Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I was pushing him in the stroller while he was napping, and at the orangutan exhibit, one came up to the window and gestured towards the stroller.
I turned the stroller to face the window, and removed the hood.
The orangutan blew my son a kiss, waved then went back to the otherside of its enclosure.
Made me rethink what I knew about animal intelligence.
All the primates and megafauna especially, it is a tragedy.
I'm certain they'll be looked back on with shame.
Even as zoos market videos of animals "eating birthday cake" on social media.
See also zoos' dark history entwined with ethnological expositions https://archive.is/xsuEU
Many zoos provide homes, food, and veterinary care for animals that would not be able to survive in the wild. For example, the mountain lion at Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is blind, and many of their other animals had been kept illegally by their previous owners, were confiscated by Arizona Game & Fish, and needed a place to live so they wouldn’t die.
It's objectively the greatest evil humans have ever committed, and for our own pleasure at that. We inflict pure hellish suffering because "tAsTe bUdS gO BRRR!"
It's hard to even comprehend something more comically, absurdly evil, both in terms of motive and sheer scale of suffering.
At least zoos do trigger an empathy response and get people to care about animals more.
Purely for taste.
> We need to eat meat.
False. 10-20% of the world population does not and we're just fine.
> So we need to kill animals for that.
No, you want to kill animals because you want tasty food. Not because you "need" meat. No one living in an industrialized country does. It's trivial to create a plant-based balanced diet (and a tasty one at that.)
> Zoos absolutely not required for humans to survive.
Neither are factory farms. They exist to satisfy "taste buds go brr." But that is not worth literally torturing[1] an animal to death.
Our interaction with other life on this planet is very human centric, some call this human supremacism. A line is drawn between us and other animals, and the justification is quite arbitrary in my opinion. A line that is used to justify a vast number of atrocities and systemic exploitation. I don't believe there is no meaningful difference between a human and a cricket. But between a human and a dog or pig? That's close enough that I'm willing to extrapolate.
Now a bird/snake generally will be gone given the chance- but they truly are wild animals, while dogs are bred to be co-dependent with humans.
In addition the chances they want to escape are smaller than for birds. I looked it up and found this source https://www.petlink.net/blog/chance-dogs-coming-back-run-awa... that says "The unfortunate reality is that 15% of dogs across the United States go missing.". For context that's not 15% of dogs want to leave and do so. What's the percentage of dogs that had the chance to leave? Let's say 50%, which would imply that given the chance 1 in 3 dogs left. Albeit not all of the because they disliked their home/prison.
Looking at the language used in that article exposes some mental gymnastics. They simultaneously state that dogs could find their way back if they wanted and compare it to loosing a child! No, the dog is not a child, and if the reasons you provide why they "go missing" are "Fear from loud noises, Easy escape routes, Boredom and Prey drive" I find it hard to ignore that these are adult conscious beings that may not want to live with us, and only do so when given no alternative.
I wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild.
Some dog breeding is nonsense. But for the most part, we adapted to each other. If you look at the most efficient land predators, it’s humans, cats and dogs. (Dogs are also the only fellow persistence hunting mammals and, apart from some lizards, the only animals to practice it period [1].)
Our domestication of herbivores is exploitative. Our domestication of dogs and acceptance of cats is far closer to an alliance.
This is not true of any pet I’ve had. The dog was always gunning for an open door. And the cat enjoys unsupervised time outdoors when weather permits. They both always came home.
Also, cats aren’t truly domesticated. If there is a creature that “chooses” to live with us, it’s cats.
https://twitter.com/amazlngnature/status/1782416298636345452
Staring into their eyes it is impossible to deny we are them and they are us. Their facial expressions, emotions, reactions, playfulness and also anger, jealousy and all the rest are incredible to be a part of. Often I was on the other side of a fence, but the times I was right in the middle of it all are something I will never forget as long as I live.
I have no doubt future generations will look back on us as heathens for keeping intelligent animals locked in cages.
I find out use of wording interesting, and it helps justify putting them in cages and doing experiments on them.
Excuse being the kill joy: the fellow might be mimicking a gesture it learned from other visitors. That's not to say they don't have an inner life--we're all made of the same substrate, after all.
And that differs from us how exactly ?
Not that the anecdote proves their guess is more right than yours, but afaik there is more evidence of animals mirroring unthinkingly than understanding.
I have learned this from my toddler son who picked up some 2 3 word sentences from the cartoons that he watches. He ofcourse has no clue what those words mean, but he does know when to use them and what response he gets from them.
English isn't the language we speak at home but he picked up "wake up" when I am sleeping and try to wake me up, "careful" when doing something where he or one of us could fall. All by seeing and hearing things said repeatedly on similar actions in cartoons.
It wouldn't shock me if we did learn they can learn that way, but it also wouldn't shock me if it was just blindly copying human gestures without learning anything from what happens when they do.
Orangutans likely don't blow kisses in the wild, so it not only imitated it, but also used it in an appropriate manner and context, without an immediate need to satisfy.
Chimps are roughly as smart as a 5 year-old human, and toddlers sure blow kisses and wave goodbye with full intention.
Great apes are more human-like than most people think: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17chimp.html
A dog asking for beggin strips…
Of course my dog will whine for food, or smack it’s water dish with her nose, but this felt much different akin to similar experiences I’ve had with strangers who smile and comment about how adorable my son was as an infant.
orangutan chef's kiss?
Same thing with cats liking scritches under their chin. They're not thinking "ah yes I am scent marking this human", scent glands are probably just itchy.
On the topic of chicks and dust baths, it's quite interesting because as soon as they encounter dirt for the first time they all do the same things. If you've never seen it I recommend looking for a video. But it seems like a weird behavior to have in every chick I've hatched. TBH, I love seeing weird inherent behaviors emerge like that.
I picked up dark chocolate as a snack in early 2020, which I chose very specifically to avoid carbs. I also use cocoa powder to make low-carb ice cream for the same reason.
I guess I've used it this way for long enough now that I've broken my default association between chocolate and sugar.
I'm a little bitter-sensitive, and it's the most-pleasant 88%+ I've had so far.
Still inevitably some carbs in cocoa, so you can do some carb-budget damage if you eat more than a serving--but I feel like it's a good treat for its weight.
They call a serving size 1/3 of the bar, with 11g carbs (4g fiber, 3g sugar). I think the bar is 3x5 squares, and I generally just have one at a time. Not sure I've had more than 3 squares in a day.
I think that would be around 7g total carbs, a bit under 2g sugar, and about 2.4g fiber (i.e. around 4.6g net carbs.)
(edit: i've seen them at cvs and target, at least--though my nearest cvs no longer carries the brand)
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/the-gut-brain-con...
Your gut microbiome also has more living cells than the rest of your cells combined.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/25201-gut-microbi...
So, it's a team effort :)
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/1/10/team_effort.png
I've been told that wild dogs and wolves eat the digestive contents of herbivores which is semi-digested (free range haggis!), which definitely seems true to me given how much both of mine go for rabbit/sheep droppings. This supposedly supplies some more available vegetative nutrients to them. But this came from a pet nutritionist, I'm not sure how strict or scientific their training is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia#Humans
Of course, these days you're probably better off swallowing a supplement. But where's the fun in that?
Anybody who watches these will come away with a deep appreciation of the Natural World, Darwinian Theory and how Human-like (even more than Chimpanzees/Gorillas) Orangutans are. After a while you forget that they are a different species and start laughing/crying/empathizing with these beautiful animals.
Very highly recommended to watch with your kids and entire family.
Pssh total pseudoscientist orangutan stuck in some institution-distrusting online subculture bubble.
I'd pay for this paste!
> The team then saw Rakus chewing the stem and leaves of plant called Akar Kuning - an anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial plant that is also used locally to treat malaria and diabetes.
Wounds on/near joints are known to heal much more slowly because of the added movement-induced stress. In contrast, facial wounds heal particularly fast¹.
For instance, I had a bike accident last September, which resulted in a small wound on my knee and several bigger, more severe injuries in my face. (I basically did a face plant.) The facial injuries healed within 2 weeks. Meanwhile, to this day people ask me what's wrong with my knee because while the wound has closed, I have severe scar tissue and it still looks like the accident had occurred only a few days ago.
¹) Not sure whether it's true but I read somewhere that this might have been selected for during evolution, since the face plays such a crucial role in communication.
(sorry)
There are all sorts of beneficial chemicals in nature, way more than we've accurately assessed and documented. Because plants can't be patented, they're left largely unknown - the incentives that might bring access to things like this are almost entirely missing from the modern Western market.
To make a medicinal plant more effective you can immerse a lot of it in a solvent and use that to extract and concentrate the chemical you care about. These concentrates are commonly referred to as "essential oils".
None of this stuff was invented by a person, working for a corporation, and so you should not expect to see any of it commercialized, regardless of its efficacy. There will always be a synthetic analog, usually more effective (because it has been designed), and more importantly, patent-able.
It's even been in Wild Kratts!
It's not the first time we've seen animals use medically beneficial plants (orally before) and it's not the first time we've seen attempts to treat wounds (previous by placing insects on them, but we don't know if that was medically beneficial or pointless action).
The plant was then analysed and it really has healing properties.
As far as wolves, it's still an open question as to how much they "self-domesticated" before humans noticed and started working from the other end. Seeing how human encampments would produce delicious food scraps in refuse (and still do, just ask any black bear!), it stands to reason that some animals would try to cash in on that opportunity. Then you have a selection process whereby the ones that are too skittish would not even bother, and the ones that are too aggressive would be chased away or worse.
The plant has been studied and analyzed, with various papers out there, like this one, but there doesn't seem to be anything recognized as effective for people (yet, more studies are probably needed) :
https://www.phcogj.com/sites/default/files/PharmacognJ-13-1-...
In previous studies, it was found that the Akar Kuning (Arcangelisia flava Merr) contains chemical compounds, including saponins, flavonoids and tannins, besides that the roots also contain glycosides and alkaloids, especially the isokuinolin group, namely berberine, jatrorizin, and palmatin. There are also some minor alkaloids such as columbamine dehidrokoridalmin, homoaromolin and talifendin, and fibraleucin terpenes, and fibraurin has several activities such as antifungal, antiasma, antibacterial, anti-tumor, anti-malarial and anti- inflammatory.
This is most probably the main reason. However there is some debate on whether these learned behaviours can be passed across generations.
Here is David Attenborough showing Orangutans washing clothes/using soap/tools/etc. mimicking what they have seen Humans in their environment do - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFACrIx5SZ0
PS: Also checkout the Orangutan Jungle School video i link here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244125
I'm pretty sure dogs sometimes vomit on purpose with the explicit goal of sharing food with humans, and/or just to eat it again for fun out of boredom. When my dog is bored he will often start preparing to vomit, and if I tell him 'no', he will stop.
We take our values and motivations as objective facts, and don’t even consider that maybe dogs enjoy eating grass, and also aren’t that interested in the weird sounds humans like to make with their mouths.
How sure are you about this? Everything I am reading seems to disagree with this.
> I know I'm humanizing Rakus here
Out of all the species on this planet, orangutans probably have some of the emotions that are the closest to human emotions. Like, would you expect Ancient Greeks to have emotional experiences that are recognisable to you? What about Cro-Magnons? Neanderthals? Australopithecines? Where do they stop being people with rich inner lives, and turn into animals driven by instinct?
Orangutans are tree-dwelling (semi)social fruit eaters, like we were not that long ago. If you set the Tree of Life to "Zoom to Fit", we'd blend right together. "Humanizing" would be if you were talking about an octopus, a fish, or a protozoan. Different humans at different extremes already experience emotions in vastly different ways; I don't think it's unthinkable or odd that the median individual in such a closely related species might have experiences which we can relate to.
But also he looked to me like he was chewing in the last couple seconds, so maybe the other commenter saying he was just eating ants was right lol.
Well in Indonesia, orang (h)utan means Forest people
A shame they're critically endangered.
I'm not sure about where these orangutans live, but my guess would be that, if it is not a thing the orangutans knew, centuries of living alongside humans... they probably picked up a thing or two. They're quite smart creatures.
(says https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/5-remarkable-animal-mo...)
Things typically become labeled "medicine" when they've been work and have been tested. "Alternative" kind of works like a logical `not`, so applying de Morgan's law that implies that alternative medicine either has not been tested or doesn't work.
Obviously that's a kind of reductive take, but I don't think it's fair to say that scientists label all things from "plants" as "alternative".
Eh, sometimes. But often things labeled "medicine" are things that companies can get FDA approval for, patent, manufacture, ensure shelf stability, label with a brand, and sell to customers at a high margin. There are lots of plants that are proven to work but aren't sold to customers because they can't meet some of those criteria. They aren't necessarily worse, just can't be be sold at scale profitably.
Pharmaceuticals these days run as businesses, and its not financially beneficial for them to even quantify the medicinal qualities of chemically unprocessed plants. Because you can't build a competitive advantage around something like that. So, while they often take inspiration taken from plant based compounds, usually the essential compounds are extracted, a synthetic process developed to manufacture them, and only the medical properties of the resultant product studied via trials.
It would do well for publicly funded medicine to reserve some funding for quantifying the medicinal properties of plants used directly.
I don't know if that counts as "publicly funded medicine", but it's certainly a publicly funded group that studies medicine.
The NIH researches lots of potential health claims and will publish their data as well. The stuff I linked was two examples that I found in like ten seconds, but there’s tons more. The NIH is much more of a research organization than regulatory, unlike the FDA.
I just felt it prudent because the person I was responding to was lamenting about not having a publicly funded research body to investigate potential health benefits for plants that is simply untrue in the US.
(Warning: some language NSFW)
For example - Rapamycin/sirolimus, ephedrine, morphine, antibiotics (e.g. penicillins, cephalosporins), psilocin and psilocybin, are the first naturally occuring (in significant quantities) that came to my mind when thinking about some. Neither of these were studied only in any combination drugs (FDCs). And a lot of close derivatives of naturally occuring substances, like aspirin. This could be really a huge list (of both).
You can also do the legwork yourself.
The person who makes the claim must justify it, not the readers.
It's literally one query to https://scholar.google.com or any other search engine of choice, should I link to search results? Okay, so append ?q=[substance name] at the end of the URL. I don't mean to come off as rude, though. But it's really simple to do so, and it won't really serve any purpose to link to particular studies, either, as this could in turn add a potentially huge selection bias.
By the way, for more "obscure" in terms of scientific interest compounds see: beberine, theanine (aka l-theanine), vinpocetine. Particularly the last one. Same. These ones don't even have any synthetic counterparts which will share same or similar mechanism of action (there are other synthetic compounds targeting the same receptors, but they still represent very unique combinations of targets and also often have unique pharmacodynamics in relation to these targets).
So are you going to insist on the same for the original claim made here, too, or is this an isolated demand for rigor?