If your intent wasn’t to start a political flame war, what is the insight you’re providing here?

Every animal needs to survive and will do anything to get by including scavenging. That’s nature. At this very moment, millions of things are getting eaten alive. Welcome to the brutality of Mother Nature.

It’s not very charitable to say something deeply provocative and putting a note to defend. It only reflects your prejudice.

> Every animal needs to survive and will do anything to get by including scavenging.

Yea, and so do nations. The descriptors they used feel conformable describing both the nation and the mascot. It's not deeply provocative. It is a comparison that is interesting to read, because it describes how nations and animals can act similarly, but on difference scales.

Except nations are a completely made up concept by groups of humans, rather than a deep survival drive of the individual when pushed into a life or death scenario.

> Except nations are a completely made up concept by groups of humans

Every division of the universe into distinct constituents is a completely made up concept by groups of humans, including “humans” and “groups” thereof.

And what are individual humans but groups of cells trying to stave off entropy and survive just a bit longer?

Animals categorize as well, e.g. food or not, threatening or not.

Ospreys only scavenge if it's that or starve. Bald eagles scavenge by preference and will harass or kill other raptors, frequently including ospreys, rather than do the difficult and dangerous work of taking prey themselves.

As superpower mascots go, I think the eagle turned out to be pretty much perfect. Large, powerful, masters of their environment, noble from a distance. Up close, intelligent, optimally utilizing resources through scavenging, leaving nothing to waste and who love the opportunity to provide to their young ones and benefit other creatures through symbiosis.

One can spin it whatever which way.

in my opinion, intelligence is good or is not intelligence, its stupidity

but even letting this opinion aside, crows, magpies, and parrots can run loops around their "intelligence"

one can spin it in any way, but some ways are more shameless then others

They're still food for bald eagles.

Most powerful Western countries have used eagles as a symbol for over a thousand years, probably as a way of emulating the Roman Empire. The USA is hardly unique in this choice, but America did select a local eagle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquila_(Roman)

Egyptians had eagles too - e.g. the doorways to the tomb of Ramesses VI[0] has eagles painted[1]

[0]: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=NeiMEZa9d93&mls=1

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/pIiFdBu

Oh, I agree. I stopped respecting bald eagles after the first time I watched one harass an osprey into dropping the fish that she had actually worked to catch, in order to steal it and eat without going to any real effort. You don't need to see an osprey fishing but once to recognize that they work hard for a living, and I've seen that more times than I can count. Bald eagles are just big lazy thieving bullies and I haven't any use for them whatsoever - I don't even bother going for my camera any more when I see one.

You might as well just scratch the entire animal kingdom off your favorites list, you're not going to like it very much.

...he said, to a wildlife photographer.

I've seen one in the wild. Actually a beautiful animal.

I've seen many in the wild. There is no less visually interesting raptor on the planet, including vultures.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26571968.

Most all of mother nature's creatures are beautiful and deserve our respect, other than humans and wasps.