12:08 PM
Thanks to Dr. Chris I had another opportunity to visit the Valley of the Kings yesterday, this time with my digital camera in tow. I've shrunk most of the pictures down for my friends with lower bandwidth, but click on any of them to see larger versions.



Although I was a little more prepared this time, it's still pretty amazing--and pretty intimidating--to be that close to so many enormous predators. Any superiority complex you might have just melts away when you're walking back alone from throwing away some garbage and see a dozen big cats staring at you from less than eight feet away on either side of you with only a chain-link fence preventing you from becoming a tasty snack.

Actually, the tigers were really friendly, and would come right up to the fence to be petted and nuzzled. Chris noted, probably rightly, that if they ever got out they would just inadvertantly play with you to death. It's the lions that would kill you indiscriminately because they felt peckish.

Feeding them was also fun, and ten pounds of chicken disappeared like a handful of popcorn. The tigers were surprisingly dainty with the chicken--they'd take it through the fence and use a paw to make certain that it didn't touch the ground. Then they'd push it between their jaws, snap! the bone in half, and crunch it down in two or three bites. I also watched a tiger eat a real meal, cracking open a ribcage and using his raspy tongue to literally lick apart a deer carcass. Strangely, watching one animal eat another wasn't quite as disturbing as I might have thought it would be.



One thing I really paid attention to this time were the sounds of the sanctuary. In The Fellowship of the Ring, when the Fellowship is fighting the cave troll in the Mines of Moria, many of the noises made by the troll are directly sampled from tiger chuffs. I captured a bunch of the sounds--roars, chomps, hisses, purrs--and I hope to be able to convince our sound guy at work to take a trip down there with me to get some good wildsound for our games.

The cats aren't the only animals at VotK; I got a lot of other great pictures to add to my "Animals in Extreme Closeup" series: