Gang rape? Kidnapping? Sheesh, are we sure we didn't evolve from dolphins?
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A few years ago I was watching a team of animal activists and scientists save a baby polar bear from the arctic. I forget the whole story but the best part for me was when they took him home they treated him like a baby - literally. Nursing and swaddling it in their arms while it drank milk from a bottle. Then one day, after a year with humans, he was standing drinking milk as a person held the bottle and he attacked him.
It was hilarious.
It was funny because what the heck did you effen expect? It's a fricken polar bear! One of the most ferocious, efficient and powerful predators on the planet.
My brother and I just sat there laughing with a Homer "losers" moment.
I don't get we have to save an animal while in their natural habitat thing. We just love intervening. I guess.
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The other thing I hate is when journalists say, "killer bears."
No shit.
How is a bear a "killer?" It's what they do: They hunt.
Idiots. Journalists I mean.
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I love it. We intrude on their territory and then shoot them dead when they attack us. At which point, the media comes in with their "killer bears" nonsense.
Bears don't reflect on the ethics of their existence. They just pounce through thick ice with thousands of pounds of brute force and drag 2 ton walruses along the ice:
The dolphin thing does not surprise me; mammals are incredibly immoral by human standards. A vast majority of them kill for sport and amusement, as well, not to mention homosexuality (though that is practiced by everything from reptiles to insects).
ReplyDeleteMost bears aren't predators, only polar bears are. Most bears are omnivorous scavengers (and if you count pandas as a bear, as some biologists are once again doing, these are largely vegetarian). Meanwhile, dogs and cats are predators, yet were domesticated. In fact, everything I have read on animal domestication indicates that carnivores are the easiest to domesticate because of their higher intelligence and social nature. Domesticated herbivores are, to this day, the most difficult and least trainable domesticated animals.
But I suppose this wasn't about domestication, it was about mocking people who are trying to help a species that, if it goes extinct, would constitute the loss of the largest land predator in the world. Why does this matter? Besides the ecosystem they live in possibly being disrupted and resulting in problems for humans, there is millions of years of evolutionary biology in a polar bear.
If you understand that a vast amount of our technology comes from the direct study of animals and their evolutionary adaptations, you might appreciate why losing a species is like burning a book that you only have one copy of. Sure, it might have been a book not worth reading, or it could hold the greatest secrets ever imagined. More than likely, it just held the recipe for a medicine or two.
But who needs that when scientists are so successul with synthetically creating artificial drugs from thin air? Oh wait... pharmaceuticals are always (without any exception I can even think of) either analogs of biologically produced chemicals, or simply the original biologically produced chemical (usually its the synthesized one, because the natural drug's patent ran out and the pharmaceutical company wants to cash in by hyping a "new" product which is bioreactively indistinguishable).
It's amazing though to match the image created around them with how they really can be.
ReplyDeleteI thought I made that clear that we're talking Polar Bears.
I guess I didn't make it clear that I bet polar bears can be trained because they are predators. My bad, I bet it seemed like "Okay... if I wanted to watch 'Animal Planet,' I would."
ReplyDeleteI think dolphins are douchebags, but a lot of their species are endagered or even suspected extinct, so I also think there is a need to document and maybe even take genetic samples so that when we lose them, we still have some record of their biology.
Dolphins are douchebags.
ReplyDeleteDouchebag dolphins.
Now that's a first.
Register it.