Vulture Grim Reaper cont'd

Well blogger's "add image" function seems to be not working for me, or the service is slow/down at the moment. So I'll just re-link yesterday's post here for reference.

Edit: Added text due to CapnG's comment about the vulture + grim reaper combo.

About the vulture grim reaper creature. Now that I think about it, it reminds me of a few combination of all things Grim Reaper and a dash of Froud's Dark Crystal. But mostly early childhood/early adult memories of a certain Gundam character with a sickle, a certain Eldar Exarch of Warhammer 40k, and the Grim Reaper(s) of the earliest Castlevania games that terrified us in the dark with their 8/16 bit pixelated goodness on the NES/Super NES. Then mix their essences together with bird-like creature in a bird creature world and voila~, a vulture grim reaper is born.

Maybe that's all what ideas are. A recombination of ideas already seen and done before, made anew to give a fresh new perspective on it. Go here if you want to read about the Words of Wisdom, which is an art history type of blog that sometimes include essays, transcripts of lectures, excerpts, and quotes of other famous or not-so-famous artists. That link above talks about ideas in that kind of way.

Anyways, as for vulture/grim reaper character, it reminded me of the infamous photo of a vulture on the ground waiting for a crying baby to die. Was probably one of Time's all-time famous photos or perhaps from National Geographic. It was about the (on-going?) starvation crisis that a country in Africa was going through. I don't remember the source but I'm hoping that most of you know of it. Google Image search "vulture looking at child".

It makes me wonder what a vulture goes through while watching something die before eating it.

Does it know from first hand experience of the most graceful ways of dying? I mean, sitting there watching its food dying takes a while, repeated each time per meal, over the course of a vulture's life, so it logs up a lot of time watching things die. One experience might have the vulture thinking "oh, how embarrassing. I wouldn't want to die like that." And maybe it has witnessed some amazing displays of grace and is so moved by that, so that it also knows how to act in a similar way when it comes to their turn to die. This line of thought also brings up a certain passage of a certain religious book that a friend brought up to me about how angels would violently rip the wicked soul's body out of the carcass with the feeling akin to that of being thrown through a bush full of thorns, while tenderly helping the good souls out of theirs. So I imagine sometimes maybe vultures do the same to their meals. That it eats the most graceful ones' flesh so tenderly while violently ripping another animal's flesh up if it had died embarrassingly.

Or does its stomach grumble as it sits there impatiently for it to die, while anticipating the wondrous taste of rotting flesh without the slightest sense of empathy?

After all vultures do wait awhile after something is dead before eating it. Is it out of respect for the dead, or to make sure that it's finally dead? Does it terrify them to eat something that's still alive when the vulture thought it was already dead? so is that why they wait, to be doubly sure?

Or do they wait and see souls leaving first, giving them a go-ahead signal to eat it on some mystical level?

Or because they savour the 'smell' long enough, or when it's fermented enough like distilled wine almost as if it's just right before eating?

Well, you get the gist of it. This is probably one of the good sides to over-analysing things to death. There's all kinds of ways of seeing into a character by asking questions like these. Then it's just a matter of choosing which one you like the best and going with it.