I cannot believe these people reacted to the bobcat in this fashion.
I think we’re doomed.
People can’t even appreciate even unambiguously natural predation.
Maybe this is why the quality of nature programming has dipped significantly.
When I was a kid, I used to watch those films were big cats killed things.
And they were wicked awesome.
I guess predators are no longer politically correct, even if they have been a major force in both regulating prey species and driving evolutionary selection pressures.
Bobcats have to eat, too!
Well… combined with the fact there’s a tendency among urban Americans who any wild predators should be removed… cougars, bears, bobcats, coyotes, snakes. Um… Yeah.
Poor woodchuck indeed.
I’m not sure that nature programs can be blamed. There’s a lot of good stuff out there both on TV and on the Internet. The problem is that culturally, it’s politically correct to deplore *any* violence. Moreover, more and more people have little or no experience with any real wildlife. They think that Fluffy going after the catnip mouse is “reality”. Their only connection to real wildlife is video. They see no reason why a bobcat won’t respond the same way as “Tabby” the kitty. It’s more important to get the video (and after all, it was successful. You found it, as no doubt others did too. The filmer now has something to talk about that would be far more entertaining than if they’d filmed from yards away ). And then there are the “wild kingdom” presenters — if people like Steve Allen etc can get “up close and personal”, most average people probably figure they can too.
Peggy Richter
Like the man who let his daughter go pet a beaver.
I think, people also think of lions and tigers and the really large predators when they think of “predation” and the natural food chain. They forget there’s also predators in their very own backyard or are ignorant to that. So people can’t appreciate this show of predation. I bet a lot of them think, “Hey this can’t happen here, not in my backyard!”
They’re vermin Fawlty!
WTH? They let the cat “torture” the groundhog before they “rescued” it. Now the vermin is dead and the cat is hungry. Is it not going to go find more food elsewhere? Perhaps it will find a box of cat chow. Maybe we should ban bobcats?
Maybe the bobcat then went and killed and ate these peoples’ free roaming housecat……