April 27, 2009:
Life doesn't care about individuals.
It only troubles itself over the survival of species. It'll put individuals through torment and hell if there's any slim chance that by hanging on just one more hour, that individual will either pass along its genetic code, or become food for someone who will.
This old little cat, for example, who has the potential to linger for weeks without food, weak, dizzy, and suffering, because cats have somehow evolved with the code for slow, torturous deaths wired into their genome.