{"id":11656,"date":"2025-07-15T12:48:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-15T12:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/11656\/"},"modified":"2025-07-15T12:48:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-15T12:48:03","slug":"can-tigers-orcas-and-other-animals-get-back-at-their-enemies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/11656\/","title":{"rendered":"Can tigers, orcas, and other animals get back at their enemies?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is part of\u00a0Revenge Week<\/a>, a series about how vengeance runs America, from the White House to cheating spouses to that bad boss who totally deserved it.<\/p>\n

A pod of killer whales disables the rudders of idling yachts<\/a> in the Strait of Gibraltar, sinking three ships. A herd of elephants tramples a woman collecting water at a river and returns to her village the following day to further desecrate her corpse<\/a>. An octopus becomes annoyed at an overhead light in a laboratory<\/a>, jets it with water, and causes a buildingwide power outage. All of these stories are true, and all of them made headlines because they innervate an eternal human curiosity: Do the animals among us\u2014the same ones that have been brutalized, subjugated, chased from their homes, and forced to live in a dystopia that is not of their own making\u2014ever take revenge?\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is a complicated question. Most scientists agree that animals do not possess the multifaceted emotional capacity to plot out a highly specific saga of retribution, designed to inflict maximum pain or humiliation, in matters of the heart or the ego. Given this baseline understanding, any exhibitions you and I might perceive as revenge are usually dampened by zoological experts, who often categorize these occurrences as mundane instincts rather than the violent acts of retribution humans excel in. Still, there are some folks who believe that there is more going on in the gray matter of animals than we realize. And perhaps that means that these animals want us to pay for our sins.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they\u2019re certainly pissed off,\u201d Philip Hoare, an author who has penned a number of books about whales and the unique relationship they have with humans, told me. In 2023 Hoare was among the first writers to document those famed orca attacks off the Iberian coast. The incident provoked the global imagination\u2014he collected the flabbergasted accounts of the victimized sea captains, who watched helplessly as the leviathans rammed into their vessels until they stalled out in the unforgiving deep. (The headlines wrote themselves: \u201cRevenge of the killer whales?<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

Whether or not it was a conscious act, those killer whales were nonetheless acting in their best interest. According to Hoare, nautical engines have a long history of bamboozling aquatic mammals\u2014they generate enough noise to disrupt migration patterns and sonar location, and there is some evidence that orca matrons are training their youth to interact with those yachts<\/a> more forcefully. But would Hoare call those actions revenge? Again, it\u2019s hard to say.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re on the raw end of an orca interaction, you realize that if anything, they\u2019re holding back,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they wanted to take us on, they could, and there is a sense that they must be socially aware of the differences we have made in their environments. So I don\u2019t discount the notion that they are capable of exacting whatever it is that revenge means to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barbara King, an anthropologist who studies the inner workings of animal minds, tends to agree with Hoare. \u201cI\u2019m very convinced that animal joy, and animal grief, is real,\u201d she said. She cites a profound episode in 2018 when an orca named Tahlequah embarked on a long, dirgeful \u201cgrief swim<\/a>.\u201d One of her calves had died, and for 17 days Tahlequah carried its lifeless body on her back as she cruised through the waters of Vancouver Island. This is grist for King\u2019s theory that animals are capable of experiencing sentimental resonance in a similar way to humans.<\/p>\n

Another example King cites in her work involves two ducks who were rescued from a foie gras factory in New York. They were bonded with each other, and when one of the ducks died a few years later, the other became consumed with sorrow. \u201cIt was incontestable that the second duck was feeling the loss of his friend,\u201d said King. \u201cHe would take himself to places around the sanctuary where they spent time together. He didn\u2019t interact with other beings. And he died relatively soon after. I\u2019m not saying grief was the sole cause, but I do think it was a contributory cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are weighty expressions from a being so often reduced to protein. And while King does not expect a Birds-style assault on the nation\u2019s foie gras producers, she is at least open to the idea that those emotions could add up to revenge. (After all, crows have been observed holding grudges<\/a> and attacking specific people they don\u2019t like.) Still, King thinks she needs to see more evidence.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnimals have physical expressions around a corpse or a body that we can interpret as happiness or sadness,\u201d she continued. \u201cBut with revenge, we need to grasp something about an animal\u2019s internal motivations. We see the outcome. We see a consequence that looks like revenge. But how can we really know? I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a frivolous question. The ambiguity is whether or not those animals can put together all of those capabilities with that motivation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It must be said that plenty of other thinkers in this field aren\u2019t willing to even remotely entertain these conclusions. I reached out to Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University who had his own dynamic encounter with an orca pod. They were hunting a seal left adrift on an iceberg, and at the very last moment\u2014when it appeared like dinner was about to be served\u2014an enterprising humpback whale swooped in to make the rescue. (It warded off the orcas and carried the seal on its back to safer waters.) That certainly looked like benevolence between creatures, at least to the untrained eye, but Pitman throws water on that theory. \u201cWhen killer whales attack, they get quite vocal. And often when that happens, humpbacks come in and break it up. And sometimes, what they might be attacking could be a related creature, like a humpback calf,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not altruism, it\u2019s inadvertent altruism.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what does Pitman think of those yacht attacks? \u201cRevenge is three-dimensional chess, and animals play checkers,\u201d he said. \u201cThose orcas in the eastern Atlantic disabling the rudders\u2014when you think about it, that\u2019s exactly how they attack larger whales. They ram them, quite often they break ribs, and often they grab onto the appendages. It\u2019s exactly what they\u2019re doing to these boats. It\u2019s normal behavior.<\/p>\n

\u201cHamlet does revenge, not humpbacks,\u201d he finished.<\/p>\n

There is only one tale in the canon of animal behavior that meets the criteria of true, cold-blooded revenge. In 1997 a poacher named Vladimir Markov was tracking a tiger in the eastern reaches of Russia. Markov shot and wounded the beast but couldn\u2019t secure a kill. Two days later, when Markov was returning to his cabin, that same tiger pounced on the unlucky woodsman. Markov, overmatched without his rifle, was dragged into the underbrush by the tiger, who ate him alive. It\u2019s a total biological outlier. The tiger internalized its quest for revenge\u2014kept it central in its cognition\u2014to the point of tracking the man\u2019s scent back to his home. \u201cIn living memory, there was no record of an incident like this, of a tiger hunting a human being,\u201d said John Vaillant, who wrote a book about the killing, in an interview with NPR<\/a>. \u201cThis was a highly unusual circumstance, completely driven by human behavior. If the tiger hadn\u2019t been shot, there would be no story.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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For as much as we might want to rationalize the actions of our fellow living creatures\u2014to confine them to patterns of behavior that reinforce our status as dominant life forms\u2014there might also be a carnivore lying in wait outside your doorstep, ready to settle a score. King notes that everyday people don\u2019t have a difficult time grasping this concept. Who hasn\u2019t watched a family dog snarl at a threat or had a disgruntled cat poop in their bed after being left alone for too long? She\u2019s more concerned about the titans of industry\u2014meat processors, pharmaceutical plants\u2014that fail to take the psychological welfare of their livestock into account.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to talk to the scientists who are keeping monkeys in biomedical laboratories,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to talk to the theme park owners who are still making orcas put on shows. Stuff like that is real,\u201d said King. \u201cWe need to invest much more funding and attention to animal emotion and tie it to animal well-being.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frankly, that\u2019s the only thing anyone can say for certain about interspecies revenge. Call it an innate evolutionary reflex or a brief glimpse into an unseen culture, but we simply (still) don\u2019t know much about how animals think. Hopefully we figure it out before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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