Watching a tiger fight is not for the faint of heart.
Nature can be brutal. Most people probably associate the cruel side of the natural world with natural predator and prey relationships. The stronger predators capture and kill their prey with no feelings of sadness or remorse. They attack and kill to survive simply because that is the way that things are.
We sometimes forget that animals can be just as vicious and nasty to their own species in the right situation. Most of these types of fights are going to take place during the breeding seasons, but sometimes animals will fight over food and territory too.
When it does happen, it can be hard to watch, as this video of two male tigers battling it out demonstrates. The sounds of their growls and the claws scratching make this a tough, but fascinating thing to watch.
The most horrific part here was simply hearing the sounds as those huge claws raked over the hide of one another. Combine that with the roars, growls, and snarls, and you've got pure nightmare fuel. Think back to the last time your cat scratched you and how small her claws are compared to these beasts. That's why humans usually don't stand a chance if one of these big cats wants to do some serious damage. Keep in mind that the average tiger weighs somewhere in the 300 to 400-pound range. That's a large feline!
It's a testament to how tough these animals are that the bleeding between the two seemed to be minimal at best. At the end of the video, one of the tigers lays down. We're not experts, but it looked like that one had resigned he had lost this fight.
As for what the two animals were competing over, that appears to be a female tiger that wanders into frame later in the video. It's probably a safe bet they were fighting over her. This may have been vicious and hard to watch, but this is how things play out in nature.
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
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