To most animal nonhumans, I highly recommend this PC game called The Wilds! It’s still in Early Access so it’s a bit funky at times, but it’s very good. $5 on Steam or you can torrent it. It’s an indie game developed by one man only, so I highly recommend supporting it.
It’s an animal simulator, and you can play as a grey wolf, grizzly bear, wild boar, mountain lion, red fox, raven, bald eagle, moose, red deer, or raccoon.
You hunt, find a mate, make a den, have pups, there’s unlockable skills, abilities, your animal has its own traits, and you can even customise the looks (e.g. different subspecies of wolves, different subspecies and coat colours of foxes), and a lot more since I’ve only briefly played it so far (personally I love playing as a fox since there’s already WolfQuest for wolves). All the screenshots are from the game page itself :)
A kestrel seeks revenge on a European Starling after it kills and eats her chicks. In the U.S, European starlings have a devastating impact on our native ecosystems in the entire United States. This species is known for their aggression towards other cavity nesting birds, outcompeting native species for nesting spots and food sources. They’ve been known to kill many native species from bluebirds, to woodpeckers, to kestrels. They are violent towards competing species, destroying their nests, and pecking holes in eggs laid by other birds. Not to mention, they also destroy crops and devour multitudes of grain each year.
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I wanted to portray something intense to kind of grab people’s attention to this problem. Most people don’t know how horribly invasive they are. While they’re pretty birds, they’re not meant to live in the United States. I wanted to use colors like red (to represent anger, sadness, revenge, betrayal) to portray what native species have to endure every year towards a bird that was never supposed to even come in contact with them. And colors like yellow (to represent wrongfully perceived innocence and guilt).
The spills of blood can be represented as the successful revenge the kestrel has, or, the multitudes of blood spilled from native species by European Starlings.
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Did you know? All the European Starlings in North America descended from 100 birds set loose in New York’s Central Park in the early 1890s. The birds were intentionally released by a group who wanted America to have all the birds that Shakespeare ever mentioned. It took several tries, but eventually the population took off. Today, more than 200 million European Starlings range from Alaska to Mexico.