8 Animals Who Are Total Jerks

Bottlenose dolphins are considered the friendliest and the smartest of the sea animals; however, they are capable of doing some pretty heinous things. Gangs of bottlenose dolphins are known to isolate a single female from their pod and rape her. They also kill baby porpoises. If that wasn’t enough to horrify you, dolphins also kill their own babies.

Cuckoos are pretty awful. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and, once their chicks have hatched, their offspring evicts the eggs of the host bird. They have no time to learn this behavior, which can only mean one thing – that it is passed on genetically.

Murder comes pretty naturally to chimpanzees. Studies have shown that groups of aggressive chimps will invade their neighbors’ territory to acquire more resources and more mates and will kill for land. During these attacks, males will attack unknown females, grab their babies, kill them and, on occasion, eat them.

If you’re thinking that lions are anything like what you saw in Disney’s “The Lion King,” think again. Male lions have a reputation for killing cubs, especially the ones that the female lions are nursing. They will bite them on the back and on their heads, which will crush their abdomens. Female lions will try to stop the slaughter; however, after the death of their cubs, they quickly became fertile again and will mate with the very males who killed their young.

Penguins are super adorable, but don’t be fooled by their fuzzy little exteriors – these flightless birds do some pretty despicable things. When a mother penguin loses her offspring, she will sometimes kidnap a chick from another penguin. The kidnapping lasts from a few hours to a week. Then the mother loses interest in her stolen child and abandons the chick, leaving it to die.

Sea otters look pretty cute and they also do some pretty adorable things. When they sleep, they hold hands to make sure that they don’t drift away from each other. Unfortunately, these super cute animals are also massive jerks. Male sea otters will rape baby seals, sometimes drowning them in the process, and they also kidnap otter pups and hold them for ransom. They only return the pups to their mothers’ once she pays them the ransom with food.

The margay is a psychologically cunning animal. When they hunt, they mimic the sound of a baby monkey in distress to draw in their prey. Although scientists call it a poor imitation, it still proves to be fairly effective.

Don’t be fooled by their adorable exteriors – meerkats are pretty darn evil. The alpha female in the group will kill the pups of other females and then use that mother as a type of wet nurse for her own children. If the grieving mother doesn’t want to nurse the alpha female’s children, she is evicted from the community. According to researcher Kirsty MacLeod, this is “a way of ‘paying rent’ to be allowed back into the group without receiving further aggression.”