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April 23, 2007 / General

Up for the Darwin Award?

The UK Times Online has this story:

“Catapult boy is eaten after taunting crocodile in pen”

This just has to be up for a Darwin Award and is one of the stupidest things I’ve heard of someone doing who is not drunk (the kid was 9 so I’m making an assumption) or on drugs:

A schoolboy who climbed over a fence into a crocodile enclosure and taunted the animals with sticks and a catapult was dragged into the water and eaten . . . The children shot at the animals with catapults and beat them with sticks.

This is not a matter of knowing good from bad or right from wrong. This is a matter of ignoring every animal instinct that we have hardwired into our brain that tells us not to piss off a large-animal-that-can-eat-you unless you are high up in the branches of a tree and said large-animal-that-can-eat-you cannot climb up. I mean, this is stuff we figured out back in our pre-sapien days.

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2 Commments

  1. Sandro says:
    April 24, 2007 at 12:56 am

    I’m going to blame this on video games.

    I know, people blame all kinds of stupid stuff on video games, but this one probably has something to do with it. Video games train people to take risks, at an older age people can probably separate the risks associated with real life from those in video games (otherwise teen drivers would be even worse than they are)., but it’s not necessarily the case in a 9 year old.

    -Sandro

  2. LtL says:
    April 24, 2007 at 5:55 pm

    Which video game is it that has you hitting large, sharp-toothed, reptilian bad-asses that will eat you up without a second thought? 🙂

    Seriously though, I think there are probably lots of reasons why a kid might sneak into a crocodile pen, hit them, and throw things at them that have nothing to do with video games. I mean, all of those reasons are stupid to the nth degree, but I don’t see why the spectre of video games needs to be invoked. There are always a certain number of kids–and, let’s be honest here, adults too–who are just dumb enough to do something like this. I will grant you that I am treating this whole incident in a rather callous manner, but I don’t think video games short circuit the ability to tell dangerous from downright suicidal.

    Besides, we have no idea if this kid played video games – seems to me that if he and his friends were bored enough to do shit like this that they weren’t playing enough video games!

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Liminal

1: of or relating to a sensory threshold

2: barely perceptible

3: of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition

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