I stole this from somewhere:
We are the only superpredator known to exist. Our best friends are apex predators we allow to live in our homes and treat like children, and we are sufficiently skilled at predation that we have allowed them to give up hunting for survival.
We accidentally killed enough of the biomass on the planet that we are now in the Anthropocene era, an era of earths history that marks post-humanity in geological terms. We are an extinction event significant enough that we will be measurable in millions of years even if we all died tomorrow.
We are the only creature known that engages in group play fighting. Other animals play fight, but not in teams. This allowed us to develop tactics, strategy, and so on, and was instrumental in hunting and eventually war.
We are sufficiently deadly that in order for something to pose a credible threat to us, we have to make it up and give it powers that don’t exist in reality. And even then, most of the time, we still win.
Orcas train in packs, and have been observed passing learned behavioral traits onto others.
I can only hope they one day rise out of the sea to destroy us all.
I believe in nature, humans are regarded as persistence hunters. Which is to say we have incredible stamina and perseverance while hunting. Other creatures can run faster than us, but only for short stints, relatively speaking, as long as we can keep track of them, we can continue to pursue prey for hours or days without significant external assistance (food, water, rest, help from others, etc).
So regardless of what we may be trying to kill, if we continue to keep our focus on it, we can absolutely find and kill it, given a long enough timeframe.
This also explains marathons, quite frankly. I don’t see too many animals just running for dozens of kilometers without a reason to do so. Many can’t run that far, and those that could, generally never would… Unless they’re running from us, I suppose.
Something like the cheetah, is very very fast in short duration, but after a few minutes of running at full speed, it’s thermal regulation tends to fail and it is biologically required to stop or it will overheat and die.
Add to that our intellectual capacity for planning, the creation of tools to assist us, strategy, teamwork, and all the things that are associated with intelligence and we’re basically a killing machine, if we choose to be…
Amazingly, we’re also the only species that we know to exist that feels bad about eating our prey. I’ve never seen a lion have an existential breakdown after killing off a gazelle so it can eat, yet there’s entire subcultures of people who refuse to cause any harm to their food. Have you people not understood the “circle of life”? Did you not watch the lion king?
Whatever. Go live your life. Weirdo.
The problem with eating meat is not the eating meat. I don’t give a fuck if someone eats meat from an animal that hasn’t suffered, that was free and in its natural habitat. I don’t know if I would myself because after 15 years of not eating meat I don’t think I’d still like it, but it’s not unethical. The problem is the untold amount of widespread suffering and cruelty of beings with emotions and sentience and attachments and capacity for both physical and emotional pain that is industrial livestock farming.
The climate costs of feeding animals for us to eat do make eating meat inherently harmful to the planet.
The land requirements for our current animal agricultural production is the same size as North American. That’s not sustainable. I say that as someone whose never gone a day without eating meat.
Been reading the Deathworlders book(s). Basically a FOSS series of novels. Sounds like it would devolve into bad fan fiction. 1,500 pages in and I’m still diggin’ it.
Humans come from a “level 12” planet. Sapience isn’t thought able to evolve on a level 10, too dangerous. Too serious on every front; Gravity, weather, temperature extremes, microorganisms, parasites, predators, radiation exposure, all that.
First chapter is a human on a space station trying to get processed through emigration when the baddest-ass aliens of all lock on and board. He beats one to death with its own arm. Basically like a chimp in a preschool of giant, soft children.
Gets hilarious when the same guy is finally back home bartending and, as Earth watches in awe, those same aliens invade a Canadian hockey game.
Epubs and such are readily available.
