In moving from an agrarian to an industrial society, many Americans have lost touch with the harsh realities of the natural world.
Sure, many people have pets and visit zoos, but for the most part, ordinary Americans' understanding of nature has mostly been filtered through cute cartoons and selective footage in movies or nature documentaries.
But at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, a group of children got to witness firsthand how brutal and, indeed, un-cute nature could be.
As seen in a TikTok video captured on April 25 by a mother hosting a birthday party for her daughter, the girl and their guests were watching a female grizzly bear named Juniper swimming around the enclosure.
A mother duck and its ducklings swam across the bear's path, and the bear saw an opportunity.
Unperturbed by the presence of an underage audience, Juniper vaulted herself toward the ducklings, grabbing one of them and biting off its head.
The children tried banging on the glass to distract the bear, and they screamed and whimpered as Juniper tucked into her feast.
The bear, however, was unbothered.
The mother could be heard to say, "OK, we can't watch this," to her child. She then said to the bear, "Hey buddy, can you leave them alone? Can we not?"
Though she described the scene as a "natgeo trainwreck" in her TikTok post, the mother said her children were "not traumatized" by the incident because "we see wildlife doing their thing all over where we live."
While the mother's account has been made private, the video was widely shared on social media:
