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And orcas don't just eat baby lions. A group will go up, grab a single baby and toss it around like they're playing a game. The traumatized sea lion cries in vain for it's mother but the orcas will just keep tossing it up and whacking it for a few hours before eating it. They delibrately torture and toy with it.Then of course there's no way one baby sea lion can satisfy a pod of hungry whales so they go back and do it again.
It just seems like torture, but this is primarily something done to exhaust their prey in order to make sure it's safe for them to eat it. There is no point in risking injuries just because you want a clean kill. Granted, sea lions do not pose a serious threat in regard to injuries but this sort of training is very useful when they have to take down a young blue whale, for example.
Orcas don't exactly toss blue whales into the air, however. This sort of "play" seems to be performed only on young seals/sea lions.
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Beside, torture would imply that the orca would know that they are causing pain to another creature and that it would be their primary purpose for doing it (in order to intimidate, to coerce, to punish, to torment, etc). Compared to countless of proven cases of torture that has occurred in human history, I don't think it's the case.
Again, tossing prey into the air happens mostly for young sea lions. Not bigger prey. It may not be to the degree of torture humans have performed, but if orcas have intelligence (which they do) they can recognize that the cries of a young pup are out of psycological and physical pain.
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It's not just kill what you need to eat and respect your prey thing folks accuse humans of not doing. It's torture. So why should humans not be able to torture livestock when animals do it their prey?
Simply because humans have no reason to do such thing. Games for animals are a training process. When a baby jaguar is given a live prey, he will "play with it" and try to strike the right way to make his prey fall on the ground or try to choke it properly. The younger they are the longer the prey suffer but as they get better, there is no longer any of such "games" (except to train the next generation).
What purpose would humans have to torture a cow?[/quote]
When a male lion slaughters the cubs of his newly conquered pride, he doesn't do it to learn how to hunt. It's to bring the females in heat and inimidate them, to impress through fear and loss. Lions, leopards and hyenas will slaughter the young of each other plus that of cheetahs. This isn't too learn how to hunt either. Mostly it's too eliminate competition, but they also seem to enjoy it too. African wild dogs will gang up and tear their baby sibilings limb from limb for pure fun. Domestic animals, dogs and cats, don't need to learn how to hunt. But they still kill mice and other things for fun.
When humans torture cows it's for the same reason African wild dogs do. It's fun. When they torture them in rodeos, it's to impress. It's also an outlet for anger. Maybe there's also the instinct that hasn't yet faded out from the times when we did kill because we had to. As I said, dogs and cats do the same.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong. All I'm saying is that humans are animals too. People seem to have this idea stuck in their heads that animals are saints who kill only because they have to and humans are the imbodiment of chaos or something. Animals are not pure, they are not innocent. Neither are humans. Humans have also done good for other animals. We build zoos and national wildlife parks to hold on to the species that are fading away. From my knowledge, no other species of animal tries to save others. If cheetahs suddenly went extinct, lions really wouldn't give a damn. Neither would elephants, dung beetles, or vultures.
The human race is not evil. Maybe we have more extreme issues, but we are not responsible for all the world's problems(yet we still try to solve them anyway), and animals are not any more pure than we are.
