Swimming near whales isn’t unsafe at all. They’re not particularly aggressive, a lone human is too small to worry about, and we operate on completely different sections of the food chain.

This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there. Total accident.

Giraffes are dangerous right? I wouldn't want to be near one (or a Hippo, or an Ostrich, etc...)

Giraffes: not really dangerous. They graze on the tops of trees. I don't know much about it, which leads me to think that "giraffe danger" isn't a thing that gets talked about because it's not much of a thing.

Ostrich: They're not bright - the bird's eyeball is bigger than its brain. Last ostriches that I saw were a whole herd that came up to the fence with open mouths in anticipation of snacks, which was kinda cute. I guess a large male could get aggressive and the kick would be very nasty?

Hipppo: Very dangerous. They may be herbivorous but they're aggressive and territorial. They will flatten you if they're in a bad mood, and they're almost always in a bad mood. A hippo is 2 tons of bastard; and don't bother running, they're faster than you, on land or in water. Best to avoid them entirely.

I'm not joking, google "most dangerous large animal in Africa", read about hippos and how they kill more humans than any other African animal larger than a mosquito.

Ostriches get very territorial, can kick and will chase you. Not recommended to enter an area keeping ostriches.

Giraffes can kick lions hard enough to kill them, or at least injure them enough to prevent lions from returning to effective hunting before starving to death.

In my very limited experience (4 or 5 day safari in Kruger), Giraffes are pretty shy, but you really want to avoid startling them or otherwise putting them in a situation where they feel a need to defend themselves or their young.

Yeah but everyone thinks that lions are badass but they fail like 77% of their hunts so they're more like huge failures.

To be fair, what I'm usually hunting I don't eat, but I fail much more than 77% of the time. Probably most men do.

> To be fair, what I'm usually hunting I don't eat,

Well, you don't know what you're missing, and it might be part of your problem. Just say'n.

:)

But perhaps not when we actually depended on it, and had all the practice/experience that goes with that.

You are also probably hunting alone. Lions cooperate.

Do you have plans for this evening?

Too hot here right now.

Funnily enough, I am a Leo.

That’s a pretty ridiculous way to measure predator success. Hunting is a high risk high reward endeavor; a predator can fail to kill in most hunts and still be a very successful species.

For the record, it’s estimated that American deer hunters have a success rate between 6-13%, depending on the method and state. So lions are apparently more consistently successful hunters than humans with guns.

Yeah, I just couldn’t come up with something safer than that while also being big.

Elephants are mostly safe, except the male ones occasionally snap and hunt humans. So…

Remember Steve Irwin aka The Crocodile Man? The guy was picking up venomous snakes and wrestling with crocodiles. Then got killed by a "harmless" stingray that operated on a totally different section of the food chain...

Freak accidents happen. If you start drawing conclusions about the risk of various activities and animals from literally one incident, you’ll end up with all kinds of erroneous and silly opinions about what is dangerous and what is not.

Focusing in on Stingrays, the number of confirmed deaths by stingrays is maybe as high as 30 ever. Yes, Steve Irwin was one of them, but that doesn’t magically move the statistics, it just makes it more salient.

For comparison, coconuts kill 150 or so people per year. In a real, measurable way, taking a nap under a coconut tree is more dangerous than swimming with a stingray.

I forgot what this conversation was about, giraffes or something? Anyway, thanks for the tips, I'll make sure to stay away from coconut trees!

> Swimming near whales isn’t unsafe at all

Ha! "I was completely inside" What else needs to happen for you to think there might be an element of being unsafe? The man was swallowed by a whale, I don't care if whales are aggressive or not, if anything can swallow me whole I consider that a bit unsafe.

> This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there.

So you also consider hanging out near giraffes to be completely safe knowing they might accidentally step on you?

That's a very interesting definition of safety.

I think what you want to say is that animals like whales are friendly and we shouldn't harm them. Point taken.

> Ha! "I was completely inside" What else needs to happen for you to think there might be an element of being unsafe?

If a thing happens once, you decide it's categorically unsafe? Not a freak accident?

Must be rough for you to actually do anything, given the how many possibilities there are to accidentally die doing basically anything.

You call diving in the ocean and swimming near whales "basically anything"? Diving itself is pretty high risk and the fatality rate isn't as low as you might think. You comparing essential daily activity to recreational diving in whale infested waters as equals is a quite mind boggling.

Given how many "An X Year Old Person Died in This Intersection This Year" signs I pass just going about my day, I don't think the fatality rate of essential daily activity is as low as you might think.

You're confusing essential with recreational activity.

Assuming that every mile is essential is quite a leap.

These are mostly recreational walks.

If you think this stuff is bad wait till you hear about driving...

Diving is risky, whales are not.

This is like saying people who are attacked by squirrels or crows are to blame for going outside. Did you know there are squirrels and crows outside? Did you read that one article about that one person getting dive bombed by a crow? Obviously you have only yourself to blame if you go outside.

This is just an impressive level of victim blaming. Swallowed by a whale? Shouldn't have been in the ocean. It's bound to happen.

I don't know why everything has to involve a "victim" and "victim-blaming."

Swim in an ocean, walk outside, or keep breathing: there's a specific set of risks associated with every type of activity.

Ocean risks include drowning, hypothermia, strong currents, ocean-wave injuries, jellyfish, coral scrapes, Portuguese man o' wars, sea urchins, stingrays, sharks, whales, red/green/brown tides, and lightning.

I can agree that victim blaming isnt useful either in response to a victim, or in hindsight

I also agree that there is a level of personal responsibility that can’t be abstracted away to just the perpetrators

And finally, sometimes people just get eaten

> Swallowed by a whale?

How would you phrase it? "Eaten by a whale?" Is that less victim blame-y?

> Shouldn't have been in the ocean.

You can swim in the ocean just don't go near where the whales are, it might just help with not becoming a victim of whales' constant eating habit and as a result alleviate the tendency to make greatly exaggerated sarcastic remarks.

It’s not the “swallowed” part. It’s the “bound to happen” part.

He didn’t even know the whale was around.

In the ocean, the whales stick within the designated Whale Zones, marked by vast rings of starfish holding hands (??). When you cross the starfish, as Packard must have, then you’re clearly in the Zone. At that point you have no one to blame but yourself when you get accidentally swallowed.

Naah, that is the old way/conception of confinement, in modern, eco-zoo-friendly, countries whales are allowed to roam freely in the ocean, it is the swimmers that must wear high visibility vests with a sign "I am not a snack!" written in whalish.

I think you did a little too much LDS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgHxFNFWlZc&ab_channel=mathy...

June apparently is the whale watching season in Cape Cod [0]. At least I hope from now on after this "freak accident" people pay a bit more attention and don't confuse things that can swallow them whole with harmless little pets they can cuddle and respect nature and the wild life for what they are. A whale in San Diego Seaworld injures several trainers [1]. A whale kills its trainer [2].

[0] https://candleberryinn.com/whale-watching-brewster-ma/

[1] https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-seaworld-san-diego...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Brancheau#Death

I take personal offense. That's freak blaming!

Are you saying you'd get pleasure from being inside the mouth of a whale?

Just that Edward Bouverie Pusey was a Jonah-Denier Shamer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah#Scientific_speculation

>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings".