Endangered Species<\/a>\u201d. A nice American family \u2013 mom and dad, teen son and daughter and latter\u2019s boyfriend \u2013 go on an unguided photo safari in Kenya. By turns, their rented van is rolled over by a charging rhino, injuring the occupants, who are then set upon by a pack of hyenas, a leopard, and human predators. The latter range from game poachers to sick psychopaths who hunt humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNaturally, modern Hollywood being what it is, the protagonists are unarmed. SPOILER ALERT: they don\u2019t all make it out, and none make it out unscathed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A lesson in preparedness: when you know that there are certain entities which are programmed to destroy you, it is wise to have the capability of fending them off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While I\u2019ve never been to Kenya, I\u2019ve been to South Africa a couple of times and once to what was then Southwest Africa and is now Namibia. We were never far from powerful rifles — .308 Winchester at the least, <\/em>up through .375 Magnum and .458 caliber \u201celephant rifles,\u201d and all the Americans in our party had loaded revolvers on our belts at all times. If there wasn\u2019t time to load a .375, the hot-loaded 320-grain hard cast SSK bullets in my .44 Magnum would have done fine against the van-rolling beast: the CGI image of the movie presented the rhinoceros\u2019 head and upper spine as straight-on targets for deep penetrating bullets. It would have been ample for hyenas (in fact, I did kill one of those), the leopard, and any of the homicidal bipeds presented in the movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPreparedness ain\u2019t paranoia, but as both Pearl Harbor and \u201cEndangered Species\u201d demonstrate, un-<\/em>preparedness can quickly become the source of terrifying helplessness in a life-or-death situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pearl Harbor was to my parents\u2019 generation what 9\/11 was to mine. Each triggered a protective national rage. Each also taught lessons about preparedness. No one at Pearl Harbor thought the massive sneak attack was going to happen. They weren\u2019t able to mount an effective defense until it was altogether too late. I recently watched […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-7044","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7044"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7050,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7044\/revisions\/7050"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}