Reminders for Humans is a monthly series exploring truths of the natural world, and how we may use them to guide us back to what it means to be human.
What I Learned:
Pumas are the apex predators of their ecosystems. They keep the food chain beneath them balanced and healthy.
They typically only catch the prey they’re after 10% of the time.
This success rate, which may seem abysmal, is enough to keep them both alive and at the top.
Reminders for Humans:
It sucks to try really hard over and over, just to face consistent rejection. Some of the most fearsome, successful animals on the planet experience this too.
This doesn’t mean your desire and trying is wrong; it might just mean that your success rate is different than what you think it should be. That’s okay.
Without uncomfortable feelings like desire and hunger, we wouldn’t be (or stay) alive.
My desire is thick and rich, like a glass of chocolate milk you have to chug.
It’s omnipotent and gaseous, angry and enraged. My desire is an elephant that busts down the door uninvited, sits down on my lungs and slowly turns me to a pancake. My desire is so ravenous she would eat the earth, then the universe, and then the stars.
My desire is staunch and relentless like a new organ in my body; a yellow-Gatorade venom that’s replaced the blood pumping through my heart and arteries and veins.
My desire jabs me before she crosses me clean from the other direction. My desire is thick enough to wrestle, slick enough to constrict around me, but not kind enough to snap my neck and end it. My desire is coming out of me like scarves from a clown mouth. My desire is a black hole that renders everything around it at risk of disintegrating. My desire is so savage she beats on my lungs for her cause.
When my brain has too much extra wanting my desire leaks out of my ears, surrounds me in a giant pink bubble, picks me up inside of it like Glinda the Good Witch and sends me to the atmosphere. My desire is the asshole teenage boat driver that pulls me tubing through a choppy lake. My desire brings in a crew with hard hats to map out the chunks inside me- my muscles and organs and other inside spaces- to level and renovate them instead into several fires that never go out.
My desire is cartoon characters floating around my head, shooting cupid’s arrows at my face. My desire is the little girl watching that cartoon.
I watched this documentary on National Geographic. One episode was about the Patagonia Puma, native to Chile.
The episode tells the story of a female puma called Petacca, who is the mother of two young, growing cubs. We meet her during a time where their family has gone many days without a substantial meal.
Torres del Paine National Park sits between the Chilean Andes mountains and the South Pacific Ocean, nestled in the Patagonia region at nearly the tail end of the western coast of South America. Its name translates roughly to Blue Towers: an homage to the three granite peaks that symbolize this place. The park has become increasingly popular, attracting more eco-tourists to see the breathtaking views- jagged peaks, turquoise water, glacial rivers, golden desert foothills- and, of course, the wildlife. The park is a stronghold for guanaco, a grazing herbivore that looks like a mix between a llama and a camel, and consequently- the park is also a stronghold for their predator, the puma. Torres del Paine has the largest concentration of pumas on the planet, which brings visitors from around the world to this pristine area to track, photograph, and catch a glimpse of them in the wild.
This alone is a success story of sorts. The extensive protection of land in Chile (over 11 protected parks, reserves, and monuments) covers roughly 50% of the region - allowing wildlife the space to thrive outside of human and rancher encroachment. While ranching and herding, particularly sheep, is common in areas surrounding the park, the protection of land has allowed native species like guanaco, south andean deer, gray foxes, pumas, and hundreds of species of birds to rebound and grow to strong levels. Keeping ranches and grazing livestock squarely outside of these protected regions allows for guanaco to thrive without competing with other grazers for food. More guanaco has also meant more pumas.
Historically, pumas and local ranchers have lived at odds. When there weren’t enough guanaco to sustain their diet, pumas searched outside of the park for easy prey in the form of flocks of sheep. Despite being a protected species in Chile since 1980, generational ranchers in the land surrounding the parks have long resorted to killing pumas to protect their livelihood. Recently, though, there is a growing trend towards cohesion of these competing interests, by introducing sheepdogs, called Maremmas, to live among, protect, and alert flocks of sheep to nearby predators. The dogs’ presence has helped to diffuse conflict between the people and wildlife that call this place home, bringing populations closer to equilibrium.
The puma is the apex predator of the Chilean ecosystem. Their kills of guanaco feed not only themselves and their cubs, but also a host of other animals further down the food chain - animals that don’t have the ability or power to take down a three-hundred pound meal. The puma’s place, squarely at the top of this ecosystem, is indisputable and necessary.
They are mostly solitary, aside from brief interactions during mating season and when raising cubs. Mothers will stay with their young for up to two years, teaching and protecting them before they leave to find a territory and life of their own. Raising cubs to maturity is a major accomplishment for a mother- it requires successfully and regularly hunting big game to feed a growing family, and steering clear of the other major threats: rancher interactions that turn deadly, and male pumas. Male pumas are the most common threat to a cub’s safety during its first year of life; should a male encounter a female with cubs, he will spare no concern to kill them in order to bring her back into heat, so he can father his own.
Petacca has two cubs, a male and a female, who are nine months old. The biologist narrating the episode reiterates the magnitude of this accomplishment, of raising two cubs to near-adulthood without losing either or both of them. The cubs follow their mother around the steppes- playing, pouncing, and somersaulting roughly with her and with one another; chasing and catching small meals; sprawling lazily in the sun. To feed a family of this size, a big meal is needed every couple of weeks. While pumas can feed on smaller game, like hares, rodents, and birds, they are sustained and satiated for much longer by bringing down guanaco. When she leaves to hunt, Petacca situates her cubs somewhere hidden and safe like rocky crags and cutouts in the stone. As if the hunting wasn’t enough work, she knows that if her cubs were to be found by a male patrolling the area, especially without her there to protect them, she’d lose them.
The stakes are high, to say the least. She herself is hungry, she has two growing mouths to feed, the safety of her cubs hangs in limbo whenever she is not there to protect them- and she must leave them regularly to hunt.
Pumas are ambush predators, stalking prey and remaining out of sight for extended periods of time until the right moment strikes. Each hunt is different. Some start half a mile away. Some start ten yards away. Regardless, the effort and focus she brings to each is the same. We watch as she locates and stalks a few guanaco grazing on the brush. She moves with silent precision, on hunched shoulders to stay lower than the sagebrush and out of sight, step by silent step. It takes her two hours to get into ambush range: to move strategically and slowly, unnoticed, to the best spot to leap from.
Guanaco have excellent instincts and perception for spotting potential predators. Talented trackers can triangulate the location of a puma mainly by the behavior of guanaco- noticing their levels either of calm and relaxation, or agitation and huddling in tighter groups. Should a guanaco see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense a puma is close, it immediately and erratically signals to the others in its vicinity and runs - ruining a hunt entirely.
We pan back to Petacca, now crouched low and camouflaged in the golden brush twenty yards from the small herd. This one attempt might be the difference between life and death for herself and her children. Can you imagine the pressure? She’s silent. Muscle by muscle stretching, rippling, padding, transferring weight. Trying to stay downwind. Trying to keep eyes on the prize.
She’s close enough now to make a move, to spring forward with every bit of energy knotted in her muscles. The goal is to make it as far as possible towards her prey, to close the gap between them, before it lifts its munching head to notice her and begin its own energetic burst towards safety. Guanaco are among the fastest mammals in the park, reaching up to 35 mph, but pumas are faster- their muscular bodies are built for these sprints, and at top speed they’re able to reach up to 50 mph. An adult female puma like Petacca is roughly 80 to 120 pounds, but the average fully-grown guanaco is 300 pounds, and nearly triple her size. Despite her speed advantage, the math alone is simply not in her favor.
The point of no return happens, and she’s off. She makes it almost halfway to the guanaco before it realizes, screeches, and takes off - but Petacca is closing the gap. She’s clipping its hind legs, then leaps onto its shaggy back. It’s an incredible sight: a violent, spectacular struggle. Her forearms grasp at the back, then neck, of the bucking guanaco, and as the milliseconds pass, her grip loosens. She falls off, tumbles, then recovers and chases to catch up and lunge again - she stays on for a few more bucks, then falls. She somersaults and gets upright, then kicks the ground hard with her back feet, launching herself towards it again, this time getting a better angle at its neck- all while they both run at a full clip. Now she grasps its neck and holds on tight, her body hanging from the long neck as it continues to run, twist, and buck erratically to shake her off. She needs to make a clear, strong bite at the neck in order for this duel to end, but she’s struggling. The guanaco’s massive body and relentless charging flings her around like a hula hoop, bucking her violently until her grip fails again and she falls and flips from it, narrowly escaping her head, organs, teeth being kicked in by four desperate hooves.
The guanaco flees. Petacca watches it escape, panting.
It’s at this point that our narrating biologist explains that the puma’s average success rate when hunting big game is about one in ten. One in ten.
Ten percent!
Can you imagine putting forth this kind of effort, this singularly-focused dedication for an hours or day-long pursuit, with potentially your children's lives on the line, and still not eating? Using whatever energy you had left, risking your life on a ferocious effort, and still going home hungry, battered, bruised?
Despite her place squarely at the apex of this ecosystem, statistically, Petacca mostly fails.
I originally wrote this piece to be about success rates.
I wanted a new number to idolize to make my own great leaps less scary : a new definition of success on nature’s terms. An equation to adjust my expectations, create more grace for the failures, or let me evolve past the sting of wanting and loss entirely. I wanted mental models to shrink it into something easier to hold. I would write about how 10% was a low, but ultimately meaningless number.
Of course by many social and corporate standards, a 10% success rate is catastrophic. Forget the corporate failure-celebrations that have gained popularity in recent years. We’d be in back-to-back, red-alert strategy zoom calls. It’s personal, too. Maybe it’s trying ten different activities to make friends in a new city, and only feeling one prick of promise. Ten mornings attempting to wake up earlier and succeeding once. Ten days trying not to drink alcohol and only avoiding it on one. It’s going on ten first dates and only clicking with one person. With odds like that, it’s easy to be disheartened; to lose every bit of wind in your sails. It’s enough to stop trying at all.
While I was watching her stalk and ambush yet another moony-eyed, slack-jawed guanaco, a shiny new thought bubbled up to the surface of my mind: she didn’t need 100%. She didn’t need a 100% success rate. And not only that - she’d never considered it a possibility. She’d never experienced it. She’s at the top of the food chain and 10% got (and keeps) her there. She does not expect to catch 10 of 10, or 9 of 10 guanaco. To her, 10% is success. 10% is dinner, 10% is children fed, 10% is survival.
If pumas could count (and maybe they can, who’s to say?) they might be disheartened by running their numbers. But even so, I doubt Petacca thinks that the reason she fails is because she isn't good enough, or that she just isn’t good enough yet. I doubt she tells herself that she’s a bad mother because she’s not catching enough big game. I doubt she thinks her failures are failures, or that they’re anything of importance, anything worth considering. This is her life. This is how it has always been, how it always will be.
She has no need to catch what she’s searching for every time. She has no right to. She only has the right to consistent effort: to trying again.
But there was a pea underneath layers of mattresses that I couldn’t seem to find: a disquiet that kept me from tying a bow and pressing Publish. Discomfort born of something slippery I couldn’t pin down, something I only knew existed because of the shadows it cast. There was more to this story to excavate.
I am a human woman occasionally filled with the desire of 1,000 suns. This is deeply uncomfortable. I watched Petacca catch her breath and saunter home to her cubs; how she, also, had nothing tangible, nothing solid to offer them; nothing to cool the burn of her hunger. I watched and wondered, Does she feel like I do? How does she survive it? Where does all of her extra wanting go? How does she make peace with it?
When my desire arrives uninvited, it’s like I’ve accidentally let a parakeet loose from its cage: chaos. It relishes its freedom to roam, to fly flustered and messy through doorways, careen into windows, and shit, unreservedly, across the entire house. It’s been waiting for this very moment, and it’s certainly not going back into that boring cage anytime soon. Which I suppose is the real visual for how I treat this feeling: like it is something to keep caged. Like it is dangerous and debilitating. Like it’s going to shit all over everything.
I haven’t been acquainted with this kind of desire before now- I must have been too busy on some other hamster-wheel of effort and movement. But I’ve slowed and settled, and desire noticed.
Desire feels acceptable so long as it results in something tangible. Without a dead guanaco caught for dinner, the ghost of hunger taunts, laughs, pours through veins like a yellow-Gatorade poison. That is the flavor I’m most familiar with: vengeful and punishing.
I’m no match for my desire in her omnipotent and ravenous state. I don’t want to be her punching bag. I was writing to find a new quantifier- a cool and apathetic number to point to when desire came to take me tubing. “Ten percent!” I could scream and shout and point to desperately. I could prove her inability to flawlessly materialize tangible success in even the fiercest of bodies; “Petacca doesn’t get it every time, either! Petacca is also frequently disappointed!” I could give her a percentage to bully instead of me. I could make desire smaller by shaming her. Because there is a shame in wanting. A rickety imbalance from every gust of appetite.
A compendium could be written about why desire and womanhood feel so deeply at odds. The perfect woman doesn’t want anything. She has no cravings, no needs that can’t be answered. She certainly doesn’t have an insatiable part of her, a part that is uncontrollable, that is wild. There is not a parakeet flying around her house. She simply is going about her business of being pretty and compliant and quiet when, all of a sudden, someone appears and offers to love her. She accepts. End of story!
Alas.
The more I tossed and turned on my many mattresses, the more I wondered if the question I needed to ask was not “How do I outsmart longing and desire?” but “What makes me think I can?”
Desire isn’t commodifiable, but it has cousins that are, and it is easy to be tricked by them. Consuming and procuring and achieving, searching and finding and catching and keeping. They are not desire, but they are often paired with it. They are the salve sold for its itch, but they can never cure it entirely. I’d venture that desire feels shameful because Being Without feels wrong when we have immediate access to anything, so long as we pay for it. So long as we work hard enough for it; repent and absolve ourselves; prove ourselves worthy. If you don’t have something you want or need, the unspoken narrative says: that’s your fault.
These cousins can program us to believe that we have control over the experience of desire itself; that lack or loneliness is one decisive action away from disappearing forever. One swipe, one therapy session, one great picture, one reality dating (game)show match away. We don’t have to sit with hunger when our devices readily attend to every ounce of discomfort. This creates the illusion that desire can be solved somehow, and that it should be.
And so here I find myself, desire being a feeling I simply have no patience for; for whom there is no extra, empty seat at the table to offer. (Desire doesn’t mind that there is no seat for her, she says. It’s fine. She will just burn the house down instead.)
A puma tackling a guanaco feels as laughably unrealistic as trying to find someone to love- a pursuit that feels nearly as embarrassing and difficult and pathetic as tackling something three-times your size. And if she feels this way too, my guess is she has a better way of approaching desire than I do.
Imagine what it might feel like to be in that powerful body, that clear and focused mind.
My current way of dealing with desire is not very effective: shaming it, intellectualizing it, diagnosing it, avoiding it, fixing it, trading it for its cousins, shoving it back in its cage. The 10% story didn’t unlock anything for me because it was an extension of those approaches: it was intellectual. The animal part of me (by which I mean the most attuned, intuitive, expansive, peaceful, instinctual part) doesn’t give a shit about numbers. The animal part of me is shapes and colors and sensation and rhythm and metaphors and that is where desire lives.
Instead of reframing this lesson into just another quantifiable measurement of expectations, I want to back up further. I want to notice the thick, rich, slippery desire that pulls a puma, over and over, into this holy choice of effort. I want to honor the willingness to leap. I want to remember that this is what’s sacred - not the success rate it yields. After all, the puma could opt to hunt small game forever instead: rabbits, birds, the occasional rodent. It could subsist on these small meals; it could survive. But that is not what happens. That is maybe not what pumas are meant for, metaphorically speaking.
And metaphorically speaking, I could do the same. Going for small and easy prey to keep me satisfied for a few days. Staying out of the hunt entirely, out of fear. Staying out of the hunt entirely, out of shame. Wondering if I’m not a carnivore anyway, that I ought to be a vegetarian. Minimizing the hunger or telling myself that I deserve it- that satisfaction is for others, but not me. Most of the pumas that raised me were hungry too. Why should I be any different?
And yet! There is the instinct in a puma to feast.
Not just to survive through efficiency, small game, low stakes, and easy prey. But to punch above its weight class. To clutch and hold audacity itself.
To try, a thousand times, for something unrealistic.
Beneath the oft-cited, admirable traits of the puma- stealth, grace, strategy, power- what I most tenderly and privately adore is this very tenacity. Its willingness to ambush prey that dwarfs it. Its inclination to take the leap, over and over, despite the math. This is uncommon. This is honorable. Not every animal does the grueling work required to conquer something giant and unrealistic.
I do not want to outsmart my desire. I want to make space for it. I want to offer it a chair. I want to understand how it might mix and mutate the colors and patterns of my life - make it bigger, more daring, more expansive. And I don’t know how to do those things yet, but I think this is an interesting starting place: focusing on the pursuit and its magnitude, instead of the end result. I want to shift from results and statistics and percentages- to sensation, experience, trying. I want to believe desire means something more than the end result it may yield. I want to trust that desire might not be malevolent or so easy to compartmentalize.
At the end of Petacca’s story she finally, blessedly, catches a guanaco. It’s a spectacular fight- two bodies viciously pursuing life from one another- but ultimately the massive creature falls limp after Petacca cinches a bite to its throat.
Fur from its shaggy neck hangs weightlessly from her mouth as she pants next to its hulking body, exhausted from the epic battle. After all of this, she has finally won- even if just for the next few days this kill will sustain her family. She has gone and done it again, despite odds she has never considered. She calls for her cubs, who locate her and come bounding down to eat their weight in the still-warm, barely-dead meat. She waits for them to finish before she begins to feed herself.
But before she can, something unexpected happens. Petacca notices another adult puma cresting the ridge a few hundred meters away: far too close for her territorial comfort, even if there wasn’t a fresh kill on the ground. It’s a female. More, it’s another mother. Her two cubs follow behind her sheepishly, and their family carefully pad towards Petacca, her cubs, and their hard-won meal. Filmmakers speculate that this other female may be one of Petacca’s siblings, but even still, this appears to be a rare occurrence at all, let alone to witness.
Petacca watches placidly, still panting, as the other mother approaches closer, and slowly hunches down to the ribboned red belly, taking hungry bites with her cubs.
It’s illogical. It’s uncommon. It’s against what we believe to know about pumas, their territory, their behavior, and it’s against our cultural definition of deserving. And yet here it is- happening. I found myself angry and protective on Petacca’s behalf. She worked for days to catch this meal for her family’s survival. She deserves to be territorial, protective, angry at the thought of giving it away so easily to someone else and their children. I imagined desire as cruel as mine haunting her, layered thick on her back, winding up to strike her for her foolishness.
She does none of these things. She watches as this other family, a mirror image of own, feeds on her kill. She appears content with it.
In some strange way it was a final token to consider, another dimension of the desire I thought I knew to be ferocious and insatiable; grasping and selfish; ravenous and angry. Perhaps it could metabolize into something new, like how this desire became generous.
She watches, serene, while the other mother eats her fill. Maybe someday she will return the favor. Maybe not.
But on those golden feral foothills, Petacca pulled up a new seat for desire, so that everyone could feast.
My desire is a ribboned red carpet, leading somewhere open and strange. My desire throws me in her backseat, adjusts her sunglasses, and says relax- we’re going to the beach.
My desire pushes at the seams of my construction, my beliefs, my life - like kids jumping into the corners of a bouncy castle – waiting for something to bust open, so she can look at me smugly and say See? There is more here for you to explore; this part of you can be bigger. My desire is a loose parakeet making a delightful mess. My desire worships unseen possibility.
My desire sends me on last-minute trips to the desert to see the sunset hit red rocks. My desire dates an improbable hippie drifter who teaches me betrayal and his mother’s enchilada recipe. My desire devours words, swallows, and waits strategically for a delicious sentence to materialize. My desire finds the best view of the mountains. My desire craves ripe pears on the 95th day of lockdown.
My desire feeds me.
My desire dares me to feast.
Thank you for reading Reminders for Humans. This was a long, twisty one and I’m still not sure if it made sense the way I wanted it to. But if you take nothing else from this, please go watch that NatGeo series and feel small and grateful to be alive on a planet where there are pumas and puma cubs and moony guanaco and sweet furry dogs that keep everyone in line.
xoxo, Sarah