YouTube and the armchair animal behaviorist.

Now that my internet odysseys of fantasy artwork and crockpot recipes are over, I am now an armchair animal behaviorist. I know all. Once I saw a video featuring live dolphins doing mean things to each other. I thought this was interesting and kind of funny. We can all be animal behaviorists if we like.

We say dolphins are great, they're smart, they have feelings, emotions. We say that our pets will pack.

We find that when let or turned loose, or allowed general freedom, a small population of dogs will behave as a pack. But then we find that cats won't, they'll pair off. Two, and you have best friends. Three, you probably have an odd man out. Four and you have two sets of best friends, and so on.

This lengthy essay is about some observations of mine of humankind's compulsion to assign certain qualities to non-human animals and our shock at the consequences of learning something new. I know the post is long, but those of you who bear with me might find it entertaining if nothing else. It's tongue-in-cheek a little too, because what if we traded which human traits we assign to animals? For many, not knowing something is better than knowing, because once you know something, you can't un-know it. And if you suddenly know something, and it turns out to be uncomfortable, you flail around trying to make sense of it.

As death machines, the great white shark and the killer whale have a lot in common. Dominant, big sharp teeth, fast and agile, sharply-honed killing skills.

The great white shark kills and eats when it's hungry, puts itself on auto-pilot when it's tired, and lives a simple life. It gets curious sometimes, though. When what it sees is out of the ordinary, it will usually check it out, and sometimes bite it. Knowledge of this is not new.

Babies and small kids do that - if you want to know something more about something, taste it. If it's iggy, spit it out. If it's good, take another bite.

"Jaws" will tell you the great white may seek revenge, as it may find it personally offensive that a human would kill its offspring.

I watched a video documenting a pride of lions and its relationship to a herd of water buffalo. The herd found the little hideout of the pride, took the pride by surprise and stomped all the lion cubs to death. As soon as the cubs were dead, the herd left. The video of the prior incident put it into perspective. Battle at Kruger, in which the lionesses tried to take down a baby buffalo near the river's edge when the herd stepped in. It took several tries, but eventually the herd saved the baby. Rather than end the confrontation as soon as the baby was saved, a few of the herd would chase each of the lionesses away. I don't know if there was a long-standing feud between this herd and that pride, but maybe "Jaws" wasn't too far off the mark.

Survival. The herd "instinctively" knows that with all the cubs dead, that's fewer future lions to contend with, and making fresh cubs will keep the pride busy. For all a while, they'll be going after easier prey. Send those bitches back with a note, "Buffalo Not Easy." Make the lesson last. That was striking at the heart of the pride. There's a lot of logic and reason in that.

Another video showed five or six lionesses and one water buffalo, which put up a tremendous fight, to its death. It gored one of the lionesses. She died later.

Maybe there's more to the hunt of the water buffalo. Maybe the girls are beating their chests. Half a dozen of them to take him down, were they are proving their womanhood? Or proving a point to the lions? Was it watch-us lessons day for the cubs?
Maybe buffalo meat is tastier. After all, those two gazelles over there could have been easy pickings. As a beef eater, faced with a pound of hamburger and a K.C. Strip, that Strip is mine, I own that Strip. I took it down, made it say ouch and then shit it out. I can show a Strip who's boss. Most times you have to dress up just-plain-hamburger. Form it into a shape. Break it up and put it in something else. Pour something on it.

The Strip is different. Throw it on the grill until it stops crying and then tear it apart. But it's not an all-the-time thing, sometimes I can't afford it.

Money is my "getting gored" or "having my babies stomped." Hamburger is my gazelles.

We have much easier lives than they.

They're more like us than people want to admit.

People want to believe animals do everything by instinct.
When we want to fuck, it's wrong. When animals want to fuck, they're trying to make babies.

Even though there's animals that will fuck just from pure boredom.

Instinct would lead an animal to protect its young, for survival, the line must continue, yada, yada.

Isn't that why humans protect their young? We love them, but an act of violence against those who would hurt our young is as much selfish as selfless. Isn't it?

We want to save the animals, so we take them out of the admittedly shitty environment of hunger, weather and disease, and put them in safe little places designed to mimic (mock?) their natural environment, and act surprised when we finally get to see them do something that an animal does. Like, I don't know, bite a dude. Or fuck another male goat in the ass. Or eat its own baby. Or eat another animal's baby. Let's cage them up, but let's wig out when they do something so evil as to be an animal.

Back to the great white shark, and thank you, those of you bearing with me. Linguascelesta. Evil Eve. Virus9. We know more about the animals we are able to observe than the ones we aren't. We know a lot about dolphins, dolphin knowledge is commonplace, but we guess on the giant squid. We guess on all that freaky shit on the bottom of the ocean near Antartica.

Look how awed and mesmerized people seem when confronted with video of the ocean floor at temperatures humans can't even comprehend, much less survive. Yes, it is neat to see, but dang. Mesmerized, like they couldn't figure something could live like that. Well, duh. Life can't be stopped, it can't be stayed, it can't be caged up. And once it's there, it protects its young. Or eats it.

I like the easy life. I don't have to eat my kid sometimes.

We appreciate them when they're being cute. A beluga whale making "boo" faces at a crowd at the aquarium gets coos and applause.

But if you're a male mountain goat, and you fuck another male mountain goat in the ass, you're just labeled gay.

Gay animals. It's another symptom of society's obsession with other people's sex. You think he's gay? Didn't you think he acted gay? Are they gay? It's gotten compulsive, the way that question is asked, right up front. Almost immediately they say, not that it matters. But... it did matter, you asked the question, didn't you? If it didn't matter, you wouldn't have asked.

And now it matters if animals are gay.

They ate their own babies.

They stomped someone else's babies.

They got drunk from fermenting rotting fruit on the ground - for real LET the fruit drop to the ground without even trying to get it while it's fresh, let it rot on the ground and then partied. Deliberately. So they could get fucked up. How's that for a lesson learned? What a surprise! They did something like what we would do, like pick mushrooms out of cowshit and party.

It's okay if a leopard kills and eats a monkey, then adopts the monkey's baby, and tries to take care of it until it dies because it's still on the teat. How sweet she did that. It's all well and good when a couple of gorilla babies make up a game. How cute, they're playing.

In the case of hippos licking and nibbling on the backs of large crocodiles, and the crocodiles paying no attention, oh, it's some instinct thing. Must be something the crocodile's skin ooozes that the hippos need physically, or maybe the hippo is licking off mites that bother the crocodile.

But when a couple of college kids antagonize a tiger until it gets out of its enclosure and shreds one of them to death, there's a big huge argument about who fucked up. Why do we even need to keep them anymore? I was able to see videos of this shit because cameras are everywhere, even in vastness of middle Africa. We can watch the migrations, and what animals do in their natural environment is a whole lot more interesting than what they do in a cage. We don't just give them limits physically, but we give them limits in our own heads.

They just can't do anything, unless we think they can.

Why is anybody surprised anymore at what an animal will do?
It's us that doesn't want to admit we are more like them, not they more like us. It's that "baser" stuff people don't want to "admit" to having or wanting. Nobody in the wild tells a mountain goat it's not okay to fuck another male mountain goat in the ass. We say what those two mountain goats just did was a dominance thing. Showing it who's boss. Oh, uh, it's a bonding thing.

Whatever. We don't know why the goats did it, and what drives us crazy is that we already know the goats didn't even put as much thought into as we did. Eew, we're perverted. We're so uncomfortable with it that we have to take all the fun out of it in order to understand it. We either call it gay or call it instinct.

It's possible that tuna might be nicer than dolphins. Maybe tunas don't gang up on each other, or jump out of the water to try to fuck a person, or kill a baby whale for fun. We wouldn't know, because we eat tuna, and the less we know about them, the better. The more we know it, the more we don't want to eat it. And dammit, they won't do tricks.

We will eat the shit out of broccoli, but if its got a funny shape and comes from a foreign country, we're scared of it.
If it tastes like cow, looks like cow, acts like cow, we eat it, but if that cow's actually a Boer goat, we saw "eew." Well, what do you expect? Cows aren't cute.

And now back to the great white shark. It depends only on itself. The killing machine of the ocean, immense and single-minded as it appears. Technology brings us more about the killer whale. It sure acts dolphin-ish when it's at Seaworld, so we want to coo at it. We've never wanted to coo at the great white shark. It won't ever perform tricks for us. The killer whale, like Shoeless Joe, plays for food money.

Slowly but surely, killer whales are moving into territory owned by the great white, and they are staying...colonizing. Maybe the great white is too single-minded to care much?

And I learned about C-A2, the 25-year-old killer whale with a taste for the liver of the great white. Not necessarily the whole great white, but just the liver. Oh, we don't want to think about that though, because they're so much like dolphins, and that sort of thing is too much like killing an elephant for its tusks, and leaving it to rot. Freaky story, and one I thought was pretty darn neat! That, to me, is a neat thing to know. Stir all that up with - yes - another video I saw. The killer whale eats on seals, snatches them up, takes them out into the ocean and plays with them, it's sick to watch. But one time, it brought a poor seal back to shore and dumped it, live, and then left.

To me that didn't say the whale felt sorry for it. Hey, I can assign any human trait I want, right? I don't think killer whales have sympathy like that. Showing its dominance perhaps. That's what "instinct" would tell us. But just having a good time? I thought, wow that was kinda psycho. That was kinda...fucked up. It was mean and horrifying. It was darn fucking neat!

So I decided, armchair animal behaviorist that I am, that the difference between the killer whale and the great white shark, killing machines that they are, is a sense of humor. The great white has no sense of humor. The killer whale has a sense of humor, in the sense I can define and assign.

I also decided, that in the case of hippos licking and nibbling on the backs of large crocodiles, maybe they're each more human than we know. Maybe it's not instinct at all. The hippo believes it's so big and bad it can chew or lick your back whenever it wants, just because it can and it wants to. The crocodile...well, let's face it, what's it gonna do? What can it do? The hippo is as big and bad as it is. I can't do anything about it, and I'm not going to walk away or let anyone see me walking away. So I'll just let you, and pretend it's okay, by the way fuck you, that's a shitty position to put me in.

Or it's just used to picking its battles carefully. Or it just doesn't mind.

Why does it have to be all serious instinct, all the time? By limiting our imagination, we limit what we can learn, and fool ourselves into believing we're superior. Why can't the cute friendly whale menace and stalk the giant squid? Why can't baboons hang out with gazelles one day and eat one the next day?

I like YouTube. I saw a dude put his whole arm up an elephant's butt, and flail around in there. Another dude had a cone-thing. They were, for real, gathering semen from this animal. Well, we need to learn more about them, don't we? Just fuck one and it's called bestiality. Cover yourself in plastic first and it's called biology.

Survival is closer to the mark of why animals do the shit they do. Sometimes survival requires that which we have simply not recorded on video.

I decided the great white sharks are moving away from their territory on the west coast in the face of the killer whales, not out of fear, or inferiority, but because killer whales are assholes, and, like I said, great whites have no sense of humor. That's why Africans don't tame and ride the zebra. It's just not worth the trouble, because zebras are dicks, obnoxious dicks. I saw it on video.

Heh. Or maybe the great whites are gay...not that it matters.