Remember when that "pet" orangutan ripped that old lady's face off like a decade or more ago now, there was all sorts of absurd monday morning quarterbacking on that one.
Anyway, that led to one of Michael Savage's fascinating stories, from when he was in with all the weirdo culture in San Francisco in the 1970's naked with Allen Ginsberg, Karl Hess and others. He knew a guy who lived with an orangutan and one day it decided to try and rip his arms off because why the hell not? But the guy managed to throw it out the apartment window. And everyone in their circle refused to speak to him because he had killed the poor defenseless animal by escalating the situation when he fought back.
His point wasn't even to blast the WATERMELONEVIROWEENIES but instead was responding to some of that MMQing about doing this or that/keeping these kinds of animals as pets/etc. and how anthromorphizing them is fine when they're something like a dog or parakeet, but if it's an orangutan or housecat you should realize that no matter what it looks like it's doing (like the guy on GAF who says "it's probably protecting the kid!") you can't actually fathom why and that it can and will kill you for no "logical" or "clear" reason. Even I, as a perfectly rational flawlessly logical self-interested individual have to catch myself from time to time and reapproach how an animal is "seeing" the situation.
But to continue my stupid rambling off that last post.
We've been around for such a small amount of time and we are tearing this place apart.
I've always liked this idea of a collective intelligence that's been passed down through
other animals only that leaves them as great stewards of a habitat unlike ignorant humanity and it often ties in with thoughts like this one:
Not many animals are glutenous animals like us, they take what they need and that is [it].
While most humans understand the concepts of supply and scarcity at a basic level and many animals mate/hunt their prey to local extinction or extreme resource scarcity and how many realize the why? And can then work out ways to reverse it until a near-extinct critter becomes a pest because it's cute or a state symbol? Why doesn't the collective consciousness of nature tune them into that?
One set of animals that does have a fairly consistent concept of surplus are squirrels/chipmunks. When they come across a cache of food, they intentionally store excess even if the excess amount is shown to be consistently available. (They also have incredible spacial memory to remember where all their secret caches are. And they'll fake digging and take multiple routes to throw off any potential snoops. It's also why there's no such thing as a squirrel proof feeder, only delaying.) Some of them get really bad and you have to take them on Hoarders to get rid of all their National Geographic's back to 1974 they've buried in the yard.
Nobody ever talks about that, and by the time we do, they'll have all the nuclear weapons. And Conker: Live and Reloaded will become as hellish of a reality as it was a game.
