September 27th, 2007 by Jemaleddin Cole

Until you’ve seen this video of giraffes fight­ing, you’ll never real­ize how flex­i­ble those necks of theirs are:

After watch­ing that, I want to see a kung fu prac­ti­tioner demon­strate giraffe style.

[Via BB]

4 Responses to “Giraffe Fight”

1. Did you notice the strat­egy of the giraffe that was on the right side of the screen and in other shots closer to the camera? He seemed to favor trying to knock his oppo­nent down by taking out his knees with a series of blows. He even stag­gered his oppo­nent. If that giraffe would have fallen it would have been all over for him.

   — skank September 27th, 2007 at 8:00 am #

2. Yeah, that seems par­tic­u­larly cruel - taking out the knee would prob­a­bly crip­ple (and even­tu­ally kill) a giraffe.

   Do ani­mals often go for the death blow in mating/dominance con­tests like these?

   — Jemaleddin September 27th, 2007 at 8:38 am #

3. I don’t think that they usu­ally do unless some­thing gets out of hand. That’s why I thought it was a notable tactic–it’s a crip­pler, tan­ta­mount to a death sen­tence.

   It’s a little dif­fer­ent among car­ni­vores like lions. When one of the younger males thinks he can take the Alpha male they will go at it to death. The new top lion kills all the cubs which forces the females into heat, breeds with them and is assured that all his efforts go to sup­port his genetic descen­dants not the pre­vi­ous head lion’s.

   — skank September 27th, 2007 at 11:26 pm #

4. Maybe they’ve only been pre­tend­ing to be her­bi­vores all this time in order to lull us into a false sense of secu­rity?

   I for one wel­come our new ungu­late over­lords!

   — Jemaleddin September 28th, 2007 at 11:43 am #