I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.
Very few other animals put energy (either directly or through abstractions like "money", "welfare", and "centralized monopolies on the legitimate use of violence") into sustaining members of the species/group that can no longer defend and feed themselves.
Humans in the developed world do this so well that very few of them are even required to defend and feed themselves without these abstractions.
The interesting thing is predator and prey both die when they get too slow. Not sure which side has a worse ending there! Then there's disease or even a simple scratch getting infected.
The world's a brutal place, probably all worlds. Because the very nature of evolution means species that exploit the most thrive the most. The obvious exception of things like a solar feeding plant isn't even an exception. The great oxidation event caused one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet - we evolved to thrive on oxygen but for most of the other life alive at the time it'd be like if plants today produced cyanide gas.
Even a slight injury to a predator can mean a slow death by starvation.
That's why videogame predators are so ridiculous. They keep coming after you, even when half their ass is blown away. A real predator will bugger off, as soon as it figures out that there might be a cost to attacking you. That's a big reason that many herbivore defenses seem kind of ridiculous, but work. They just need to make the predator nervous. Unless the predator is starving, it's likely to seek prey elsewhere.
There's also tremendous competition between predators.
Certain prey animals, especially gazelles, engage in dramatic leaps known as stotting. This behavior makes them highly visible to predators. One theory for why they do this is as a fitness signal to predators, who generally want to go for the easy pickin's, not the ones who present a challenge, and represent taking on more effort and risk of injury or just wasted energy.
Most lions also know not to prey on humans, for similar reasons: if a lion took a human, it risks being hunted down by other humans related to their prey. Most "man-eating" lions or tigers are starving or injured, therefore desperate, and lions are largely seen in Africa as pest creatures who take livestock.
(Hippopotamuses, by contrast, give absolutely no fucks and will kill you on sight. Africans consider the hippopotamus to be the fiercest animal by far, even more so than the lion.)
I knew about the stotting, but figured it was for mating. The predator thing makes sense.
Hippos also hang out around humans a lot, which increases the chances of unfortunate misunderstandings (almost always resolving in favor of the hippo).
I remember visiting a village in Uganda, on the banks of the Nile.
They had a couple of jettys, going out into the river, and between them, a series of poles and whatnot. It looked like a fish hatchery.
Didn't matter. It was a hippo sofa. There was this hippo, just lying in the water, right in the middle of one of the busiest areas of the village. We were told that it was a regular. Everyone just ignored it.
The jury is still out, as to whether it is worse to be in front of an angry hippo, or behind an incontinent one.
I think this is probably right. But does that mean that cancer, cardivascular disease, ALS, Parkinson, etc etc human diseases are incredibly rare among animals?
