Zigged when it should have zagged.
Out in the wild, a wrong step or wrong turn could be the difference between life and death. There are no breaks in the action out in nature, and this rabbit found that out the hard way. As it turns out, a hare’s go-to escape method isn’t always 100% effective.
If rabbits sense that a predator is nearby, their first instinct is to freeze in an attempt to blend in with the landscape. They’ll try to do this first, and if the threat continues to charge towards them, rabbits will then move on to plan B.
What’s plan B, you might be asking? The hares try to utilize the speed in which they are famously known for (everyone has read ‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ right?). Rabbits can run at speeds of 20 to 25 miles per hour, and with their size, they should be able to quickly sprint through tight spaces and lose their pursuers.
However, if a predator manages to get really close, a rabbit’s instincts lead them to run in zig-zag and circle patterns. That can sometimes get them out of really stick situations… but other times, it does them in. Watching this video below, you have to think that the hare would have been better off trying to just outrun the bruin chasing it
The footage picks up with the bumbling bear already hot on the trail of the rabbit. It was already in zig-zag 360 mode, and that elusive method turned out to be detrimental to it’s health. And by that, I mean the rabbit caught a bad case of death-by-bear-mauling.
Once the bear smartly caught onto the circular pattern, it took a shortcut and slammed its paws down on the poor rabbit. It didn’t take long for the bear to turn the lights out on the small animal, and the commentary from the people videoing it all from their car perfectly described the brutality:
“There’s a bear chasing a rabbit. What the f**k? Oh, he got it. Oh my God.”
