Nature Is Metal
Fortune Favors The Bold
📽 by @russ_wildlife
We humans cling to certain animals, elevating them in our hearts above the rest. From my own experiences, three species - dogs, whales, and elephants - spark the fiercest sorrow when they perish in the wild. Dogs, bound to us through millennia, are family; their devotion, bred into their genes, makes their loss feel like a knife to the soul. Whales, like humpbacks or blues, glide through oceans with a grace that seems eternal, their haunting songs evidence of their perceived omnipresence. When they’re hunted or stranded, we ache for these titans.
Elephants carry a unique weight. Their minds rival ours, with memories that span decades. A gestation period of 23 months - nearly two years - yields a 200-pound calf, born into a herd woven by matriarchal bonds. When that calf is ripped away to nourish a bandit like a lion or hyena, it’s a gut-punch, a theft of years of care.
But nature will never heed our tears. It’s a massive fucking swirl of chaos and luck. We like to create our hierarchies, slotting animals into neat boxes, saying this one’s too noble to fall. Yet, the wild laughs at our charts. A leopard sees no wisdom in an elephant, only flesh to sate its hunger. An orca cares not for a whale’s grandeur, only its meat. Survival boils down to one brutal edict: be faster or smarter than what’s trying to end you, be it the jaws of a ravenous hunter or the specter of failure that haunts every predator in the form of devastating hunger.
No one animal is sacred. There are no untouchables, no favorites or underlings. Only the lucky and the unlucky, dancing on a knife’s edge. A missed step can mean certain death - whether you’re the hunted or the hunter. Predators face their own doom: a few failed hunts can spiral into starvation quickly, turning the pursuer into the pursued. Our pleas, our love for these creatures, changes nothing. The wild is a relentless lottery, where every soul, revered or ignored, draws the same unforgiving odds: outrun, outwit, or into the grinder you go.
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