“Oh that animal doesn’t LIKE you it just TOLERATES you”
…..So? If that’s the most a non-social organism can feel towards you isn’t that just as special an honor as whatever it is you think affection means??
“This creature with no natural social instincts outside of mating allows me to freely interact with it, while causing it little stress” is fucking DOPE AS SHIT
also… are you SURE? like, we’re still finding out so much about animals. Wolverines fathers, who we thought were not involved in caring for kits, turn out to travel around and collect all their kits from multiple mothers and take the whole group out on camping trips. Some spiders have tiny frog pets (!) or group up to communally raise their young. Wild sharks, crocodiles, and snakes have formed strong, documented relationships with people.
this man Gilberto (Chito) Shedden nursed this crocodile back to health after it was shot in the eye, and they were best friends for the rest of the crocodile’s life.
this python came in out of the wild as a baby snake and curled up next to the family’s infant, Oun Sambat (or Oeun Sambat?) and they were inseparable for 12 years
Cristina Zenato removes hooks from sharks and they let her stick her hand down their throat to do it and they even bring other sharks who need help to see her.
It’s a relationship that goes beyond a single helpful interaction. For example one of the sharks that would show up when she first started swimming with them was a shark she called Foggy Eye who really didn’t like to be touched. One day, Foggy Eye showed up with a hook in her mouth that Cristina Zenato removed, and ever after, Foggy Eye cuddles when she visits, putting her head in Cristina’s lap and enjoying some petting
We don’t know SO much. Some wolf spiders will adopt unrelated orphaned spiderlings and raise them. We recently discovered that the ant-mimickingjumping spider (below) produces “milk” and suckles its young until they are nearly fully grown.
SO. Don’t assume we know all about what creatures do or feel or whether or not they form social connections or bond with others.
don’t ever let anyone make you feel ashamed for not going down a conventional path (e.g. not finishing college or starting college later in life, doing an internship in your late 20s, not having a "career” by a certain age). all of this is arbitrary. do not create a life that aims to satisfy everyone but yourself. you worked hard as fuck to get to where you are. don’t you dare let others including yourself diminish those efforts. you do not deserve that. especially if you did it all while battling mental illness.
As with many disciplines, kindness may come more easily to some than to others. But it is nonetheless something you can learn, something you can teach, something you can work at.
Something that really breaks my heart is the cruel indifference that some people have towards pets or animals that they personally don’t enjoy. Like I hear so many stories about someone losing a beloved pet snake or rat or tarantula, only for their friends to say something like “good riddance”.
My best friend does not like my gerbils at all. She jokingly calls them vermin and teases me for being the only 25 year old woman that still has pet gerbils. She came to visit me one weekend when one of my sweet babies was really sick, and unfortunately called me at work to solemnly let me know my gerbil had passed. The entire drive home I was trying not to cry because we had plans and I didn’t want to ruin the weekend with my ridiculous grief over a rodent. When I got home, my best friend was sitting in the driveway, hand painting a little coffin with my gerbil’s name on it. I immediately started sobbing. She went and got me a glass of wine, and played a Stevie Nicks song on her phone while she dug a grave. After the somber funeral in my backyard, she cancelled our evening plans and we walked to a bar, where my best friend completely un-ironically held up a glass and toasted my dead gerbil, thanking her for the joy she’d brought me.
The point of this story is, you don’t have to share or even understand your friend’s interests to show them respect and empathy in a time of loss. It’s alright if you don’t like a friend’s unconventional pet, you certainly don’t have to! However, pet loss can be incredibly painful, and I think it is always best to err on the side of kindness.
I can only hope that you hit a tree instead of a person.
as long as you’re on the road with me, putting my life in danger, it sure as hell IS my business. don’t look at your fucking phone while your car is moving. you’re going to kill someone.
I did a report on actual studies of this for college. It is part of a category of behaviors referred to as “distracted driving,” a category which includes driving while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.
The reason drunk driving is bad is you have inhibited judgment and a depressed nerve response. If you are drunk driving, and there’s something you need to avoid or react to, you are more likely to make bad reactive decisions, and make them much slower than a sober person would. (I do not recall offhand the name for the type of distraction this represents neurologically.)
Looking at your phone is something called a COGNITIVE distraction, which means your focus, in that moment, is entirely on a separate task, because contrary to popular belief, “multitasking” is not a thing that actually exists neurologically. It is possible to switch between multiple tasks in such a way that you make progress towards both at nearly the same time, but within the same INSTANT, your brain CANNOT, by design, perform two cognitive tasks at the same time without greatly impairing your performance at both of them. Even talking on the phone while driving, keeping your eyes fully on the road at all times, is a cognitive distraction that makes it much harder for you to pay attention to your driving and to the people around you, and even people who claimed to be proficient multitaskers, when tested, proved to be highly prone to accidents while talking on the phone AND far less effective at responding to the conversations they were having, because it is not possible for the human brain to do both things at the same time. Talking on the phone while driving was found to be approximately as bad as drunk driving.
But it gets worse.
If you are traveling at highway speeds, and you look down at your phone for just six seconds, you will have traveled roughly the distance of an American football field while your eyes were completely away from the road.
This, obviously, is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
A person under the influence of alcohol will have a DELAYED reaction. A person whose eyes are not on the road because they are texting will have NOreaction. In the event of an accident, this means full speed collision head on with no actions taken to mitigate the damage.
What every study ever done on the subject showed, unambiguously and by a CLEAR margin, was that TEXTING WHILE DRIVING IS SIGNIFICANTLY MORE DANGEROUS TO YOURSELF AND OTHER MOTORISTS THAN DRUNK DRIVING. You are both more likely to be INVOLVED in an accident and less likely to REACT to it in time to save your life and the lives of other people on the road.
Drunk driving is punished HEAVILY by law, and rightly so, because it is a reckless endangerment of public safety.
If you text while driving or check facebook while driving or do anything else on your phone instead of keeping your eyes on the road, YOU ARE MORE DANGEROUS TO YOURSELF AND OTHER DRIVERS THAN A PERSON WHO IS SEVERELY DRUNK, YOU ARE A THREAT TO PUBLIC SAFETY AND YOU SHOULD BE STOPPED. Other people on the road have every right to hate you for it and to hope someday the law catches up on this issue.
If you’re driving on the same road as me, YOU TEXTING IS MY FUCKING BUSINESS, because you are putting MY LIFE in danger.
If you want to text while in transit, you shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat.
Looking at this I get to the bit about moving at highway speeds and looking at your phone for six seconds means going a football field without seeing the road. And I think “People look away for that long?!?!?” But of course they do, this is the same species where someone put on the cruise control in their RV/camper and went in the back to make coffee.
ifesbob 