Hint: If you are on vacation and arrive at a beach where NOBODY is in the water and there is flag flying WITH A SHARK on it, you might want to pause and consider the possible implications of those two facts before diving in.
Likewise if you are hiking in a tropical jungle and stumble on a snake, which you then correctly identify as venomous, and you take note that you are a mere two feet from it, DON'T MESS WITH IT!
Seriously. I love nature. But people need to show a modicum of respect when moving outside of their normal habitat and entering the wild (oceans jungles, woods etc.). This is not your home. Wild animals live there. You are in their home and need to behave accordingly. Human beings have no natural predators. There is no living creature that has a natural inclination to eat us. But yes, there are animals that are quite capable of severely injuring people. The vast majority of serious injuries or fatalities inflicted on humans by wild animals are the consequence of stupidity or bad luck (like accidentally stepping on a snake). People who ignore warnings of potentially dangerous wildlife and or go out of their way to provoke them just really tick me off. (I cleaned the language up a bit there.) I don't want to say I was rooting for the shark or the snake, But you can put me down as supporting two candidates for Honorable Mention in the Darwin Awards.
7 comments:
And that, Ladies and Germs, is natural selection playing itself out.
To be candid, confronting a poisonous snake in, say central America, on a forest trail is a very disorienting experience. It's easy to make bad decisions in that kind of case.
Don't you have to actually die to be considered for the Darwin Awards?
Having said that, I'm in for making exceptions in both of these cases.
David,
Yes to get the actual award you need to die. Hence the Honorable Mention. But they both get an 'A' for effort.
Concur. On the philosophical side, I can't figure out if these two demonstrate that Darwin got it exactly right (for obvious reasons) or that Darwin was completely full of it (because, lets face it, they lived, and how did they make it this far?). One could argue their survival can only be explained by divine intervention.
I grew up in Oregon where there were always stories of people dying for stupid reasons. Usually they were mountain climbing or camping right as winter was about to surprise us and they'd be told by the locals, but there they went.
Then again, what do you expect from a culture to celebrates idiot-saints like Into the Wild?
To be candid, confronting a poisonous snake in, say central America, on a forest trail is a very disorienting experience. It's easy to make bad decisions in that kind of case.
That's why a million years of evolution have conditioned the default response in those of us with a bit more archaic memory to leave snakes the eff alone.
Post a Comment