Considering tigers may have a mental capacity for revenge, is it more accurate to call them vengeful or spiteful when wronged?
Considering tigers may have a mental capacity for revenge, is it more accurate to call them vengeful or spiteful when wronged?
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You mean between spiteful and vengeful? I'd go for spite, unless we are talking about a fictional tiger that really put some long careful planning to work just to get revenge.
Fair, and what I had in mind was a case of an actual tiger that got severely wounded by a human, with said human stealing its food, and the tiger responding by killing said human (and maybe his dog), but not before camping out at his lodging and waiting for him to return there. Almost like vengeful stalking behavior in particularly creepy humans, but probably a lot more mentally simple for the tiger.
So yeah, I could see spite being a better description.
That's an interesting story. Yeah I would say it's a lot mentally simpler for the tiger starting because there are no morals or social norms to weigh. Second, revenge often has an element of justice and/or cruelty between humans: you want to make the other person suffer, make them feel the same or worse. There's a theory of mind there, which in the tiger's case it's not obvious. For the tiger, there's a threat that needs to be dealt with, period.
The stalking behaviour is just natural for cats. Seeing how domestic cats are so well acquainted with their territory that they know where to sit and wait for prey to show up, and they know where to look for other trespassing cats, I'm not surprised the tiger already knew about the human, he just probably underestimated it.
Yeah, probably less “revenge” in a human sense, and more “treating a tiger that badly drives you way up on the tiger’s ‘prey priority list’”
Like that elephant that attacked a person, they died, then the elephant came back to stomp her again during the funeral gatherIng. Some serious planning skills.