If
animals, real or imaginary, feature heavily in your story, give this
a read.
In fiction, carnivores are frequently depicted as
incredibly vicious and as attacking every other living creature on
sight, whereas herbivores are depicted as gentle, benign, and
typically only hurt humans on accident if they panic, such as by
rearing or stampeding.
This is bullshit. Firstly, many
herbivores are incredibly vicious and are in fact far more likely to
attack a person just for being nearby. This especially goes for large
herd ungulates like rhinos, hippos, Cape buffalo, and moose. All of
these are highly aggressive to humans and in general. Bison are
considerably more chill than their African cousins, but they still
send tourists flying (sometimes to their graves) in Yellowstone due
to people trying to get too close and treat them like a petting zoo.
Deer, often imagined as the pinnacle of fearful and delicate, will
typically choose flight over fight…but should they choose to
fight, especially a male in rut or a female with a fawn, they can and
will kill a human being. Even a rabbit will do its best to fuck
someone up if they feel they are threatened.
Remember,
every animal will fight for its life with all its got, and to
herbivores, EVERYTHING is a potential threat. If an animal they’re
not familiar with as “safe” is nearby, they will assume it’s a
threat. There are some prey animals that are surprisingly
docile—videos I’ve seen of people interacting with a wild potoroo
and a Bosavi wooly rat show them to be incredibly chill, and the
quokka is famous for its lack of fear towards humans—but these are
the exception, not the rule.
Wild carnivores aren’t
cute pets just waiting for the right special animal-loving
protagonist to take them home, but they aren’t these
constantly-aggressive, constantly-angry, constantly-ravenous monsters
either that so much media makes out. They
most certainly will hunt when they’re hungry, and in the rare
instance they decide to make a meal of a human, that human is indeed
fucked (it’s hilarious to me how many people think they could fight
off a lion, tiger, etc.) but unless it’s truly starving and
desperate* most of them are not going to make a point of pursuing a
potential meal, human or otherwise, to the exclusion of all else.
Especially not if there’s other options around. Why expend all
these energy chasing after the protagonists if there’s literally
anything else they could catch and eat instead?
And why do so many of
these monster-animals seem so interested in catching and killing the
protagonists, but not in actually eating them; a ridiculous number of
predators in fiction will straight-up leave the body of a person they
JUST killed behind in order to catch another human. Why? This makes
no sense, I don’t care if it’s a fictional animal like a dragon
or manticore, it’s not conducive to survival.
Unless this animal is
MEANT to have an actual sentient grudge (which CAN happen, a man in
Russia once shot a tiger and took its kill; the tiger waited for him
in his cabin when he returned) do away with the Super Persistent
Predator trope. Especially when it’s an animal like a great
white shark,
whose preferred prey not
only
isn’t humans,
we’re actually downright nasty to them because we don’t have the
fat content of the seals and sea lions they typically eat (most great
white “attacks” are just them checking us out or mistaking us for
a delicious sea mammal)
There
are exceptions to this rant, though most are small creatures. For
instance, stoats do engage in “surplus killing” and stockpile the
bodies, and shrews are very aggressive little predators due to having
incredibly fast metabolisms that mean they basically have to eat all
the time to stay alive. And, yes, there are some large ones; the
tiger shark will eat anything, bull sharks are pretty bad to be
around, and the polar bear has actively hunted humans when the
opportunity presents itself.
But
as with the “super gentle chill wild herbivore that is basically
domesticated” they are the exceptions. And
I’m sure you know of other exceptions; the fact they are
“exceptions” in the first place means it’s NOT the norm.
If there’s a reason the animals in your story are hyper-aggressive and persistent to a point they seem almost consciously evil, that’s fine—genetically engineered that way, for instance—but have there be a REASON. It’s seldom the default in nature.
Think of it
this way: You’d fight a lot harder to save your life than you would
to get a hamburger (unless saving your life required that hamburger). Consider that when you write real animals, and
when you craft fictional ones.
(*
Which admittedly most real life man-eaters are; most large mammals
that turn to actively hunting humans have been sick, elderly, or
injured in such a way they can’t pursue their normal prey. But in
fiction, the animals that are absurdly focused on eating humans alone
always seem in perfect health and are seldom revealed as otherwise,
or even having a reason at all. It’s just presented as their
default behavior. Which
it is not. That’s the point of this rant.)
