Big Cat Vs. Bigger Snake?

That’s unusual coming from me, as I don’t even watch very much TV these days, so the odds that I would be watching something that would totally floor me are just about zero. Despite that, I’m here to tell y’all that I just watched a TV program that almost made me come up out of my chair...

I hate to admit that I can’t even remember the name of it as I was watching it at 3 am this morning (I have really weird sleeping habits, and let‘s just leave it at that). I want to say that it was something like “Animal Kingdom Match-Up,” or whatever. The show had a very basic premise - what would happen if you took two different species from the animal kingdom and matched them up against each other? Which would win? I thought it was pretty creative, but what cinched it for me was the two species they said they were about to match up, a tiger and an anaconda!

A tiger and an anaconda - talk about the Super Bowl of animal kingdom match-ups! For a kid that grew up like I did watching all kinds of nature programs, this was something amazing, intriquing, and incredible all rolled up into one. And it appeared that they were going to literally match them up and let them fight it out right there on the air! Think about it the two combatants...

A tiger - lightning fast, armed with razor sharp claws that could take a man’s arm off in one swipe, and a bite that could quickly send someone to the promised land. A cat weighing hundreds of pounds that will not hesitate to attack anything that he feels may be threatening him.

An anaconda - one of the largest snakes in the world, they can grow upwards to thirty feet, and can be a foot wide across the middle. They’re so large that they can swallow whole species like alligators, cows, or even humans. They kill their victims by wrapping coils around them and constricting (squeezing to death) them. And if all of this isn’t bad enough, an anaconda has a large head with razor sharp fangs, if one bites you pulling it off is nearly impossible.

It’s safe to say that a fight between these two species would be something along the lines of King Kong vs. Godzilla, and, if anything, that might be low keying it. The announcer proceeded to raise my anticipation level even more when he started handicapping the fight. He said that if the anaconda was able to bite the tiger’s head that it was all over, that this would enable the giant snake to hold the tiger and quickly wrap a couple of coils around him. On the other hand, a tiger is so quick that it possibly could avoid the strike of the anaconda. If that happened, the tiger’s jaws or claws would be enough to do serious damage to the snake. It was then noted that a couple of bites to the snake would probably kill it from just infection alone. Man, after hearing all that, I can tell y‘all that I was wide awake and ready to watch the animal kingdom fight of the century!

Do y’all want to know who won? I hate to have to tell y‘all this, but they didn’t actually match up a live anaconda and tiger. What they did was assign a team of experts to build a mechanical anaconda and tiger. I guess they were concerned that the animal rights people would be on their butts if they staged a real fight, and I‘m sure they were right about that. Honestly, though, I lost interest in the program when I discovered that a real fight was not in the cards. Maybe I’d have to sum it up like this - watching a fight between a mechanical tiger and a mechanical anaconda would be about as interesting as watching the prettiest female stripper in the world put on more clothes as her background music was playing. Some things in this world have to be real to mean something, and that definitely holds for true for a battle between an anaconda vs. a tiger. Man, just think, if we could’ve gotten a real fight goin’ with Marlin Perkins in there with ‘em both as the special guest referee....