Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
bbc.com
bbc.com
We asked her about it afterwards, turns out they just like being petted :). Eventually got to try it out ourselves on another dive, fish can be really friendly.
It's a complicated multi-threaded discussion. I saw a vid recently from (I assume the UK) that people were protesting on the meat-alley of a super market. So those people are cool when the super market sells cigarettes, sugary drinks that cause diabetes to kids, 'chocolates' with 50% sugar, alcohol that ruins millions of lives around the world, etc. But steak.. that is their problem. Oh the hypocrisy.
Selling cigarettes harms the buyers, but selling factory-farmed meat harms the animals being factory farmed, and they don’t have any agency in this at all.
Yes, it is exactly as you write it! Did you just realize that? (pardon the irony but come on.. idealism = ideas, realism = reality)
> and they don’t have any agency in this at all.
Correct again! No they don't. We cut down trees that are very much alive because we want new/more/better chairs. We take a fish from the water, kill it, skin it, eat it. We don't care for its life. We care for our lives and comfort more. Yes. It has been decided, humans are the dominant species on this planet. We rule. Now, I wished we ruled with more wisdom (e.g. avoid over-fishing and other unsustainable practices). But that's not how greed works. And our species is greedy. Perhaps you and I are not, but 'we' are. And perhaps it will ruin us.
It is about "how obedient/simple/easy/effortless" is the thing we eat.
I probably did not explain that well in my initial message.
But we don't care. We only keep the plant alive so we can make more of the 'good stuff' (cigarettes, jeans, etc.)
Again, low effort and low cost from our side. If it would be cheaper to kill the tobacco plant (I don't know much about tobacco plants, perhaps that at some point/age of the plant it becomes sterile, so we kill the old one and plant a new one?) If this is the case, then kill the old cotton plant, get a new one, start harvesting. We decided that we rule the earth. Until something very dramatic happens (ruin ecosystems, aliens invade, etc.) then we run the show.
There was a poem written about the phenomenon:
Big fleas have little fleas
upon their backs to bite 'em
And little fleas have lesser fleas
and so ad infinitum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonaptera_(poem)
But he lifted the genius part of it from Jonathan Swift.
She had some rather distinct markings and would hang around the house pretty regularly after that. Then one day outside she was getting seriously groomed by a larger pigeon and wow is that where that term comes from?
Anyhow yeah she returned the grooming (which I'd later look up was her way of saying 'yeah I'm down - let's go') and I never saw her, or him, again.
So yeah - there could've been a happier ending there, especially because when a cat does eat a pigeon there tends to be evidence left.
one year, he disappeared, which added a lot of sadness to my life. that summer, he reappeared and walked up a hill to greet me, with his mate and ducklings in tow. his mate had had a shattered (and repaired) beak, and was easy to pick out, and he spent time walking between us with "quack quack quack", back and forth, as if to introduce us. they stayed around at least until I moved a year or so later. by far the most profound experience I've had with a "wild" animal, a memorable experience that I will continue to cherish.
I knew someone who got a bird at a pet store. The bird's favorite caretaker looked like a younger version of my friend. So the bird was intrigued. When she surrendered the bird about five years later, the girlfriend of the man running the sanctuary also had the same hair color and skin tone. So again the bird was eager to check out the new person. Most other people could fuck right off.
Here he is mounting and having a go at Mark Carwardine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY
"You are being shagged by a rare parrot!"
I understand the conservation aspect of aquariums and all the good things that come out of it (research, etc) but it still makes me a bit sad when I read things like this.
And I think they serve an important and not-irreplaceable purpose - exposure. They help show ordinary people, many of whom live in cities with no exposure to real nature, just what out there is worth protecting. I think it helps build public support for things like reducing waste, better fishing and hunting practices, the importance of parks and preserves, wildlife crossings, etc.
Sure, you can see them on your phone. But the result is completely different than seeing them with your own eyes.
Polar bears at the zoo on plastic ice may be the saddest thing I've seen in my life, but how are you gonna provide tons and tons of ice for miles in a warm climate?
They might take "really good care" of the animals, feed them well, give them the best veterinary care, etc, but that's not a good life for an animal. When they have so little space to roam, so little engagement or interaction with other groups of the same species, no agency over their food or other aspect of their life, and all the while having humans gawk at them whenever they aren't hiding away. It's just a pitiful existence for the benefit of tourists. I can't buy into that.
Some animals need a lot of territory to roam and don't do well in captivity, some don't really care.
I'm not saying zoos are perfect, but well-run ones are far from evil either. Calling it 'terrible circumstances' is too broad. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Except in the direst of circumstances, your connection with that experience of seeing an African Elephant is a much more potent predictor for survival of the species than the benefit of having the elephant here where poaching is nonexistent but gene inheritance is complicated and limited. The star power of the animals triggers positive steps and slows or stops negative ones.
There's a conservation group I was involved with who thought they were going to save the world with a half dozen acres of land. The longer I knew them the more I realized that some of them didn't mean it figuratively. I love them but that's deranged. Meanwhile I treated it the way I think of zoos. That first hand experience re-establishing a human connection with Nature. The first or second domino in a long series of dominoes.
This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lot of unethical practices in these industries that I'd like to see greatly improved, but putting a few individuals in an enclosure where there is at least some research and educational value seems like not even a rounding error on the state of animal welfare.
It's even incredibly rare for humans - we're currently in an age of plenty and abundance, with more people living better lives than at any other point in the history of our species.
Overfishing and the geopolitical nature of enforcement and exploitation aren't something we can affect at an individual level, but these aquarium staff are doing a good thing, making a pretty good life for a sunfish. An actual companion would be better, but as long as the cutouts are triggering relief for whatever social needs being affected, that's a good deal for the sunfish.
The world's a brutal place, probably all worlds. Because the very nature of evolution means species that exploit the most thrive the most. The obvious exception of things like a solar feeding plant isn't even an exception. The great oxidation event caused one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet - we evolved to thrive on oxygen but for most of the other life alive at the time it'd be like if plants today produced cyanide gas.
Even a slight injury to a predator can mean a slow death by starvation.
That's why videogame predators are so ridiculous. They keep coming after you, even when half their ass is blown away. A real predator will bugger off, as soon as it figures out that there might be a cost to attacking you. That's a big reason that many herbivore defenses seem kind of ridiculous, but work. They just need to make the predator nervous. Unless the predator is starving, it's likely to seek prey elsewhere.
There's also tremendous competition between predators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting
Most lions also know not to prey on humans, for similar reasons: if a lion took a human, it risks being hunted down by other humans related to their prey. Most "man-eating" lions or tigers are starving or injured, therefore desperate, and lions are largely seen in Africa as pest creatures who take livestock.
(Hippopotamuses, by contrast, give absolutely no fucks and will kill you on sight. Africans consider the hippopotamus to be the fiercest animal by far, even more so than the lion.)
I knew about the stotting, but figured it was for mating. The predator thing makes sense.
Hippos also hang out around humans a lot, which increases the chances of unfortunate misunderstandings (almost always resolving in favor of the hippo).
I remember visiting a village in Uganda, on the banks of the Nile.
They had a couple of jettys, going out into the river, and between them, a series of poles and whatnot. It looked like a fish hatchery.
Didn't matter. It was a hippo sofa. There was this hippo, just lying in the water, right in the middle of one of the busiest areas of the village. We were told that it was a regular. Everyone just ignored it.
The jury is still out, as to whether it is worse to be in front of an angry hippo, or behind an incontinent one.
Humans in the developed world do this so well that very few of them are even required to defend and feed themselves without these abstractions.
Additionally, most of us are taught "hurting things is bad" as children and many adults have a hard time reconciling that we have to intentionally hurt at least some living things to live, hurt an even greater amount of living things to flourish, and at a certain point decreasing suffering in one dimension increases it in another.
For those who haven't developed a more mature framework, they tend to revert to the childhood "hurting things is bad" lesson, and an alternative framework based on nuance and context around suffering is too emotionally painful for them to accept, even if they can intellectually admit to the logic.
On behalf of the more intellectual crowd, I'm obliged to devastatingly elucidate that we're (quite singularly) more intrinsically adept at forcefully projecting ex post facto rationalizations upon our--invariably and universally--emotional decision-making processes whilst obfuscating the same under an avalanche of loquacious hifalutinisms.
This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together.
Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy. Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel? Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but against the law in Germany). And so on.
People in developed countries have become very good at dealing with cognitive dissonance.
Essentially, having the animal be free before we catch and immediately and hopefully quickly kill it for food is fine. Keeping it in a zoo where it's not suffering is fine.
Keeping it in poor conditions before we kill and eat it is not fine. Keeping it in poor conditions in a zoo is not fine.
This story is interesting in that it gives insight into the mental state of these zoo animals, something that is often hard for the public to see and understand. It should make you pause to consider if we're really keeping these animals in humane conditions, given that apparently even fish have possibly more complex internal mental states than we assume.
A world with no zoos and less appreciation and consideration for nature as well as the long term necessity of caring for it?
I’m wondering about creating more nature parks instead of zoos. Of course not as accessible for people in cities, but could be a much better compromise.
In general, we should avoid putting animals in small cages as much as possible.
If the benefit of putting wild animals in small zoos is some sliver of human cultural contact with the wilds, then that calculus is worth it, however paradoxical and politically incorrect it may appear to be. That's the argument.
Why do you think we could do that?
I say we could just increase taxes by $5,000 per person per year and spend it on breeding and releasing mosquitoes in Los Angeles.
As for why I think we could do it, the answer is because we obviously can. The world become a much worse place once you realise the many things of which humanity is capable, yet which we choose not to do.
This logic is at the root of almost everyone who has been complicit in evil through history. It would once have been said about the abolition of slavery, gay rights, etc. It is a lazy attitude that's entirely self-justifying. Change is often opposed primarily by the great mass of people who use this same logic, in spite of them recognising that the change would be good.
Besides that, they have an important educational component that surely contributes politically for conservation efforts.
And maybe stop going to them (you went to a few?) and they will become even less common.
Never seen one of those, but there's plenty of private animal habitats I've seen that take injured and stray animals.
Usually just ran/funded by someone who loves animals.