Hurry up with the pictures, picture monkey!

In any case, yeah, I think there are intentionally evil animals. Lions & bears will kill cubs that aren't their own, as one example. If you mean "intentionally jerky animals that do bad things without any gain to themselves," I think so too. I once read that a whale (or maybe dolphin?) was spotted tossing its prey up and down for fun, and it was pretty clear that the prey was in a huge amount of pain. It doesn't seem that big of a stretch to think that animals could be jerks, based on the fact that they could do things for fun that caused harm to other animals.

With your lions and bears example, don't they kill other cubs so that their own genes can be dominant? So I'd argue that it's not exactly "evil," but makes sense in a gene-propogation sort of way. I suppose it's impossible to judge intent with animals, but I wouldn't exactly call that evil.

evil (or at least just very scary):

link

Seems like it all depends on how you define 'evil' behavior for animal. I think its pretty difficult to apply our own human moral judgments on an animal when they appear to be dictated by instincts developed over generations of learned behavior and needs to survive and propagate. Seems like to be evil is need to be a conscious choice.

All that said, I had a pissy little fish that would constantly eat its own babies. Never really understand that one.

Well, getting back to your "asshole dolphins" -- I mean, if I cut lots of people off on the road and tailgate like crazy, I'm doing it so that I can get home a little faster despite what it might do to make you uncomfortable while driving. That sort of makes sense to me, but it's still an asshole thing to do. Even taking the example of people who do mean things when they don't gain by it, I'm guessing (because obviously I've never done that, no...) that they get a small thrill from it -- so regardless, if you horrifically oversimplify, I'd say that people won't do anything without getting some gain out of it.

So extending that to animals, it makes sense (to me) that since humans can do something like that, couldn't animals? Simple mammals might, but I don't see why a mildly miswired smarter mammal wouldn't get pleasure out of seeing something else suffer. It's been shown that smart enough animals can understand pain that's not being inflicted on them... so given that they might be able to actually perform that, I don't see why you wouldn't get that happening with at least a few cases.

Personally, it seems like altruism that doesn't involve your own genes is the harder one to explain...

I don't know about dolphins, but I've definitely known some cats who were assholes.

While reading about autism, I learned that only humans 5 years and older and possibly some higher primates have the ability to view a situation from anyone's point of view other than their own. Therefore, most if not all animals have no conception of the impact of their actions on another individual. Conclusion: not evil, just stoopid.