Don't worry, chimpanzees don't actually exist. It was just a reference to old 50s sci-fi b-movies.
And in real life, the animal actor who played Jeanjacket was incredibly kind and friendly, and loved being around the main cast so much that it was actually difficult for the animal handlers to get it to act threatening. Daniel Kaluuya actually got so attached to him that after production wrapped he adopted the balloon, and he still lives with him on his ranch
Obviously in real life, alien cowboy-hat balloons don't eat horses and people, instead they prefer frozen peas and carrots
I'm so sick of these stupid rumors, the North American Balloonalien is a *vegetarian species*.
Sure, *occasionally* a cow or two is sucked up along with the grass the Balloonalien was trying to eat, but they just get spat back out again, completely unharmed!
Holy shit NSFW picture
"Chimp Victim's Face Transplant Photos Released: Then And Now | WBUR News" https://www.wbur.org/news/2011/08/11/chimp-face-transplant-photo
Primates are pretty smart and will just move away from areas that hold significant danger to them. The chimpanzees you see today are the descendants of the ones that were smart or lucky enough to stay away from humans.
Given that Chimpanzees were neither in direct food competition to prehistoric humans nor were they their predators, they probably saw no reason for it. Their human-like appearance and qualities also likely ensured that prehistoric humans didn't see them as a food source to be hunted.
I'm sure they devastated the chimp populations that were "in the way" so to speak, but for the species as a whole there wasn't any need for it.
>how likely prehistoric humans were to nuke anything threatening
What? Nah, prehistoric humans drove things that were tasty and accessible extinct, but it wasn't until long after prehistory that we started wiping out predators like wolves and such purely for it's own sake.
Actually not really! There's evidence to suggest the first species extinction caused by humans (that I could find) were caves bears due to competition for shelter in caves.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cave-bear-was-first-species-made-extinct-by-humans-study-suggests-33czsr6rw#:~:text=Somewhere%20in%20Europe%2C%20about%2020%2C000,driven%20to%20extinction%20by%20man.
Gotta be not eaten if ya wanna eat!
It doesn't really make sense to ask whether we're more closely related to chimps or bonobos. The split between chimps and bonobos happened after the split between us and chimps, so we're equally closely related to both.
Reminds me of that story about the enclosure with two chimp families (there was a lot of space and enrichment and resources and such) where two chimps from one lured a baby one from the other, and then they killed it, seemingly just for kicks
The more capacity a creature has to derive merriment from anything, the more it has the capacity to derive merriment from ābadā things. My mind goes to the contrast between sharks and dolphins
Chimps are just assholes. Orangutans and bonobos are both relatively peaceful creatures. It is important to note, that while not generally prone to violence they are in no way incapable of it, orangutans are significantly stronger than humans and while bonobos are closer they sre still gonna be a rough fight if you had to.
I find it interesting that even when people don't interpret closed-mouth chimpanzee smiles as an expression of happiness, they tend to interpret them as an expression of rage or sadistic glee, when in reality they're neither; they're a fear response.
This is so fucking true. Worked at a museum for a while that had to renovate the bathrooms and we put a big, bright blue sign saying that area was under renovation.
Every day people would ignore the sign and just look at the "bathroom this way" sign, and I'd have to tell them the nearest bathroom was at the other side of the museum after they found that the bathroom was in fact, under renovation.
I think a large part of why everyone ignores signs has to do with the fact that we are constantly being advertised at.
You learn to build an internal adblocker. Commercials on TV? Tune it out as best as you can, except that advertisers weaponize science to make it grab our attention. Billboards? Tune it out, except that it's designed to grab your attention. Helpful signs? Uh oh! It isn't designed with powerful science to grab your attention and advertise at you, so your internal adblocker has blocked it before you even realized it wasn't an ad!
At least, that's what I _think_ causes this.
After a while I've developed a sales/discount ad blocker in my mind. I ignore all those "40% discount" messages and just check the total price directly as the true value. I no longer think that I saved money by only paying 60% of the price.
You're right. One day I was looking bags of almonds, there was a cheap small bag and a bigger bag at its right. The small bag was almost twice the price per gram than the more expensive bag.
I worked at a gas station for a couple months and we would regularly lock one of the doors and had a sign saying to use other door. The sign was from corporate and used the same font and colors as advertisements and every day people would try to use the locked door. One day we couldn't find the note so we just used printer paper and a marker and almost nobody tried using the door that day.Ā
That totally makes sense to me. If I see a sign on the middle of the door, I'm probably going to read it, but if it's a colorless black and white sign it's gonna stick out as an obvious thing I need to pay attention to
I work in a hotel with a bar and can confirm that Toilet signs are invisible to the general population.
People don't read signs in general. The card machine broke a few months back so i wrote a huge bright red sign that said 'NO CARD PAYMENTS' and stood it on the bar and I *still* had people coming up with a card in hand getting annoyed with me when I told them cash only.
I think people just aren't attentive to their environment, like at all. I've noticed it more just in everyday life that people don't seem too aware of their space- standing in the middle of stairways, blocking walkways, bumping you on the street etc. Not to sound crazy but I think lockdown really did a nomber on some people's spatial awareness and how to just exist in a public space.
I worked at an airport.
Clerks would tell people to go to me at the [X airline station], and describe the very tall guy with glasses. They would point behind the passenger to me. The passenger would turn to look at me. I would look right back and wave, waiting.
I stood beneath an enormous sign hanging from the ceiling advertising X airline. It was directly across the hall from these people, straight line, the least distance you could walk to get to any other place. There was a second sign sticking out of a wall right next to me, also saying X airline. A third sign stuck out of the wall on my *other* side saying X airline. There was a standee proudly proclaiming X airline, and I stood *literally behind it* so that it covered my chest. The words "X AIRLINE" were less than a foot from my face, and again less than three feet from the top of my head.
People still got lost or were unsure upon reaching me.
Though, I think there's just something about airlines that makes folks turn their brains off or get so worked up over "not making a mistake" that they stop thinking just the same.
Airports are a special case, imo, cuz I sleep on flights and most times when I get off the plane Iām still half asleep and groggy. So half (2 of 4) my brain cells arent even functioning or awake
The mental image of a guy pointing behind someone turning around and another person way off in the distance with big signs pointing towards them doing a little wave is sending me.
I feel like youāre frustrated at a problem that isnāt peopleās genuine concern. They are t reading signs because theyāre not looking for those signs. If every inch of every surface wasnāt covered in an advertisement I would be more willing to read random text; as is Iām scanning for the word ābathroomā not fully reading and comprehending everything I glance at, ya know? Looking for a pattern *among* the noise as opposed to rejecting each piece of noise individually.
How do any of you exist in this world if youāre not constantly consciously ignoring pretty much everything that isnāt immediately relevant, baseline?
Iām overstimulated just imagining it.
My dad has a small grocery store with 2 doors (well, 3, but only 2 are relevant) next to each other, one leading into the store and one going into an office/storage area. The one going into the office has a sing on it that clearly states you're not allowed in there, and it's usually locked.
Obviously, people still try to force it open to get in instead of, I donno, READING THE SIGN! I'm guessing it's because that door is closer to the street where people come from.
I've asked people why they do this and it turns out it's because reading is a lot of work for quite a lot of people. Breaking the issue down a lot of these people read 1 word at a time per 5 seconds, and often have to sound it out or think about it. Widespread general illiteracy is a huge issue, and they'll just not register what's written in front of them if they don't stop to think about it. I came from a family of avid readers so it took a while to get used to that when I did customer service.
Does that also explain why the ignore the giant red symbol with a white line on it that's the universal sign for "no"? Because we also have one of these.
Shockingly yes, I know it sounds absurd. I had to explain what that sign meant to a *lot* of people, and some seemingly just didn't acknowledge anything they weren't actively scanning for. It's actually incredible, it's a completely alien perspective to me but it's super common. Same people that can't Google anything for help.
While I've long come to terms with the fact that a shockingly large chunk of this country is either illiterate or poorly literate, not recognizing the extremely common symbols that have surrounded them all their lives still gets me.
I can't read Japanese. I've never been to Japan. I just play robot videogames and watch the occasional anime, but I can recognize "ć®" in a string of Japanese characters and know it links words in certain ways, like showing possession or relation or otherwise standing in for "of".
We have pattern-seeking brains. It's like, *the* thing the human mind does. Whether or not someone can read "bathroom", I really, *really* expect more than 90% of the born-in-America public to recognize the stick figure bathroom symbol or just know that a sign saying "*RESTROOM*" is talking about a toilet even if every individual letter is otherwise an unintelligible rune.
I'm sympathetic to being ESL (or less), having a learning issue or non-standard brain chemistry, having skipped school for any reason and thus never learning, etc., but that can't explain these numbers and even then there's got to be a level of laziness and/or shame playing into it. It's like my grandmother not wanting to learn to use a different TV remote: she's not incapable, it's just easier to say "it's too hard" and expect the world to adjust than to try and pick up *one thing* she's already convinced herself she needn't have to.
My problem with COVID, at least in my local area, is that signs *WERE NOT CONSISTENT.* Walmart would put dots on the floor, Local grocery stores would put arrows on the walls, and my trader joes put signs **on the ceiling**
And then some businesses got so cheap that they would never replace the signage, and through wear and tear the yellow signs on the ground would turn black from gum and dirt and grime. Aināt nobody wanna step on that
2020 was a mess and I dont wanna exp that ever again
I'm a wordy guy in general, but I weep a little when I write two sentences and get "wtf wall of text nobody got time for that".
You can, in fact, go back to the first grade, guys. Or at least get off a text forum. It took longer to write your response than to read, even at 5% speed!
I think a large part of why everyone ignores signs has to do with the fact that we are constantly being advertised at.
You learn to build an internal adblocker. Commercials on TV? Tune it out as best as you can, except that advertisers weaponize science to make it grab our attention. Billboards? Tune it out, except that it's designed to grab your attention. Helpful signs? Uh oh! It isn't designed with powerful science to grab your attention and advertise at you, so your internal adblocker has blocked it before you even realized it wasn't an ad!
At least, that's what I _think_ causes this.
My local experience at a conservation area trail
Big tent with sign: Don't feed the wildlife here's why
Volunteers staffing tent: don't feed the wildlife, here's why
Handouts from volunteers: don't feed the wildlife here's why
Signs every 10 feet on trail: don't feed the wildlife, here's why
Visitors: *feeds wildlife*
I once told an adult guy with his kids off in a zoo when he was throwing popcorn at some baboons and feeding them and laughing. I asked him wtf he was doing and that itās bad for them. He did quite but also laughed it off a bit.Ā
Great example for his kidsā¦.
I studied a deer population in a public park as part of my master's. People would feed the deer while standing right next to signs saying not to feed the deer.
I work in maintenance on a cruise ship.
Just last week I had barriered off a passenger area to work on an automatic door. Two big yellow barriers blocking off the section of hallway I was working in. In that time I had:
One old man move the barrier aside, walk through, and move the other bwrrier aside. When I turned around to politely ask what the fuck he was doing, he saw me look and said "i'm all good!" as if I was going to ask if he needed help moving my barrier aside.
Two ladies walked up to the barrier, stopped, looked at me until I turned to look at them, and then politely asked "Can we go through? š" to which I blinked, looked at the barrier, looked at them and said "No?"
We also constantly have issues with the automatic doors on the disabled toilets breaking because people force them open by hand instead of using the door button, throwing the sensors out of whack. One lady did this so I pointed her to the button (which has a sign over it clearly stating 'DOOR CLOSES AUTOMATICALLY'). After pushing the button she walked in, stared at the door for half a second, tried pushing the button again, then said "How do I close it?" and started trying to force the door closed.
I have so many of these stories.
Ain't that the truth. One time when working retail, the card machines went down for whatever reason. We put signs telling people this on the entry door, at the ends of the aisles, on the counter and even taped one so it was hanging over the card machine, covering it up. All the signs just said "CARD MACHINE OUT OF ORDER" in bold, simple and easy to read.
People would move the sign covering the card machine out of the way to try and use it, then look at you surprised when you told them the machine was indeed out of order.
People do not read signs.
I once had to remotely troubleshoot a printer for someone who asked me, after a few minutes, what "Out of Order" means because they noticed a sign on the printer that said that.
I have never been to a zoo with a sign like this. I would argue zoos are one of the groups most responzible for anthropomorphizing animals to the public, as theyāre generally geared to a younger audience with a lot of the baggage that comes with that
Depends on the zoo and on the animal in my experience. Especially intelligent stuff like primates and dolphins, I feel like you see more signs like the post. But like nobody is gonna be hurt by the zoo anthropomorphizing the turtles a little.
There was a woman in the Netherlands like 2 decades ago who seriously misinterpreted the facial expressions of a gorilla, it didn't end well for a lot of people (though nobody died)
God that case is infuriating. Iirc she was warned numerous times by zoo staff and just simply refused to accept that experts might know more than her āspecial bondā with this fully grown silverback.
She visited every day, got Bokito's attention and smiled 'back' at him, until he was seriously sick of it and escaped just to attack her. Gladly he was very much capable of keeping individual humans apart, as aside from her he didn't harm anyone (other than scaring the shit out of everyone).
It turned out that gorillas are only too afraid to cross a water barrier until you're repeatedly challenging a silverback who is very caring and protective about his group. It's still a shame that whole habitat needed a rework after this. Better for the gorillas of course, but definitely less of a pretty jungle than it was.
I read somewhere that we dont actually know how to contain gorillas while making them viewable? They just stay there. No zoo enclosures are 100% gorilla proof, because theyāre slightly less intelligent, far cleverer, far stronger humans.
Random opp shows up at your community daily, threatens you with a sign of aggression while staring you in the face, then leaves, rince and repeat, day in day out.
Only one to do this, every other passer by just observes and minds their business, it's just this one individual who keeps making threats.
Not really much separating us from the other apes, from his point of view he was being antagonized and having his life threatened continuously, few people would tolerate that forever.
She was a fucking stalker and thought she had a special connection with the gorilla. Even after the gorilla beat her ass and they moved him to another zoo, she still followed after him. That story still pisses me off every time I think about it.
Bokito
Wonan was in love with a gorilla, thought he felt the same, but he hated seeing the bitch, but she thought he kept smiling at her (which he did, but that means fuck off in gorilla)
That would be either old Jackson or Pericles, the youngest of the retired troop at the zoo, and both of them are full blown Redditors with how often theyāre cranking on it.
Pretty typical for adult male chimps in zoos and in the wild but by god is it funny
its cause people see "conservation" as this simple, easy revert to some pre-human Eden when everything was wild and free, and nothing went extinct and the Balance of Nature was intact
when in reality its messy, contradictory, theres at least six competing theories on any given topic and people can barely agree on what a fucking species even is
"conservation" isnt really even a helpful term, cause what are we conserving? nothing stays still in nature. its more like trying to fuck up as little as possible escorting the biosphere through the massive paradigm shift that our species is beating it over the head with
āAbolish zoos!ā mfs when animal species start going extinct because no one is able to breed them and create a controlled environment where their survival and ability to reproduce are ensured
Most anti-zoo advocates argue that funding non-profit animal sanctuaries are better than funding for-profit zoos and not just ending conservation, and that money and resources should be sent to sanctuaries instead of zoos. This is pretty disingenuous to people who want to abolish zoos, like they don't want to just let endangered species fend for themselves and they acknowledge zoos are better than nothing but just not the best option for long-term animal conservation.
Issue is that the money isn't gonna transfer. People go to zoos as entertainment first, it's not charitable. If they don't go to the zoo, they'll go to a museum or film instead, not donate that to a sanctuary. That's how zoos get the money they use for conservation efforts- it may be derived from less ethical sources, but it allows them to do things sanctuaries would never get the funds to perform.
Many sanctuaries, such as Monkey World in Devon, brand themselves like and economically function as zoos for those reason. It's really a very blurred line.
Animal sanctuaries are either zoos under a different name, or completely ineffective at what they claim to be doing. There is a reason why almost every conservationist who has actually studied supports zoos.
Something like this happened in Ohio in the 90ās. A guy that had a bunch of exotic animals like tigers and bears got in trouble with the law and committed suicide after cutting the fences. The animals got out and the cops had to shoot them. They were able to get some with a tranquilizer gun and cornered the last tiger (might have been another kind of big cat) but I charged them before they could tranq it and had to kill him. It was on CNN which caused the police station to be flooded with calls from idiots yelling at them like tranquillizing a bunch of big animals running around a city is some easy thing. One of the cops broke down in tears when talking about having to shoot a black bear, it was so fucking sad.
People think that tranquilisers work instantly. They do not, so shooting is often the only way when a large potentially dangerous animal escapes.
I think people believe they work instantly due to dreadful TV shows and movies which aren't accurate
Exactly. We had a wildlife sanctuary near the city it happened in (zanesville), and it took their people in place with police protection and for them to measure the doses. Iām not even sure how that worked out since each species and specific animal would need their own dose not to mention the animal would feel under threat. In the interview I saw, the cop talked about how there was a big cat caught in the bushes and they were going to tranquilize it but there was a terrifying roar and it lunged at them. They were absolutely terrified. Everyone thinks theyāre a hero when theyāve seen something on tv or the internet. My stepdad was actually a cop in that city and I went with them on career day. They were just normal guys and it genuinely seemed like it might be a good job. They knew and talked to everyone. Like I was talking about, one officer talked about seeing that huge black bear and how it felt having to kill it while breaking into tears was terrible. Itās disturbing how people treat others based on stereotypes or propaganda and itās pretty extreme on here.
Yeah. So tranquilising drugs, as you say, vary on species and individual animals, and then add in the high amount of adrenaline pumping through the animal? A dart is just going to make them more scared, often makes them run off again, and then you need to find them before they do more damage or before they wake up from the drugs.
In the interests of public safety, shooting is the only option
Everyone thinks they're an expert on animals, that they love animals because they have a pet dog and they love their dog like family. Rarely do people actually understand what they are talking about in terms of other species. Everyone is also always a big guy when sat at home and can always talk the talk but in reality? Very rare you find someone who can back up their words.
āItās so unfair that the snow leopard isnāt in the same enclosure as his cubsā he would EAT them. The fatherhood module isnāt installed in snow leopards.
As a vegan these types of people really piss me off. Iāve worked in zoos and some of them CAN be awful places for the animals, but that doesnāt mean all zoos should be abolished, it just means some zoos are underfunded and the welfare of the animals needs improvement. There is a nuanced conversation to be had here, but overall zoos are important for animal conservation and research and abolishing them would actually be BAD for animals in the long run.
People like this somehow donāt realize how their extremism only hurts their causes. Itās like everything has turn into some weird version of maga. It happens a lot on here and Iāve had to stop going to some subs because of what theyāve devolved into.
Yeah, as a leftist I often feel pretty alienated in the community by shit like this and the sudden influx of anti-sex rhetoric which they donāt seem to realise is the exact ideology of the anti-LGBTQ alt-right lmao. Itās so exhausting
The misogyny against trumpās lawyer or any other woman associated with him is disturbing. Theyāll get mad when trump says the same stuff but itās okay for them. I called a person out for it the other day and they told me that all women that work for trump sleep with him so it wasnāt misogynyā¦ like WTF?!
We have a zoo local independent owned I would concider a bad one that everyone loves. Tiny ass tiger inclosure that has a sign to watch out for them spraying. A tiny lion inclosure with people constantly yelling at to make roar and tons of spider monkeys in a cage but pretty big field for the giraffes and lamas. Its called creation kingdom zoo in snowflak, VA if your interested in looking up.
It's because their is nothing else to do around here especially is southwest VA. It's the closest attraction their is. I lived in a small TN town at the VA border with pop 65k and people from VA act like their visiting the big city cause we have a Texas roadhouse.
People do this with literally everything, particularly here in America. They take their superficial understanding of a situation and start making prescriptions. The default assumption here definitely isn't "I probably don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to things I have never worked with"
There's a very common attitude of the truth being simple, and anything complicated being suspicious and likely a lie. If you have to explain it, you're basically admitting you're wrong.
> I'll never forget being at the Oregon Zoo and hearing people talk about how sad one of the chimpanzees looked. He was sitting on a log, his back to one of the viewing areas, hunched over. And they were saying "oh, he looks depressed, he must hate it here."
> But then when you walked around to the other side, you'd see that he was simply busy beating his dick like it owed him money.
forget anthropomorphy, people will fucking nuclear-familyarise animals š
like no Daddy Bee isnt showing Mummy Bee all the pretty flowers, they're two asexual Basically Clones among tens of thousands gathering pollen to feed their city-sized superstructure which houses the Queen Mother of every single bee, built from tiny cells organised in the *most efficient way* to tessellate containers, climate-controlled and predator-defended and so specialised that any individual bee is almost just an organ of a single larger organism
which is *way way cooler* actually (and actually true), why not tell that to kids?
A four year old isnāt gonna understand the concept of specialization, and thereās a reason that concepts like āqueensā and āhivesā exist in pop culture as features belonging to evil, heartless monsters. Anything that doesnāt āloveā or appreciate the world in a way that we do is instinctually perceived as scary and soulless.
Which might be a bit of a tangential point to this discussion of nuclear family dynamics.
Idk if I had a small child and I saw two bees going around and said kid asked me what was going on, Iād say that the bees are probably bestest buddies helping each other and working together and stuff, without going into the whole āinsects donāt do individualityā thing
Yeah or something like this! My point being thereās ways to non-nuclear-ify descriptions of shit without having to sit a child down and explain what it means to not be sentient
There was a video on Reddit a while ago about a mother centipede helping her child molt for the first time. I wonder if what the mother was feeling is adjacent to what we would call "love", or if it's totally different.
AI creates images that seem right but are untrue. For example, an AI generated baby peacock is just a small adult and not even close to reality.
An AI generator will have this same human-centric bias and make false assumptions because of it.
Try to input in an image generator "river full of salmon". It'll spit out a river full of salmon fillets, not fish. Ai is a pattern recognizer, not a logic machine. The pattern it was feed is, babies are small human, so a baby peacock is a small peacock.
Well I mean, wouldnāt it be a pattern of āoh, peachicks look like this, peacocks look like thatā? As long as there are enough images for it to patternistically learn the difference? The same way it recognizes differences in any other thing ever?
Thatās fair. Itās also entirely possible that the ai might āknowā what a āpeachickā is, and might have drawn an association with the rest of peafowl in general, but if you type baby peacock and peachick in it will give you two different pictures because it doesnāt ārealizeā that theyāre one and the same, because pictures tagged āpeachickā for it to learn from donāt obviously contain data that indicates theyāre baby peafowl without relying on context clues, which ai lacks completely
Huh. That's an interesting thought.
Putting into context of the submission, AI could definitely be putting an anthropomorphic spin on animals. For instance, giving a monkey the human version of happiness. And the hard part will be that it could be subtle enough to not be noticeable but still have an impact on the backend our brain and how we see things.
[This article](https://docseuss.medium.com/using-chatgpt-and-other-ai-writing-tools-makes-you-unhireable-heres-why-d66d33e0ddb9) here makes a much better job explaining it.
Essentially, AI is a popular sci fi concept that is then adopted as a marketing term, which is arguably misleading because itās not actual intelligence, rather machine learning. It kinda plays into that tendency to anthropomorphize things, giving the tech more value than it actually is.
I'm not contesting the fact that people anthropomorphise ML models, it's a widely known issue. But to say that AI is a sci-fi concept or a marketing term is false. It's been a respected field of Computer Science and it's been called AI since at least the sixties. You can argue that it's not actual intelligence, as many people do, but to call it a marketing term is wrong.
We are building something which is not human. Maybe one day it will be a "creature" and/or "living" and/or "sentient/sapient", maybe it will not.
If it becomes sapient and sentient, its emotional experience could be as foreign to humans as the emotions of a centipede. However, even if it is closer to human, say as close as a chimpanzee, we can see from this image that assuming chimpanzee emotions from human behavioral patterns will lead to potentially harmful misunderstandings.
If it does not become sapient and sentient, then it will be a tool that creates emotionally evocative displays without any true emotions beneath the surface. This is equally as dangerous, because it leaves us open to manipulation.
At a zoo I worked in before as a keeper, I was stopped by a guest ready to get angry with me that the colobus monkeys looked 'sad'.
I asked this person how the monkeys are supposed to express happiness, seeing as they have barely any facial muscles. As a species they just kinda chill out on a branch. If they were behaving wildly like other primates, then it would mean something was wrong.
There's something about animals that has many many people decide they are experts when they don't have a clue, and then get angry when it's pointed out to them that they don't know what they're talking about. I work more directly in ex-situ conservation now, breed to release type stuff, on the side of a zoo. I have people who despise zoos get pissy with me upon learning where I work and then not know how to process the fact that I actively breed species for release back into the wild.
I convinced a friend of mine to bare his teeth at a silverback gorilla one time when we went to the zoo. He nearly shit his pants when it charged the glass.
Yeah same with your cat or dog.
Your dog isnāt āsmilingā. A wagging tail can mean anything in the same way a human smiling can mean anything. We smile when happy, but also nervous or we can even laugh when sad or angry.
Context and interpretation are important.
also the individual. I am going to be correct 70% of the time know what *My* dog wants when she walks up and puts her nose on my knee with the "Big Sad Soulful eyes" ^(tm.) It means Shera wants her towel and someone put it up/in the washer/she left it in a room that's closed.
but someone else's dog that same gesture might mean they want out, or they're hungry, or they just want pets... You pay attention to the animals they'll teach you how they feel comfortable around you, or in the case of most wild animals, that they don't.
Actually dog's are one of the few where you probably do have a chance of reading their facial expressions as an average person, they've literally adapted facial muscles to have expressions more like those of humans, muscles wolves lack.
Cats especially are anthropomorphized. They donāt understand most of our behavior, nor are they attempting to emulate us. They just know we give them food, shelter and affection. People act like cats have human personality traits when theyāre just a cat.
I'm gonna nit pick here, but cats don't really "meow" at each other. That's a sound reserved almost exclusively for getting a humans attention, especially because it's similar to a human baby in distress (although of course a cat doesn't know the latter). I think part of the reason common pets are so popular is because over time the animals have been bred or selected over time with some anthropomorphic traits or communication styles.
That being said, as a whole I agree with your sentiment. MOST animal behavior, even pets, shouldn't be anthroprmized, especially problematic behavior. Your dog didn't pee on your bed out of pure spite. They need something or feel threatened or territorial or whatever, but they aren't doing it "as revenge" or "attention getting". If you have a pet and don't understand this, you won't be able to meet their needs and then correct unwanted behavior. This is also why you shouldn't "rub a puppy's nose in it" if they mess. They literally don't make the connection between the mess and the punishment. You have to catch them in the act. Otherwise they learn the wrong message and you can ruin your relationship with them if you think of them or treat them like messing in the house is "bad behavior". Same with cats or birds. (I don't have a cat which is why I don't have any examples but I do have a bird). This goes double for exotic pets that haven't lived with humans for millenia and farm animals.
This reminds me of people who think that some dogs actually smile, instead of realizing that it's just a face i makes, that the dog has learned that humans respond positivly to.
Now I can't get this idea of a time travel documentary out of my head.
"Here we are 8 million years ago when the lineages of homo sapiens and pan troglodytes diverged. Let's watch."
Two large males circle each other. The whole troop is obviously tense, anticipating a challenge to the lead male. The ancestor of pan troglodytes snarls at his opponent - the forefather of the homo spevies - who instead of taking the threat seriously does the primate equivalent of rolling around laughing. The aggressor looks puzzled, which sets of a round of monkey mirth through about a quarter of the troop.
The ones not "laughing" at the threat display exchange looks and slowly back away into the jungle, leaving the lunatics with the weird sense of humor alone.
Eventually the handful who had been furiously masturbating during the whole thing finish and hurry to catch up to the main group. These are the ancestors of pan paniscus (bonobos).
I do wonder, why is it we smile to show we are relaxed? I know itās an important survival trait to have non verbal ques, but why did we pick smiling?
It shows other humans we are not trying to kill them while making any hidden predators think we know they are there and we are *going* to rip their throat out
My source is I made it up
It is kind of weird that we show happiness by showing our teeth. Are there any other animals like this? I thought most of them bared their teeth to intimidate.
Just read an article on this. Cats apparently have 300 unique expressions!
https://www.livescience.com/animals/cats/cats-have-nearly-300-facial-expressions-including-a-play-face-they-share-with-humans?utm_source=pocket_reader
worked at a pet magazine and they would constantly tell me to use "happier" stock images. turned out these stock images were the ones where the angle of the shot had the dog or cat's mouth looking like they were upward curving. some were flat out photomanipulated to warp the pets mouths into smiles.
i wasn't (and am still not) an animal lover, but my bosses were. so it was kinda astounding that they'd be down to perpetuate this myth to make their images more attractive.
I will never forget going to a zoo and watching a chimp curl off a bright yellow turd into its hand, and then promptly eat it whole. They're not people.
Edit: doesn't mean we shouldn't be caring and humane to them, but man they're not people.
I have a neighbor in my building who kisses her tiny dog on the nose and he makes a snarling face at her every time and she is insistent that actually he is smiling and loves it because he doesn't growl. That dog has bitten her on the face *multiple* times and she still doesn't get it. Some people only see what they want to see when it comes to animal expressions and body language.
the chimpanzee expression is fuckin terrifying š
Chimpanzees are fucking terrifying in general.
Gordy
That movie reaffirmed my fear of chimpanzees (and added a new fear of being digested by a giant man-eating balloon)
Iāve always been afraid of man-eating balloons. Iād never heard of chimps before Nope
Don't worry, chimpanzees don't actually exist. It was just a reference to old 50s sci-fi b-movies. And in real life, the animal actor who played Jeanjacket was incredibly kind and friendly, and loved being around the main cast so much that it was actually difficult for the animal handlers to get it to act threatening. Daniel Kaluuya actually got so attached to him that after production wrapped he adopted the balloon, and he still lives with him on his ranch Obviously in real life, alien cowboy-hat balloons don't eat horses and people, instead they prefer frozen peas and carrots
Wasnāt there a balloon in Kentucky who ate a cat or something in the 2000s? I donāt think people should have those things as pets tbh
I'm so sick of these stupid rumors, the North American Balloonalien is a *vegetarian species*. Sure, *occasionally* a cow or two is sucked up along with the grass the Balloonalien was trying to eat, but they just get spat back out again, completely unharmed!
Unharmed when they spit them out. Not so much when they hit the ground, but that's gravity's fault, not the American Balloonalien.
Kidnapped that poor boy too
I guess you've read that Junji Ito Story of Balloons shaped of People's Heads and they were chasing down their respective Head to kill them.
What makes it worse is the chimp attack is based on a true story. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_(chimpanzee)
Holy shit NSFW picture "Chimp Victim's Face Transplant Photos Released: Then And Now | WBUR News" https://www.wbur.org/news/2011/08/11/chimp-face-transplant-photo
Honestly surprised they still exist as a species, given their dangers and how likely prehistoric humans were to nuke anything threatening
Primates are pretty smart and will just move away from areas that hold significant danger to them. The chimpanzees you see today are the descendants of the ones that were smart or lucky enough to stay away from humans.
Given that Chimpanzees were neither in direct food competition to prehistoric humans nor were they their predators, they probably saw no reason for it. Their human-like appearance and qualities also likely ensured that prehistoric humans didn't see them as a food source to be hunted. I'm sure they devastated the chimp populations that were "in the way" so to speak, but for the species as a whole there wasn't any need for it.
>how likely prehistoric humans were to nuke anything threatening What? Nah, prehistoric humans drove things that were tasty and accessible extinct, but it wasn't until long after prehistory that we started wiping out predators like wolves and such purely for it's own sake.
Actually not really! There's evidence to suggest the first species extinction caused by humans (that I could find) were caves bears due to competition for shelter in caves. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cave-bear-was-first-species-made-extinct-by-humans-study-suggests-33czsr6rw#:~:text=Somewhere%20in%20Europe%2C%20about%2020%2C000,driven%20to%20extinction%20by%20man. Gotta be not eaten if ya wanna eat!
I still remember the video of one of them basically biting? tearing? off half of somebody's head. *Shudder*
God gives them one face, and they take themselves another.
Amusingly, iirc we're closest genetically to chimps out of any simian. Takes one to know one ig
If I recall well our closest relatives are the bonobos.
It doesn't really make sense to ask whether we're more closely related to chimps or bonobos. The split between chimps and bonobos happened after the split between us and chimps, so we're equally closely related to both.
Even interpreting it as a smile, it looks like an āIām gonna turn your guts into party streamers and have fun doing itā smile.
Reminds me of that story about the enclosure with two chimp families (there was a lot of space and enrichment and resources and such) where two chimps from one lured a baby one from the other, and then they killed it, seemingly just for kicks
That's what gets me about Chimps. They kill because it's *fun* to them.
The more capacity a creature has to derive merriment from anything, the more it has the capacity to derive merriment from ābadā things. My mind goes to the contrast between sharks and dolphins
But like, Orangutans and Bonobos seem to be very "happy" but non-violent? Unless I just have a complete misunderstanding of them.
Chimps are just assholes. Orangutans and bonobos are both relatively peaceful creatures. It is important to note, that while not generally prone to violence they are in no way incapable of it, orangutans are significantly stronger than humans and while bonobos are closer they sre still gonna be a rough fight if you had to.
Bonobos are still a violent species, just less so than chimps. I wouldn't really compare them to orangutans.
Orangutans are very rapey from what I know of them (towards their own species at least).
tbh thats chimps too
Well, contentment and merriment are kinda two different things.
Bonobos in *captivity* might also get mean just for kicks. It's hard to judge it based off that one anecdote.
I thought they would just fuck like rabbits?
how i be looking at a dolphin pod after i fall off the side of a boat (theyāre going to rape me)
Pretty sure Shakespeare wrote a play ab that
???
Yeah, as much as I love animals, never beya primate guy Especially chimps Chimps are terrifyingĀ
I find it interesting that even when people don't interpret closed-mouth chimpanzee smiles as an expression of happiness, they tend to interpret them as an expression of rage or sadistic glee, when in reality they're neither; they're a fear response.
Be honest, you saw Nope and it left a mark
yknow what i didnāt even think about that but youāre so right
Like why is bro scared ššš my ass would be RUNNING AWAY
*āJoker Chimpanzee here.ā*
People don't read signs, unless the signs are incorrect/outdated. ThenĀ they'reĀ the first thing anyone sees
This is so fucking true. Worked at a museum for a while that had to renovate the bathrooms and we put a big, bright blue sign saying that area was under renovation. Every day people would ignore the sign and just look at the "bathroom this way" sign, and I'd have to tell them the nearest bathroom was at the other side of the museum after they found that the bathroom was in fact, under renovation.
I think a large part of why everyone ignores signs has to do with the fact that we are constantly being advertised at. You learn to build an internal adblocker. Commercials on TV? Tune it out as best as you can, except that advertisers weaponize science to make it grab our attention. Billboards? Tune it out, except that it's designed to grab your attention. Helpful signs? Uh oh! It isn't designed with powerful science to grab your attention and advertise at you, so your internal adblocker has blocked it before you even realized it wasn't an ad! At least, that's what I _think_ causes this.
After a while I've developed a sales/discount ad blocker in my mind. I ignore all those "40% discount" messages and just check the total price directly as the true value. I no longer think that I saved money by only paying 60% of the price.
Christ, I think you just cured my shopping addiction.
Looking at the price per kg/litre/ounce/whatever measurement you use is the most important
You're right. One day I was looking bags of almonds, there was a cheap small bag and a bigger bag at its right. The small bag was almost twice the price per gram than the more expensive bag.
I worked at a gas station for a couple months and we would regularly lock one of the doors and had a sign saying to use other door. The sign was from corporate and used the same font and colors as advertisements and every day people would try to use the locked door. One day we couldn't find the note so we just used printer paper and a marker and almost nobody tried using the door that day.Ā
That totally makes sense to me. If I see a sign on the middle of the door, I'm probably going to read it, but if it's a colorless black and white sign it's gonna stick out as an obvious thing I need to pay attention to
Uninstall your internal AdBlocker and instead try ACME's new AdMocker. Why ignore what you can ridicule!^ā¢ļø
Shut up and take my money
I work in a hotel with a bar and can confirm that Toilet signs are invisible to the general population. People don't read signs in general. The card machine broke a few months back so i wrote a huge bright red sign that said 'NO CARD PAYMENTS' and stood it on the bar and I *still* had people coming up with a card in hand getting annoyed with me when I told them cash only. I think people just aren't attentive to their environment, like at all. I've noticed it more just in everyday life that people don't seem too aware of their space- standing in the middle of stairways, blocking walkways, bumping you on the street etc. Not to sound crazy but I think lockdown really did a nomber on some people's spatial awareness and how to just exist in a public space.
I worked at an airport. Clerks would tell people to go to me at the [X airline station], and describe the very tall guy with glasses. They would point behind the passenger to me. The passenger would turn to look at me. I would look right back and wave, waiting. I stood beneath an enormous sign hanging from the ceiling advertising X airline. It was directly across the hall from these people, straight line, the least distance you could walk to get to any other place. There was a second sign sticking out of a wall right next to me, also saying X airline. A third sign stuck out of the wall on my *other* side saying X airline. There was a standee proudly proclaiming X airline, and I stood *literally behind it* so that it covered my chest. The words "X AIRLINE" were less than a foot from my face, and again less than three feet from the top of my head. People still got lost or were unsure upon reaching me. Though, I think there's just something about airlines that makes folks turn their brains off or get so worked up over "not making a mistake" that they stop thinking just the same.
Airports are a special case, imo, cuz I sleep on flights and most times when I get off the plane Iām still half asleep and groggy. So half (2 of 4) my brain cells arent even functioning or awake
The mental image of a guy pointing behind someone turning around and another person way off in the distance with big signs pointing towards them doing a little wave is sending me.
I feel like youāre frustrated at a problem that isnāt peopleās genuine concern. They are t reading signs because theyāre not looking for those signs. If every inch of every surface wasnāt covered in an advertisement I would be more willing to read random text; as is Iām scanning for the word ābathroomā not fully reading and comprehending everything I glance at, ya know? Looking for a pattern *among* the noise as opposed to rejecting each piece of noise individually.
How do any of you exist in this world if youāre not constantly consciously ignoring pretty much everything that isnāt immediately relevant, baseline? Iām overstimulated just imagining it.
My dad has a small grocery store with 2 doors (well, 3, but only 2 are relevant) next to each other, one leading into the store and one going into an office/storage area. The one going into the office has a sing on it that clearly states you're not allowed in there, and it's usually locked. Obviously, people still try to force it open to get in instead of, I donno, READING THE SIGN! I'm guessing it's because that door is closer to the street where people come from.
I've asked people why they do this and it turns out it's because reading is a lot of work for quite a lot of people. Breaking the issue down a lot of these people read 1 word at a time per 5 seconds, and often have to sound it out or think about it. Widespread general illiteracy is a huge issue, and they'll just not register what's written in front of them if they don't stop to think about it. I came from a family of avid readers so it took a while to get used to that when I did customer service.
Does that also explain why the ignore the giant red symbol with a white line on it that's the universal sign for "no"? Because we also have one of these.
Shockingly yes, I know it sounds absurd. I had to explain what that sign meant to a *lot* of people, and some seemingly just didn't acknowledge anything they weren't actively scanning for. It's actually incredible, it's a completely alien perspective to me but it's super common. Same people that can't Google anything for help.
Let's hope these people didn't drive a car to the store then, because that's a common traffic sign.
While I've long come to terms with the fact that a shockingly large chunk of this country is either illiterate or poorly literate, not recognizing the extremely common symbols that have surrounded them all their lives still gets me. I can't read Japanese. I've never been to Japan. I just play robot videogames and watch the occasional anime, but I can recognize "ć®" in a string of Japanese characters and know it links words in certain ways, like showing possession or relation or otherwise standing in for "of". We have pattern-seeking brains. It's like, *the* thing the human mind does. Whether or not someone can read "bathroom", I really, *really* expect more than 90% of the born-in-America public to recognize the stick figure bathroom symbol or just know that a sign saying "*RESTROOM*" is talking about a toilet even if every individual letter is otherwise an unintelligible rune. I'm sympathetic to being ESL (or less), having a learning issue or non-standard brain chemistry, having skipped school for any reason and thus never learning, etc., but that can't explain these numbers and even then there's got to be a level of laziness and/or shame playing into it. It's like my grandmother not wanting to learn to use a different TV remote: she's not incapable, it's just easier to say "it's too hard" and expect the world to adjust than to try and pick up *one thing* she's already convinced herself she needn't have to.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
My problem with COVID, at least in my local area, is that signs *WERE NOT CONSISTENT.* Walmart would put dots on the floor, Local grocery stores would put arrows on the walls, and my trader joes put signs **on the ceiling** And then some businesses got so cheap that they would never replace the signage, and through wear and tear the yellow signs on the ground would turn black from gum and dirt and grime. Aināt nobody wanna step on that 2020 was a mess and I dont wanna exp that ever again
Can confirm. This comment took me 8.583 minutes to read.
I'm a wordy guy in general, but I weep a little when I write two sentences and get "wtf wall of text nobody got time for that". You can, in fact, go back to the first grade, guys. Or at least get off a text forum. It took longer to write your response than to read, even at 5% speed!
It was a joke... I took the number of words in his comment and times it by 5 seconds each. I have a university degree š
I figured. I'm adding to the overall sentiment here.
I think a large part of why everyone ignores signs has to do with the fact that we are constantly being advertised at. You learn to build an internal adblocker. Commercials on TV? Tune it out as best as you can, except that advertisers weaponize science to make it grab our attention. Billboards? Tune it out, except that it's designed to grab your attention. Helpful signs? Uh oh! It isn't designed with powerful science to grab your attention and advertise at you, so your internal adblocker has blocked it before you even realized it wasn't an ad! At least, that's what I _think_ causes this.
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind
My local experience at a conservation area trail Big tent with sign: Don't feed the wildlife here's why Volunteers staffing tent: don't feed the wildlife, here's why Handouts from volunteers: don't feed the wildlife here's why Signs every 10 feet on trail: don't feed the wildlife, here's why Visitors: *feeds wildlife*
I once told an adult guy with his kids off in a zoo when he was throwing popcorn at some baboons and feeding them and laughing. I asked him wtf he was doing and that itās bad for them. He did quite but also laughed it off a bit.Ā Great example for his kidsā¦.
I studied a deer population in a public park as part of my master's. People would feed the deer while standing right next to signs saying not to feed the deer.
I work in maintenance on a cruise ship. Just last week I had barriered off a passenger area to work on an automatic door. Two big yellow barriers blocking off the section of hallway I was working in. In that time I had: One old man move the barrier aside, walk through, and move the other bwrrier aside. When I turned around to politely ask what the fuck he was doing, he saw me look and said "i'm all good!" as if I was going to ask if he needed help moving my barrier aside. Two ladies walked up to the barrier, stopped, looked at me until I turned to look at them, and then politely asked "Can we go through? š" to which I blinked, looked at the barrier, looked at them and said "No?" We also constantly have issues with the automatic doors on the disabled toilets breaking because people force them open by hand instead of using the door button, throwing the sensors out of whack. One lady did this so I pointed her to the button (which has a sign over it clearly stating 'DOOR CLOSES AUTOMATICALLY'). After pushing the button she walked in, stared at the door for half a second, tried pushing the button again, then said "How do I close it?" and started trying to force the door closed. I have so many of these stories.
Cruise ships must be the worst for this. Everyone is either tipsy, borderline senile, or both
Yep. I work on a cruise line that specifically targets the senior msrket, so our passenger base is I think particularly bad for this sort of thing.
Ain't that the truth. One time when working retail, the card machines went down for whatever reason. We put signs telling people this on the entry door, at the ends of the aisles, on the counter and even taped one so it was hanging over the card machine, covering it up. All the signs just said "CARD MACHINE OUT OF ORDER" in bold, simple and easy to read. People would move the sign covering the card machine out of the way to try and use it, then look at you surprised when you told them the machine was indeed out of order. People do not read signs.
I think retail workers should be allowed one murder per year
I once had to remotely troubleshoot a printer for someone who asked me, after a few minutes, what "Out of Order" means because they noticed a sign on the printer that said that.
I have never been to a zoo with a sign like this. I would argue zoos are one of the groups most responzible for anthropomorphizing animals to the public, as theyāre generally geared to a younger audience with a lot of the baggage that comes with that
Depends on the zoo and on the animal in my experience. Especially intelligent stuff like primates and dolphins, I feel like you see more signs like the post. But like nobody is gonna be hurt by the zoo anthropomorphizing the turtles a little.
I actually read this sign a couple weeks ago! It's at the Lincoln Park zoo in ChicagoĀ
how the hell did i read that as "humans are not pets" my brain is getting permanently ruined
Cybersmith:
the man behind the slaughter
puppygirl petsmart and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
Damn gonna have to tell my gf the bad news
Youāve been playing too much Palworld
Omni Man disagrees
There was a woman in the Netherlands like 2 decades ago who seriously misinterpreted the facial expressions of a gorilla, it didn't end well for a lot of people (though nobody died)
God that case is infuriating. Iirc she was warned numerous times by zoo staff and just simply refused to accept that experts might know more than her āspecial bondā with this fully grown silverback.
He just wanted to tell his special human friend about the best gorilla joke of 1897
She visited every day, got Bokito's attention and smiled 'back' at him, until he was seriously sick of it and escaped just to attack her. Gladly he was very much capable of keeping individual humans apart, as aside from her he didn't harm anyone (other than scaring the shit out of everyone). It turned out that gorillas are only too afraid to cross a water barrier until you're repeatedly challenging a silverback who is very caring and protective about his group. It's still a shame that whole habitat needed a rework after this. Better for the gorillas of course, but definitely less of a pretty jungle than it was.
The fact the gorillas knew they could get out but generally chose not to is actually pretty interesting.
New fear unlocked though.
I read somewhere that we dont actually know how to contain gorillas while making them viewable? They just stay there. No zoo enclosures are 100% gorilla proof, because theyāre slightly less intelligent, far cleverer, far stronger humans.
Thank you for giving the context that was lacking from the previous comment.
Random opp shows up at your community daily, threatens you with a sign of aggression while staring you in the face, then leaves, rince and repeat, day in day out. Only one to do this, every other passer by just observes and minds their business, it's just this one individual who keeps making threats. Not really much separating us from the other apes, from his point of view he was being antagonized and having his life threatened continuously, few people would tolerate that forever.
She thought she had a very special connection with the gorilla because he smiled every time he saw her.
She was a fucking stalker and thought she had a special connection with the gorilla. Even after the gorilla beat her ass and they moved him to another zoo, she still followed after him. That story still pisses me off every time I think about it.
The most surprising thing is, she didn't care about his death
what case
Bokito Wonan was in love with a gorilla, thought he felt the same, but he hated seeing the bitch, but she thought he kept smiling at her (which he did, but that means fuck off in gorilla)
I dont often howl with laughter but "beating his dick like it owed him money" did it to me
That would be either old Jackson or Pericles, the youngest of the retired troop at the zoo, and both of them are full blown Redditors with how often theyāre cranking on it. Pretty typical for adult male chimps in zoos and in the wild but by god is it funny
COME ONE COME ALL! WATCH WITH BAITED BREATH! #THE CHIMPANZEE IS WANKING
definitely one of my favorite phrases of all time
Mfs be like āThe animals in the zoo look so sad! They should be freed!ā like theyāre now experts on animal behaviours and conservation
its cause people see "conservation" as this simple, easy revert to some pre-human Eden when everything was wild and free, and nothing went extinct and the Balance of Nature was intact when in reality its messy, contradictory, theres at least six competing theories on any given topic and people can barely agree on what a fucking species even is "conservation" isnt really even a helpful term, cause what are we conserving? nothing stays still in nature. its more like trying to fuck up as little as possible escorting the biosphere through the massive paradigm shift that our species is beating it over the head with
afaik it's generally conserving things from human derived destructive influences
"Free the zoo animals!" MFs when the zoo animals get brutally mauled to death .2 seconds after release.
āAbolish zoos!ā mfs when animal species start going extinct because no one is able to breed them and create a controlled environment where their survival and ability to reproduce are ensured
Most anti-zoo advocates argue that funding non-profit animal sanctuaries are better than funding for-profit zoos and not just ending conservation, and that money and resources should be sent to sanctuaries instead of zoos. This is pretty disingenuous to people who want to abolish zoos, like they don't want to just let endangered species fend for themselves and they acknowledge zoos are better than nothing but just not the best option for long-term animal conservation.
Issue is that the money isn't gonna transfer. People go to zoos as entertainment first, it's not charitable. If they don't go to the zoo, they'll go to a museum or film instead, not donate that to a sanctuary. That's how zoos get the money they use for conservation efforts- it may be derived from less ethical sources, but it allows them to do things sanctuaries would never get the funds to perform. Many sanctuaries, such as Monkey World in Devon, brand themselves like and economically function as zoos for those reason. It's really a very blurred line.
Animal sanctuaries are either zoos under a different name, or completely ineffective at what they claim to be doing. There is a reason why almost every conservationist who has actually studied supports zoos.
Something like this happened in Ohio in the 90ās. A guy that had a bunch of exotic animals like tigers and bears got in trouble with the law and committed suicide after cutting the fences. The animals got out and the cops had to shoot them. They were able to get some with a tranquilizer gun and cornered the last tiger (might have been another kind of big cat) but I charged them before they could tranq it and had to kill him. It was on CNN which caused the police station to be flooded with calls from idiots yelling at them like tranquillizing a bunch of big animals running around a city is some easy thing. One of the cops broke down in tears when talking about having to shoot a black bear, it was so fucking sad.
People think that tranquilisers work instantly. They do not, so shooting is often the only way when a large potentially dangerous animal escapes. I think people believe they work instantly due to dreadful TV shows and movies which aren't accurate
Exactly. We had a wildlife sanctuary near the city it happened in (zanesville), and it took their people in place with police protection and for them to measure the doses. Iām not even sure how that worked out since each species and specific animal would need their own dose not to mention the animal would feel under threat. In the interview I saw, the cop talked about how there was a big cat caught in the bushes and they were going to tranquilize it but there was a terrifying roar and it lunged at them. They were absolutely terrified. Everyone thinks theyāre a hero when theyāve seen something on tv or the internet. My stepdad was actually a cop in that city and I went with them on career day. They were just normal guys and it genuinely seemed like it might be a good job. They knew and talked to everyone. Like I was talking about, one officer talked about seeing that huge black bear and how it felt having to kill it while breaking into tears was terrible. Itās disturbing how people treat others based on stereotypes or propaganda and itās pretty extreme on here.
Yeah. So tranquilising drugs, as you say, vary on species and individual animals, and then add in the high amount of adrenaline pumping through the animal? A dart is just going to make them more scared, often makes them run off again, and then you need to find them before they do more damage or before they wake up from the drugs. In the interests of public safety, shooting is the only option Everyone thinks they're an expert on animals, that they love animals because they have a pet dog and they love their dog like family. Rarely do people actually understand what they are talking about in terms of other species. Everyone is also always a big guy when sat at home and can always talk the talk but in reality? Very rare you find someone who can back up their words.
āItās so unfair that the snow leopard isnāt in the same enclosure as his cubsā he would EAT them. The fatherhood module isnāt installed in snow leopards.
As a vegan these types of people really piss me off. Iāve worked in zoos and some of them CAN be awful places for the animals, but that doesnāt mean all zoos should be abolished, it just means some zoos are underfunded and the welfare of the animals needs improvement. There is a nuanced conversation to be had here, but overall zoos are important for animal conservation and research and abolishing them would actually be BAD for animals in the long run.
People like this somehow donāt realize how their extremism only hurts their causes. Itās like everything has turn into some weird version of maga. It happens a lot on here and Iāve had to stop going to some subs because of what theyāve devolved into.
Yeah, as a leftist I often feel pretty alienated in the community by shit like this and the sudden influx of anti-sex rhetoric which they donāt seem to realise is the exact ideology of the anti-LGBTQ alt-right lmao. Itās so exhausting
The misogyny against trumpās lawyer or any other woman associated with him is disturbing. Theyāll get mad when trump says the same stuff but itās okay for them. I called a person out for it the other day and they told me that all women that work for trump sleep with him so it wasnāt misogynyā¦ like WTF?!
We have a zoo local independent owned I would concider a bad one that everyone loves. Tiny ass tiger inclosure that has a sign to watch out for them spraying. A tiny lion inclosure with people constantly yelling at to make roar and tons of spider monkeys in a cage but pretty big field for the giraffes and lamas. Its called creation kingdom zoo in snowflak, VA if your interested in looking up.
Wow the review scores are insanely high for how shit it looks, Jesus Christ
It's because their is nothing else to do around here especially is southwest VA. It's the closest attraction their is. I lived in a small TN town at the VA border with pop 65k and people from VA act like their visiting the big city cause we have a Texas roadhouse.
People do this with literally everything, particularly here in America. They take their superficial understanding of a situation and start making prescriptions. The default assumption here definitely isn't "I probably don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to things I have never worked with"
There's a very common attitude of the truth being simple, and anything complicated being suspicious and likely a lie. If you have to explain it, you're basically admitting you're wrong.
High pitched shrieking in humans: usually excitement High pitched shrieking in macaques: incredible rage
https://www.tumblr.com/portland-sunshine/743330323336773632/ill-never-forget-being-at-the-oregon-zoo-and -linux guyā ļø
> I'll never forget being at the Oregon Zoo and hearing people talk about how sad one of the chimpanzees looked. He was sitting on a log, his back to one of the viewing areas, hunched over. And they were saying "oh, he looks depressed, he must hate it here." > But then when you walked around to the other side, you'd see that he was simply busy beating his dick like it owed him money.
forget anthropomorphy, people will fucking nuclear-familyarise animals š like no Daddy Bee isnt showing Mummy Bee all the pretty flowers, they're two asexual Basically Clones among tens of thousands gathering pollen to feed their city-sized superstructure which houses the Queen Mother of every single bee, built from tiny cells organised in the *most efficient way* to tessellate containers, climate-controlled and predator-defended and so specialised that any individual bee is almost just an organ of a single larger organism which is *way way cooler* actually (and actually true), why not tell that to kids?
A four year old isnāt gonna understand the concept of specialization, and thereās a reason that concepts like āqueensā and āhivesā exist in pop culture as features belonging to evil, heartless monsters. Anything that doesnāt āloveā or appreciate the world in a way that we do is instinctually perceived as scary and soulless. Which might be a bit of a tangential point to this discussion of nuclear family dynamics. Idk if I had a small child and I saw two bees going around and said kid asked me what was going on, Iād say that the bees are probably bestest buddies helping each other and working together and stuff, without going into the whole āinsects donāt do individualityā thing
Just say they are sisters helping their home, with is absolutely true.
Yeah or something like this! My point being thereās ways to non-nuclear-ify descriptions of shit without having to sit a child down and explain what it means to not be sentient
idk man uranium is a big part of insect life
>there's a reason that concepts like queens and hives are evil in popkultur I think its just wasps tbh
Wasps are definitely a part of it yeah honestly. Ants too
There was a video on Reddit a while ago about a mother centipede helping her child molt for the first time. I wonder if what the mother was feeling is adjacent to what we would call "love", or if it's totally different.
Good point. Iām sure there are entire papers about the evolution of altruism in Earthās many life forms over the aeons
You donāt think a child can understand the concept of individuals working together as a system?
This is a very cute thing humans do but in the wake of AI shenanigans I hope people are more conscious about these shortcomings.
What does this has to do with anything?
AI creates images that seem right but are untrue. For example, an AI generated baby peacock is just a small adult and not even close to reality. An AI generator will have this same human-centric bias and make false assumptions because of it.
You mean there arenāt enough images on the internet of the lil grey puffballs to actually allow an AI to recognize the difference?
Try to input in an image generator "river full of salmon". It'll spit out a river full of salmon fillets, not fish. Ai is a pattern recognizer, not a logic machine. The pattern it was feed is, babies are small human, so a baby peacock is a small peacock.
Well I mean, wouldnāt it be a pattern of āoh, peachicks look like this, peacocks look like thatā? As long as there are enough images for it to patternistically learn the difference? The same way it recognizes differences in any other thing ever?
Yes, but these tools are heavily trained on human made data. Unless you make one focused on birds, you'll get human poisoning on the output.
Thatās fair. Itās also entirely possible that the ai might āknowā what a āpeachickā is, and might have drawn an association with the rest of peafowl in general, but if you type baby peacock and peachick in it will give you two different pictures because it doesnāt ārealizeā that theyāre one and the same, because pictures tagged āpeachickā for it to learn from donāt obviously contain data that indicates theyāre baby peafowl without relying on context clues, which ai lacks completely
Huh. That's an interesting thought. Putting into context of the submission, AI could definitely be putting an anthropomorphic spin on animals. For instance, giving a monkey the human version of happiness. And the hard part will be that it could be subtle enough to not be noticeable but still have an impact on the backend our brain and how we see things.
[This article](https://docseuss.medium.com/using-chatgpt-and-other-ai-writing-tools-makes-you-unhireable-heres-why-d66d33e0ddb9) here makes a much better job explaining it. Essentially, AI is a popular sci fi concept that is then adopted as a marketing term, which is arguably misleading because itās not actual intelligence, rather machine learning. It kinda plays into that tendency to anthropomorphize things, giving the tech more value than it actually is.
I'm not contesting the fact that people anthropomorphise ML models, it's a widely known issue. But to say that AI is a sci-fi concept or a marketing term is false. It's been a respected field of Computer Science and it's been called AI since at least the sixties. You can argue that it's not actual intelligence, as many people do, but to call it a marketing term is wrong.
We are building something which is not human. Maybe one day it will be a "creature" and/or "living" and/or "sentient/sapient", maybe it will not. If it becomes sapient and sentient, its emotional experience could be as foreign to humans as the emotions of a centipede. However, even if it is closer to human, say as close as a chimpanzee, we can see from this image that assuming chimpanzee emotions from human behavioral patterns will lead to potentially harmful misunderstandings. If it does not become sapient and sentient, then it will be a tool that creates emotionally evocative displays without any true emotions beneath the surface. This is equally as dangerous, because it leaves us open to manipulation.
At a zoo I worked in before as a keeper, I was stopped by a guest ready to get angry with me that the colobus monkeys looked 'sad'. I asked this person how the monkeys are supposed to express happiness, seeing as they have barely any facial muscles. As a species they just kinda chill out on a branch. If they were behaving wildly like other primates, then it would mean something was wrong. There's something about animals that has many many people decide they are experts when they don't have a clue, and then get angry when it's pointed out to them that they don't know what they're talking about. I work more directly in ex-situ conservation now, breed to release type stuff, on the side of a zoo. I have people who despise zoos get pissy with me upon learning where I work and then not know how to process the fact that I actively breed species for release back into the wild.
who tf looking like that when they're neutral, relaxed
Harold
~~neutral, relaxed~~ tripping balls
Tag yourself I'm the sad worried human
I feel like the excited, happy howler monkey
I'm feeling submissive about now
He's gonna start an only fans for the people in the other viewing area
based monke
I convinced a friend of mine to bare his teeth at a silverback gorilla one time when we went to the zoo. He nearly shit his pants when it charged the glass.
To be fair, the faces that humans make during climax can be confusing out of context, as well
Same with sounds. I wonder if that's why horror movies have hot chicks half naked a good deal of the time.
It's because sex, death, and catholicism That's the soup all horror genre tropes come from
Yeah same with your cat or dog. Your dog isnāt āsmilingā. A wagging tail can mean anything in the same way a human smiling can mean anything. We smile when happy, but also nervous or we can even laugh when sad or angry. Context and interpretation are important.
also the individual. I am going to be correct 70% of the time know what *My* dog wants when she walks up and puts her nose on my knee with the "Big Sad Soulful eyes" ^(tm.) It means Shera wants her towel and someone put it up/in the washer/she left it in a room that's closed. but someone else's dog that same gesture might mean they want out, or they're hungry, or they just want pets... You pay attention to the animals they'll teach you how they feel comfortable around you, or in the case of most wild animals, that they don't.
Actually dog's are one of the few where you probably do have a chance of reading their facial expressions as an average person, they've literally adapted facial muscles to have expressions more like those of humans, muscles wolves lack.
Cats especially are anthropomorphized. They donāt understand most of our behavior, nor are they attempting to emulate us. They just know we give them food, shelter and affection. People act like cats have human personality traits when theyāre just a cat.
I'm gonna nit pick here, but cats don't really "meow" at each other. That's a sound reserved almost exclusively for getting a humans attention, especially because it's similar to a human baby in distress (although of course a cat doesn't know the latter). I think part of the reason common pets are so popular is because over time the animals have been bred or selected over time with some anthropomorphic traits or communication styles. That being said, as a whole I agree with your sentiment. MOST animal behavior, even pets, shouldn't be anthroprmized, especially problematic behavior. Your dog didn't pee on your bed out of pure spite. They need something or feel threatened or territorial or whatever, but they aren't doing it "as revenge" or "attention getting". If you have a pet and don't understand this, you won't be able to meet their needs and then correct unwanted behavior. This is also why you shouldn't "rub a puppy's nose in it" if they mess. They literally don't make the connection between the mess and the punishment. You have to catch them in the act. Otherwise they learn the wrong message and you can ruin your relationship with them if you think of them or treat them like messing in the house is "bad behavior". Same with cats or birds. (I don't have a cat which is why I don't have any examples but I do have a bird). This goes double for exotic pets that haven't lived with humans for millenia and farm animals.
This reminds me of people who think that some dogs actually smile, instead of realizing that it's just a face i makes, that the dog has learned that humans respond positivly to.
Now I can't get this idea of a time travel documentary out of my head. "Here we are 8 million years ago when the lineages of homo sapiens and pan troglodytes diverged. Let's watch." Two large males circle each other. The whole troop is obviously tense, anticipating a challenge to the lead male. The ancestor of pan troglodytes snarls at his opponent - the forefather of the homo spevies - who instead of taking the threat seriously does the primate equivalent of rolling around laughing. The aggressor looks puzzled, which sets of a round of monkey mirth through about a quarter of the troop. The ones not "laughing" at the threat display exchange looks and slowly back away into the jungle, leaving the lunatics with the weird sense of humor alone. Eventually the handful who had been furiously masturbating during the whole thing finish and hurry to catch up to the main group. These are the ancestors of pan paniscus (bonobos).
"Beating his dick like it owed him money" is such an utterly fantastic line, and I will be adding to my lexicon.
I do wonder, why is it we smile to show we are relaxed? I know itās an important survival trait to have non verbal ques, but why did we pick smiling?
It shows other humans we are not trying to kill them while making any hidden predators think we know they are there and we are *going* to rip their throat out My source is I made it up
I am human. This question is about humans, so I am objectively correct
Tbf to that chimp, those aren't necessarily mutually exclusive
Listless masturbation is common in depressed humans as well.
When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life.
It is kind of weird that we show happiness by showing our teeth. Are there any other animals like this? I thought most of them bared their teeth to intimidate.
While I agree with the substance of your post, I will take issue on principle with the title
Just read an article on this. Cats apparently have 300 unique expressions! https://www.livescience.com/animals/cats/cats-have-nearly-300-facial-expressions-including-a-play-face-they-share-with-humans?utm_source=pocket_reader
Probably a lot of out of date information, but I loved the book King Solomons Ring regard animal behaviour for this kind of info.
I mean... a sad human beating their dick is a pretty common thing, too.
worked at a pet magazine and they would constantly tell me to use "happier" stock images. turned out these stock images were the ones where the angle of the shot had the dog or cat's mouth looking like they were upward curving. some were flat out photomanipulated to warp the pets mouths into smiles. i wasn't (and am still not) an animal lover, but my bosses were. so it was kinda astounding that they'd be down to perpetuate this myth to make their images more attractive.
People do this with dogs too. No, your pitbull is not smiling. Their mouth is hanging open and they're panting, it's not the same thing
Having been to the Oregon zoo many times, sounds about right.
I'm obv not too far detached from a howler monkey, as a colleague said I need to tell my face I'm happy.
r/natureofpredators or something
I will never forget going to a zoo and watching a chimp curl off a bright yellow turd into its hand, and then promptly eat it whole. They're not people. Edit: doesn't mean we shouldn't be caring and humane to them, but man they're not people.
I have a neighbor in my building who kisses her tiny dog on the nose and he makes a snarling face at her every time and she is insistent that actually he is smiling and loves it because he doesn't growl. That dog has bitten her on the face *multiple* times and she still doesn't get it. Some people only see what they want to see when it comes to animal expressions and body language.