Pod of killer whales attacks...

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"Pod of killer whales attacks and sinks 50-foot yacht in Strait of Gibraltar"

That is absolutely wonderful OMG! I love to see nature fighting back

Eventually someone's going to respond with deadly force to the whales attacking their vessel and I won't blame them at all.

I don't think that would be wise.

Its a strange recent fad among orcas around the Iberian peninsula. Attacking boats.

A mature alpha female got angry at some humans in a boat (maybe she was accidently injured, or maybe they were rogue poachers or what)and she seems to have a set a bad example to the teenage orcas who joined in on the fad of attacking small boats.Bumping the hulls. Tearing the rudders off. This is the first actual sinking Ive heard of.

Kinda the opposite of the "law of the tongue" in a region of coastal Australia in the 19th century. Orcas and human fishermen would cooperate in attacking big whales- the orcas would locate ...and the humans kill...so the humans would take the whale carcasses but leave the tongues for the orcas to devour. Seems to have started thousands of years before between the orcas and the Aboriginies of the same area. And the orcas just recruited the later White settlers into it.

It don't think it's wise for the whales, but the wisest course of action isn't always the one that occurs.

The moment they either hurt someone or make someone genuinely fear for their lives there's going to be a response from whatever government is responsible and it will likely involve dead or displaced whales.

I don't think it's wise for the humans, as from what I have heard it's unlikely the orca are trying to harm the people on board. If people on boats kill one of the orcas then they may actually get more aggressive to people themselves it would be best to find non-lethal ways to deal with this.

Their intent doesn't really matter; but also, getting more aggressive, no matter the reason, would be terrible judgment. The moment they either hurt someone or make people genuinely fear for their lives there's going to be a response from whatever government is responsible and it will likely involve dead or displaced whales, even if there's no vindictive intent behind the response (the process of relocating them will place significant stress on them).

It's likely that any effective non-lethal intervention will be a much larger, more drastic action than the emergency killing of an individual animal; although the larger, more drastic sort of intervention doesn't require things to escalate to that point before it occurs.

Once either Spain or the UK (depending on who's waters) feels intervention has become required, they'll respond in a manner that ends the threat to boaters. There's a good chance that will include denial of access to the waters in question, relocation, destruction of the problem animals or some mixture of the above. That's going to be a much larger impact than an individual getting killed.

People are gonna people and it tends to go poorly for other varieties of animal when they get our attention like this. We roll thousands deep and generally don't respond well to being threatened. I understood you were implying that humans lacked wisdom, but looking at the big picture and what we both know about humans, it's the whales that are failing to understand the problem they might be asking for.

Harassing humans is a dangerous game, especially if it's just for the lulz.

We're more of a threat to them than they are to us. And I don't think sinking of a yacht warrants killing off orca. Its not the same as having to shoot a problem bear that has attacked and killed people. Killing an orca for sinking a yacht would be like killing a bear for destroying a trash can. I admit may be baised because I have a soft spot for the meat eating animals and they are important for the ecosystem.

So you understand why f*****g with us is a bad idea.




I'd say a yacht is much more fairly compared to a trailer home. These attacks are much more analogous to a bear attacking a trailer and we'd absolutely murk a bear for that, if the homeowner wasn't calling to report a dead bear.

You seem to be worried about fair when fair will not be a consideration once they're considered a threat to human life. They'll be given the exact same seat at the table as problem bears receive when discussing how to best deal with them.

The major difference between bears and orcas being the pod, if this has become a learned behaviour the response will likely involve all problem animals rather than an individual.

Yes. I would like to see a de escalation of tensions between the two species!