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What you have described is typical pack animal behavior, but (1) how many humans would "run on and on, streaming its guts out the wound"? and (2) how does this apply to large carnivores like bears, lions and tigers, who can kill or incapicitate instantly and effectively?

Most carnivores take it as they can and will feed on living animals as long as the animal is not preventing them from doing so. There are numerous cases of wolves feeding on moose that are stuck in snow drifts.

As for cats, their behavior seems to be a bit different, especially bobcat and mountain lion {tigers, too?} who hunt alone and often cache their prey before feeding. We have even observed that exact behavior here on the ranch and set up a game camera to document it. Lion behavior here often involves almost immediate caching and sometimes multiple carcasses can be found in a close area. Thus, the animal must more or less be dead to allow caching. But do lion wait for a "coroner's report" before caching? I don't think so, but if there is any resistance they may back off, continue to clench down on the throat, etc. I have observed a bobcat killing a medium sized doe, doing just the latter, holding it down by the throat as the deer struggled. It took a lot of time and the bobcat was exhausted. Both were.

The nature of lion attack is different than wolves, too, and they often attack forward of the shoulders as coyotes commonly do on sheep as well. None of this is guaranteed, tho, as friends have had horses attacked by lion that got them on the back, hind quarters, etc. Note...the horses lived as they were botched attacks. Again, this is not etched in stone, as wolves attack the face, rip off noses, tear out tongues and sometimes such injured prey escapes to die a lingering and horrific death. Cattle here have been rounded up missing tails, crippled in the hind quarters, etc.

Which is another issue.

Carnivores are not "efficient", "clean", or even in many cases, anthropomorphically-speaking, "skillful" in their attacks. The modern view of carnivores has been wholly hijacked by the current pipedream notion of their being "sanitizers" or even "improvers" of nature. They do what they do, as they can do it. Sort of like those who say, "In a gunfight, I'll rely on 'shot placement'", only to find it is hard to "place" a shot on a fellow who doesn't want to be shot, and so goes the career of the game killer, who grabs as grab can and makes many mistakes along the way.

Bear are sheer death on elk and deer, but mostly on calves and fawns, where they can and have devastated populations as was documented in the Lochsa region of Idaho. The young of course are no big deal to kill, and actually more or less in the course of the attack the fawn dies, but is it the intent of the bear to kill it? No, it is the intent of the bear to get the meat into its belly.

My experience with carnivores is that they don't start at the toes and eat up, but, as you say, go for the "soft underbelly" and the guts. How does this apply to the case in point?

Actually, I do not know how it would apply because like you, I find the whole telephoning thing to be quite bizarre. Having said that, who knows, maybe it happened just as the article says. These things are impossible to say. Maybe the bear went back and forth and crippled her and all she had was her phone?

I often find news reporting to be about as close to fiction and fraud as a tale can get, and even if the event actually happened, news often alters the details so much it might as well be make believe. I'm not saying that is what is going on here, only commenting that our society seems wholly insane and wedded to their cell phones if a girl believes by instinct that getting to the phone is somehow going to save her from an imminent and/or ongoing attack. The World According to XBox...?

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What are the Rosary, the Cross or the Crucifix other than tools to help maintain the fortress of our faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?

Edited by 9.3x57 (05/09/11 10:47 PM)

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