Whence herbivores are killed by predators it cannot always be a scene picked from a National Geography wildlife serial. Some of the moments could be heart-wrenching, agonizing, and strikingly painful experiences. The pathos such incidents generate is difficult to contain what with emotions streaking through the over-awed mind.
While tigers and leopards are efficient hunting machines causing swift death, predators like the wild dog and jackals are not. The charge is often a series of fumbled attacks that end up mauling and scaring the terrified prey. The resultant attacks lead to torture misery and painful death sometimes taking a long time.
I observed a jackal attack on two occasions on a tiger safari in April. The first one was a single jackal in a meadow that managed to pick out the flesh from the cheeks and eyes of a terrified fawn. Agonized to the extreme the helpless fawn bleeding and weakened stood up its ground but to no avail. In a series of charges, the jackal could succeed in an awkward kill as other deer watched haplessly.
The scene was heart-wrenching many in the crowd had closed their eyes, and some simply left the scene. The end was agonizingly slow but the predator succeeded in availing food.
The second incidence was at the edge of the forest where two jackals had managed to rip open the stomach cavity, and the entrails were hanging loose. It was indeed a gory event and certainly not for the weak hearts. The animal eventually succumbed and became a meal for the jackals followed by crows and vultures. All was over in a short time.
Though the events are described here as gory this is the way nature works. In almost all the events the death is painfully slow there is an inbuilt death mechanism amongst the prey but sometimes it does not work.
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Jackals by nature are omnivorous animals but whence there is a preponderance of prey they develop the instinct and capability to kill the small ones.
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