As much as we may think we understand nature—especially after the enriching process of watching hours of Planet Earth on a hungover Sunday morning—it is always capable of surprising us. Take, for instance, a video of two majestic lynx, resplendent, elusive predators that they are, standing on the side of the road and screaming at each other with voices like angry children. Did you know lynx could sound like that? Well, you do now.
The CBC reports that the video was captured by a man named Ed Trist who, along with his girlfriend and daughter, was planning to catch minnows in remote Avery Lake, Ontario when he came across the pair of offline Grumpy Cats in a showdown.
Sort of a wilder version of the usual backyard cat brawls, the lynx initially look like very beautiful creatures engaged in a terrifying test of power. But then they make these sounds—sounds like a turkey trying to clear its throat; sounds like Mickey Mouse trying to go Super Saiyan; sounds like a pair of 5-year-old bodybuilders lifting a transport truck together.
Of course, to the lynx, their headbutting and shrieking was not funny at all. The CBC spoke to Assiniboine Park Zoo’s head of veterinary services, Chris Enright, to confirm that, yeah, it’s pretty rare for a human to catch this kind of thing happening and ask, too, what exactly the fight was about. As far as Enright could tell, it could be a bit of late-breeding season cat foreplay, two fluffy boys competing over a mate, or an unexpected run-in between the usually solitary creatures that resulted in a territory-protecting stand-off.
All of those possibilities are, no doubt, of great importance to the animals themselves. And that means we absolutely must not laugh when thinking of which lynx will win this not-at-all-hilarious showdown between a pair of adorable, stub-tailed goofballs with tufted ears and little cat goatees styled like the wilderness versions of Kerry King.
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