Did Scar and the hyenas cause the destruction of the Pridelands?

[Tora]

This argument is still going? I mean clearly it was Scar and the Hyenas fault. All the evidence points to it. Regulus here just likes Scar and the Hyenas.

[SlayerOfLight]

Apparently the environment didn't like Scar as it's ruler, that's probably why everything looked so depressed until Simba liberated it. Can't be a coincidence that the sun started shining again shortly after the liberation. It's a brat's movie so don't be that realistic about it, lol.

[Regulus]

[quote="Tora"]This argument is still going? I mean clearly it was Scar and the Hyenas fault. All the evidence points to it. Regulus here just likes Scar and the Hyenas. [/quote]

They may not be as cute and cuddly, but they're still part of the circle of life, too.

[DGFone]

[quote="Regulus"][quote="Tora"]This argument is still going? I mean clearly it was Scar and the Hyenas fault. All the evidence points to it. Regulus here just likes Scar and the Hyenas. [/quote]

They may not be as cute and cuddly, but they're still part of the circle of life, too. [/quote]

In small numbers. Ever heard of conservation of energy?

[cleargreenwater]

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? :p

Seriously, it's viewer's choice. How long would it take for the ecosystem to degrade to the point, after overhunting/mass exodus of herbivores, after plant overgrowth, after insects wiping everything clean, until it GETS to the point that it effects weather and actually *causes* a drought?

Whereas droughts happen in Africa all the time?

I don't argue that the hyenas didn't overhunt--far from it, they unequivocally did. Hyenas usually eat an animal completely, bone and all. Going by all the bones left laying around the Pridelands they hadn't been fussing to do that for quite some time and had gotten choosey.

But on that same token that also shows that the overhunting itself couldn't have been a major problem up until not too long ago, (plenty of bones left the hyenas hadn't turned to devouring yet,) and obviously Nala was healthy enough to make a pretty long trek, leading me to believe there was an external trigger that caused the point of no return, though the Pridelands no doubt were degraded enough that they couldn't sustain or tolerate a drought due to bad resource management.

Now for the barely on-topic contributions!

[quote="DGFone"]Yes, but you keep failing to notice that Scar introduced an unnatural number of hyenas to the Pride Lands. Yes, a hyena clan or two (composed of the same numbers as a lion pride or so) in an area is a number that the grasslands can handle. But Scar didn't allow a clan or two in.[/quote]

Clan size is deceptive, the group gathers as a whole very rarely, but it can be upwards of 80 hyenas in a clan. It very well may have been just one or two clans, and it would be natural.

[quote="Regulus"]Considering that the lions were able to drive away the hyenas with ease after Simba's return, their numbers were actually about even.

Also, how would Scar ever be able to bring an unnatural amount of hyenas into the Pridelands in the first place? Was he breeding them or something? Did he go all across Africa to gather them into a megaclan and bring them to the Pridelands?[/quote]

The numbers game as far as real-life goes is more for 2 or 3 to 1 ratio. A pair will bully a lioness, but one typically would retreat unless others were around to back it up, so there would be more hyenas to lions.

As for the megaclan thing, in fanworld I pretty feasibly, or so I think, explain it as new recruits. Male hyenas disperse to join new clans naturally anyway, why not go somewhere where you would be welcomed by a lion versus attacked and fed well, and by someone else to boot. And it's one of those things only complete dork, I mean, fan, would think of too but; of course Disney wouldn't want to make them sympathetic, but I would not be surprised if there was a small baby boom thrown in there at the outset of things, either, resources are nice things to have. They'd be on the younger side, teenage, by the end but old enough to do some damage.


Even less on-topic, I often wondered just how long the bulk of the hyenas would have tolerated staying around if Simba didn't return. It was only their laziness and Scar's temper that kept them there, but Scar was doing them favors as part of an exchange, they had collateral and larger numbers in a way the lionesses did not. At some point they would have walked; possibly too late and in too bad condition to make it to greener pastures, but walked all the same.




Truth be told, and this being the whole thing in a nutshell, it's difficult to reconcile hyenas, the cartoon villians, with hyenas the actual animals in this scenario. Even if lions & hyenas suddenly got along just peachy in real life, hyenas still wouldn't emulate the scenario in the film, they would patrol and protect their own territories and resources from other hyenas outside their group and essentially see to a balance themselves, with a population still being brought under control by border clashes, hunting injuries, a small litter size comparatively, and diseases & parasites, long before even remotely effecting their environment to any similar extent.

And to that I say: Disney, all making hyenas look like parasitic slugs, you're so crazy. And so am I for doing this on a holiday afternoon.

[Hydro]

OK, I read both sides of the story, and my point of view is really much almost neither of them. Or both of them. Or I'm just really undecided. What I noticed is that its really hard to explain this movie's ecosystem basing our facts on real life processes, because it might just have been completely ignored by Disney for the purpose of storytelling. I'll try my paw at explaining my opinion on both sides of the view.

First side - Scar and the hyenas DID cause the destruction: OK, now, let me tell you from the start that I know much less about how ecosystems work compared to most of the posters here, so I'm just opinionating on what I have already read. First of all, I think it will be extremely unlikely that an over-abundance of hyenas will make a whole chunk of region look fallout3-esque. Now, lets assume that it somehow DID happen, and happened roughly how DGFone explained it would happen. But, there might be a problem with that(if it even works), or I could be completely wrong in this altogether: Time. I'm not sure how long such a process will take, but for a WHOLE ecosystem to be destroyed in a couple of years is, well, pretty far-fetched in my opinion. Remember lions don't live as long as humans do, not even in the slightest, so during the time that Simba grew up from a cub to a young adult, just a few years may have passed, two or three. (not sure on any exact number). Now, to completely have every single leaf on every tree and blade of grass blown out of existence in that timeframe? Because the animals are gone? Not sure.

Yeah, lets say because the animals are gone, the grass overgrows so much that in a couple of years all the nutrients vanish from the soil, thus creating a deficiency and dying off, like DGFone said. Thing is, the animals are gone, but how much grass do animals need to eat in order to survive? I know, a lot, but certainly not so much that it causes such a drastic change if they all leave. Plus, not ALL the animals are gone, they can't be, even if it looks like it, or else no one would even survive anymore. And they looked in pretty good shape too, physically, when Simba arrived. They should have been anorexic if everything just vanished, and would not be capable to fight the fight they did. Can lions suddenly photosynthesize? Evolution at its finest. I don't know, so many things points against Scar and Hyenas destroying everything, at least to me >.> . An ecosystem is large, it would take a lot to destroy it completely (Lets say, a nuclear bomb?). Sure, humans destroy stuff too, but I still see some nature, and I don't see insane weather cycles destroying everything, like year long droughts. I'm not buying stuff with bottlecaps. Even in metropolitan areas, there is still an ecosystem, albeit a much different type. This movie pretty much had a LACK of it when Simba arrived. And in a couple of years.

Now, lets say a long, LONG drought happened BECAUSE of the hyenas affecting the land adversely. You know what I call that? Bull of the highest order. Do the pridelands occupy millions of square kilometers in land? To have such a drastic effect on weather, the pridelands would probably have to occupy a few countries worth of land. Lets not forget that because this drought has to probably be a year long or more for such a disaster to happen(Not a SIGN of vegetation?), this would probably not even be a weather event anymore, but a climatological one, more like. And I highly doubt a couple hundred or so Hyenas (If the number was even that high) would be able to do that. Leave the weather-destroying abilities to things like asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions. Modification to the land will obviously affect the weather in the long term, but certainly not something the size of the pridelands. It might AFFECT the weather, even small modifications to local landscapes, but that certainly won't mean the rain is banished. Just different weather patterns in general. In this case we are talking about a whole chunk of land suddenly having a desert climate.

Now, next side of the story - Scar and the Hyenas did NOT cause the destruction. I agree with this. But there is a problem here too. Although I do believe Scar and the Hyenas could not have possibly destroyed the place by themselves, the drought itself is almost impossible in that part of the world. Never have I seen documented a year- or longer - drought without a sprinkle of rain to completely wipe out all vegetation. Its pretty much the weather randomly fudging up because it wants to with a complete disregard of all normal atmospheric processes. Simply doesn't happen.

OK, done with that. So in conclusion I'm going to resort to going with "everything is symbolic" as was mentioned before. Its just the best way to show how evil and greed corrupts things, in this case it corrupted the "circle of life" idea the movie mostly circles around (hue). My mind doesn't extend enough to think of a proper and valid chain of events that will lead on to the destruction of the ecosystem, therefore I cannot properly deny or agree with both sides because I don't have a solid knowledge foundation on this subject to be able to think up of a proper explanation.

[BlackLion1]

[quote="DGFone"][quote="Regulus"]
[quote="Tora"]Well considering that the Hyenas were allowed to come into the Pride Lands and everything basically died you can see they had no respect for the law or order.[/quote]

This is a logical fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

[/quote]

You do know that it's official cannon that by allowing the hyenas in, Scar directly lead to the troubles in the Pride Lands, right? To sum it up: Scar invites his pals in. These pals invite their pals. Now the predator population has increased in a way that can be represented by the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function]heavyside function[/url]: a very sudden, near instantaneous jump.

Unlike your local carrot shop, prey animals want to live, and can do something about it. So just as the demand for prey animal jumped, the population of available prey began a very steep decline: over-hunting of the herds as well as the rest of the herds leaving the Pride Lands in fear of their lives.

And if you know anything about ecosystem biology, then you should know that something as drastic as the entire herbivore population fleeing will cause severe damage to the local plant life, as the gasses will grow uncontrollably and effectively starve themselves to death as they deplete available nutrients faster than they can be replenished. Add a drought, and you have an ecological disaster. Heck, even without the drought there was going to be an ecological disaster.

So was Mufasa bad in banishing all hyenas? Perhaps. But Scar was much worse in letting them in without any checks in place to control their population, not to mention his severe favoritism towards said hyenas, only making the problem worse.

It's not a logical fallacy to say that letting the hyenas caused the devastation, because when you actually connect the dots, you will see that sometimes, like in this case, Action A directly leads to Action B.

So before you pull off an insulting move as to call an argument a "logical fallacy", [i]explain[/i] how it won't work. Because to say "no, you're wrong!" without any backing evidence... is rather stupid and mean.

Now as for is Simba better than Mufasa? I will say that while Simba made plenty of mistakes, he had to learn from the very rock bottom how to be a king without an actual king to help him. Combined with the obstacles he had to overcome - returning the Pride Lands to their pre-drought state, for example - I will give him my vote. He at least demonstrated that he can learn from his mistakes, a trait that we didn't see Mufasa do.[/quote] Seconds from Disaster. Since Scar's rule turned into a disaster zone, what were the chain of events that lead to this disaster, before and during the first movie, could this disaster be avoided, if yes, why didn't it happen? Why did the weather change after Scar toke over the Pridelands? Why did so many animals and palnts die? Why did it had to take about almost three years for Simba to return and remove Scar from power? Now with advance computer simulation will take us where no camera can, into the heart of the disaster zone. Disasters don't just, triggered by a chain of critical events, unreval the clues, and countdown those seconds from disaster.