After a long time and many questions, Satan said, The spider kills the fly, and eats it; the bird kills the spider and eats it; the wildcat kills the goose; the -- well, they all kill each other. It is murder all along the line. Here are countless multitudes of creatures, and they all kill, kill, kill, they are all murderers. And they are not to blame, Divine One?

Thus the will to live everywhere preys upon itself, and in different forms is its own nourishment, till finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as a manufactory for its own use. Yet even the human race...reveals in itself with most terrible distinctness this conflict, this variance of the will with itself; and we find homo homini lupus .

A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten

Denize bak. Bir sürü canl?yla dolu, irili ufakl? canl?lardan ibaret. Hiçbir ÅŸey yapm?yorlar, birbirlerini yemek d???nda hiçbir ÅŸey yapm?yorlar. Yiyor ve ürüyorlar. Birbirlerini yiyor ve kendileri üzüyorlar. Neyseler o olduklar? için mi? Yoksa baÅŸka bir ÅŸeye dönüÅŸtükleri için mi?

I've always found wildlife very calming-- except when animals are eating each other, of course.

To an ignorant lady, she wants to look attractive and beautiful while some conscienceless men prey on her life.

Hobbes clearly proves that every creatureLives in a state of war by nature.

One can imagine that if humanity suddenly disappeared from the planet, the cat would shrug its shoulders, raise its tail, and return to its forest habitat, there to live as its ancestors have done for two million years, forever in search of something small, furry, and squeaky to play with.

Bluestar was gnawing a fat pigeon.

It's kill or be killed, hunt or starve. There's no room for weakness.

Lions, wolves, and vultures don't live together in herds, droves or flocks. Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his neighbor, and yet we herd together.

if you slip a rat's face and hide, Hannibal Lecter–style, over the snout of a non-favored prey item, a python will try to swallow it. (University of Alabama snake digestion expert Stephen Secor did this some years back to reenact a scene for National Geographic television. "Worked like a charm," he told me. "I can get a python to eat a beer bottle if I put a rat head on it.") For

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate.

All predators are limited in the kind and duration of suffering they can inflict and in the level of moral degradation of which they are capable. We are not.

Life is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive.

I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.)

Your personality. You know, most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep." He looked at his soup, then back to her. "But there's a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn't predation. It's protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock.

most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep." He looked at his soup, then back to her. "But there's a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn't predation. It's protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock.

When a spider sucks blood from a fly, he also works hard.

Doesn't matter," Maren said. "As long as the wolf enters the pen, who cares if it happens to eat the sheep?" Mac shook his head. "You can bet your ass the sheep cares.

one bird, usually the largest, will eventually win—but even the victor may be hurt by the fight. That means a third bird, an undamaged, canny bystander, can move in, opportunistically, and defeat the now-crippled victor. That is not at all a good deal for the first two birds