Maybe that lion will go tell the other lions that they were wrong... that maybe humans aren't such easy prey after all.
Maybe the word'll get around to bears, too.
(Let's face it --through the anthropomorphism shown in all those kids' cartoons and Diznee movies, everybody knows these critters can talk to each other, right?)
Well........ On a slightly tangential note to the thread, I've got an anecdote that still leads me to ponder that statement.
I had a place in the country on 10 acres with a really big barn. I'm not a rancher or farmer so it didn't get used like a barn might be expected. But I did keep things like riding mower, other yard tools/stuff and an occasional vehicle in there. The barn had no front doors. It seemed like all of the pigeons in the county really liked my barn and I couldn't harass them enough to chase them away. My barn had pigeon poop by the ton. There wasn't anything in there that wasn't splattered and streaked with it. Yuck!
"Out, out damned pigeons!"
Okay, I'd make a big, foolish fuss and they'd scatter and sometimes even fly away. As soon as I left, they'd come back. I hated those damned birds.
I couldn't afford, and didn't want to buy actual barn doors for that huge opening, so I pretty well closed it off with the kind of plastic mesh you put on your trees to keep birds from the fruit.
That made it difficult, but not impossible for the more determined pigeons to get in. Every so often I'd go out there with my single shot .22 with CB caps and shoot whatever pigeon had managed to get in. The barn cat liked that immensely. Seemed warm pigeon carcass was a real delicacy for her.
But killing a pigeon now and then didn't stop them from continuously trying to get in, with annoying success at that.
Then one day I found three of them in there. Off I went and fetched the .22.
My first shot hit one and knocked it down from the rafters but didn't kill it. I worked the bolt and ejected the empty and inserted another round. In doing so I had to take my eyes off the pigeons. The two that weren't hit had hastily beat wings back out the way they got in. The one I did hit, I assumed also made an escape because I never did find it. I also figure the cat didn't get it because she
always left me a pile of pigeon feathers and lips (don't ask me why she wouldn't eat the lips) in the middle of the barn where she liked to chow down.
Now here's the strange part. After years of putting up with the pests, I never had another pigeon in that barn again. EVER. I never saw another pigeon on my property. The nearest neighbor lived about a thousand feet from me and I think he inherited the pigeon swarm in his barn, but they
never came back to mine.
This was the only time I had shot pigeons in the barn and had any witnesses (pigeon witnesses, that is) live to "tell" about it.
So.... can those critters talk to each other?
Gotta say, that's a mighty weird coincidence if not.
