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  • 2018-06-09 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Mother Deer Sacrifice Herself to Cheetahs to Save Her Fawns? (en)
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  • Tales about animals exhibiting human (or human-like) behavior have long been the subject of myths and legends, and one form of this narrative especially resonates with modern readers: the notion that an animal would — like most human mothers — knowingly and willingly sacrifice her own life to protect her children. Many animals will of course engage in defensive posturing and even aggressively attack a much larger predator in order to defend their broods. But we seem especially drawn to accounts (such as this one) that posit a mother animal's going beyond mere instinctive reaction and reasoning out (and then engaging upon) a course of action she knows will spell her end but will preserve the lives of her offspring. One example of this type of narrative is the following account, which holds that a mother deer (actually an impala) deliberately allowed herself to be caught by cheetahs in order to allow her two fawns a chance to escape a similar fate: The image seen here is one of a series of pictures (titled The Stranglehold) taken by photographer Alison Buttigieg in Kenya in 2013, documenting the capture of an impala by a group of cheetahs. But as Alison explained in her backstory to the set of photographs, what she captured on camera was not a mother impala's sacrificing herself to protect her offspring. In fact, the real story was nearly the inverse of that concept -- these photographs show a mother cheetah attempting to teach her cubs how to kill prey, then eventually dispatching a captured impala when her inexperienced cubs proved they weren't yet up to the task of strangling it themselves: As Alison noted, it's unusual how calm the impala is throughout its ordeal, as well as how the doomed animal exhibited a seeming lack of interest in self-preservation, but those behaviors had nothing to do with an effort on the part of the impala to allow her fawns a chance to escape a similar fate. Other versions of this tale maintain that Ms. Buttigieg fell into depression after snapping the photograph, a claim she refuted in a statement to DNA (India), as well as in her own Facebook post: (en)
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