My Complaints With a Book I Read in Elementary School

    When I was in elementary school, I once read a book called Predator Showdown that discussed who would win if various animals fought each other. I recently found the book again and I wanted to complain about some of the matchups.

1. Grizzly Bear vs Mountain Lion. This is very obviously a victory for the grizzly bear, which, based on the size comparison the book gives, is several times as large as the mountain lion. Also, it’s a grizzly bear fighting a mountain lion. On another note, the stats the book gives say that the mountain lion has more attack than the grizzly bear, however that’s defined, which I don’t think makes any sense. Luckily, the outcome in the book is reasonable, as the bear wins.

2. Polar Bear vs Orca. This is another very unbalanced fight, where the orca is almost certainly winning, assuming they fight in an arctic environment with both ice and water, which is where they fight in the book, and the orca doesn’t start on ice. It is far larger than the polar bear, and even in the statistics given by the book, it surpasses or is equal to the polar bear in every category. 

1. Lion vs Spotted Hyena. This is the fight that annoys me the most, since it happens in nature, and an individual lion, especially a male lion, almost always beats an individual hyena. It’s only when a clan of hyenas fights one or a few lions that they stand a chance, and even that’s not certain. There’s a BBC video that I think illustrates my point well, where one lion fends off a clan of hyenas, which run away as soon as a second lion appears. Also, another thing that I really don’t like are the stats for the lion. They should be comparable to the tiger’s stats, which are also in the book, but for some reason, the lion’s are a lot worse. Maybe they needed to lower the lion’s stats to make the fight look fair. For example, the lion has an intelligence level of 2, according to the book, while the tiger has 6 and the jaguar has 7. That’s even lower than the score they gave for some of the bugs. This makes no sense considering they are all big cats with relatively similar levels of intelligence. The lion’s intelligence should arguably be even higher than the other cats, as they live in prides, and social animals are generally more intelligent.

    Jaehyun