China's Underage Gymnasts

I recently started watching Planet Earth, having heard reviews ranging from "It's great" to "After you watch it you'll sprint outside frothing at the mouth and have rabid sex with the dirt". So far, my opinion probably falls somewhere between the two, so I guess you could say that I want to feel up nature. It's definitely an impressive undertaking, man. The creators spared no expense, using state-of-the-art technologies to show us rarely-seen creatures and locales that other state-of-the-art technologies are pushing toward extinction. And David Attenborough's narration could make a backalley stabbing instigated by a "Yo mama" joke seem dignified and poetic.

I always feel weird about watching nature documentaries, though, because it turns out that animals often kill each other, and I never know who to root for. And the documentarians don't make it any easier with this popular formula:

1. Introduce animals as they frolic/eat/chill.
2. Segue to that animal's predator by cuing dramatic music and saying something about how life isn't all just fun and games for the animal.
3. Show the inevitable clash between the animal and its predator.

In cases like these, the primacy effect dictates that I'm going to root for the prey. Plus, I don't particularly like seeing things die. But then it's like, what do I expect the predator to do? They've gotta eat, man. They've gotta feed their families and mistresses, just like the rest of us. And what they do is necessary, even if I don't like it, not unlike bar bouncers or Rush Limbaugh's lawyers. So what the fuck do I do? I'm an American, and I wasn't brought up to watch things without a rooting interest. And fucking David Attenborough never helps me out by playing favorites. If he would just tell me that macaques are homophobic, or that golden eagles beat their wives, I wouldn't have a headache at the end of each confrontation.

Sometimes, though, one animal is so much cooler than the other one that I can wholeheartedly root for an outcome. Who wouldn't want to see a badass endangered snow leopard make an acrobatic kill on seemingly impossible-to-navigate mountain terrain? Unless you are a markhor enthusiast, this one is easy.

But if the snow leopard fails, it doesn't die on the spot - unless something goes super-wrong, it lives to hunt another day. So while I rooted for it, there was no real sense of urgency. It's only when the animal being hunted is undeniably cooler than its predator that shit gets intense. Cue the otters.

Otters are fucking awesome. I've always thought so. When I saw otters come up on the screen, I smiled a stupid smile, because otters are like little furry hits of Ecstasy without the spinal fluid issues and potential for rape. Basically if you don't like otters, I hope you get eaten by a snow leopard. So imagine my distress when Attenborough introduced the crocodile*. My memory isn't the best, but here is a paraphrased version of events:

Me: (smiling about otters)
Attenborough: (Britishly, accompanied by suddenly ominous music) Check out this crocodile. It is big and scary.
Me: Oh no.
Attenborough: Crocodiles eat otters.
Me: No!
Attenborough: A single otter is no match for a crocodile.
Me: (hoarsely, crazily) NO! Goddamn it, no! Run, you fucking otters! Attenborough, do something! Why won't you do something!

In retrospect, I should have seen the foreshadowing when he said "a single otter". But then my mind wouldn't have been so otterly (fucking yeah, I did.) blown when the otters got together and GANGED UP ON A GODDAMN CROCODILE. A bunch of cute little otters teamed up and antagonized a murderous dinosaur thing until it got confused and ran away. Usually when you root for the prospective prey the best you can hope for is that they live. But these otters basically got together and pantsed the school bully. Just when I thought otters couldn't get any cooler, by Darwin's balls they did it. If the otters were fat kids and the crocodile were Ben Stiller, this would be the movie Heavyweights.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, except to say that nature is cool.

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*Some might contend that crocodiles are also cool, but they don't do much for me - certainly not as much as otters. Dictionary.com has my back on this one, as the third definition of "crocodilian" is "hypocritical; insincere". Otters are nothing if not sincere. I think "otterian" should eventually come to mean: 1. sincere; 2. gregarious; 3. lovable 4. better than a crocodile.

UPDATE: Just after writing this post, I realized that the otter video is probably on YouTube. Sure enough, it is. This renders moot my (inaccurate) paraphrasing of Attenborough, but oh well. Here ya go: