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#not primates
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[image description: image is a flow chart entitled " You can put an end to this: never pay to pet a cub" the chart starts with a drawing of a tiger cub head with a hand touching it. There are 6 arrows that flow from the start, in order from left to right:
1. Drawing of 3 small tigers, "constant breeding to supply cubs" arrow leads to image of a hand holding a sack with and a hand taking it, "injection of assets into the illegal wildlife trade"
2. Drawing of tiger skin rug and bottles, "older tigers sold for parts" arrow splits to two first leading back to "injection of assets into the illegal wildlife trade", and an drawn image of a bottle above 3 outstretched hands, "increases size of tiger product market" arrow to drawn image of a bear trap, "more poaching: wild tiger products preferred over captive"
3. Drawing of a mounted tiger head and a rifle "older tigers sold for canned hunting"
4. Drawing of tiger in very small barred cage, "older tigers sold to unaccredited zoos and backyard owners"
5. Drawn image of hands counting a large stack of money, "masquerading as non-profits takes away from legit organizations"
6. Drawing of the globe and a tiger head on it, "irresponsible breeding hurts gene pool"
End description. ]
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Woman at the zoo: Why do they look so sad? 😔
Sign literally 10 feet away:
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beemovieerotica · 1 year
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the cognitive dissonance from people who want the products of modern medicine but get weird about animal research. like im sorry but this is necessary for the survival of the society we currently live in. and the scientists who work on these things are not evil cackling psychopaths. anyone you talk to in animal research has incredibly complex feelings about their work and incredibly complex relationships to the animals in their care. there are regulations and oversight and penalties in place to make the work as humane as possible and scientists are overwhelmingly the ones enforcing and advocating for better care.
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weaselle · 11 months
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i wanna do a thing where i lay out studies that show things in different primates that show us parts of ourselves as humans. Call it Primates: Through the Looking Glass or The Monkey in the Mirror or something
There are studies and documentaries that show things about Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Baboons, Macaques... that just make sense to me. That if shown right would make sense to a lot of people, i think.
like... they were studying this one group of gorillas --
okay wait. First of all, you know a silverback (the Big Male) of the group is not the leader or in charge or anything, right? He has a role, and it includes a certain amount of control, which i’ll explain briefly, but he’s not, like, in charge.
wait, you know all that Dominance/Alpha theory about wolves is all wrong, right?
wait wait wait, and also that like, the bull or the stag or whatever in a herd is not in charge of anything, right? right?
hold on. the wolves is it’s own post, the herd thing i might get back to, we’re on gorillas, okay. Silverback is basically just the male head of an extended family in which plenty of the leadership is handled by the women of the family.
There are often 2-4 silverbacks, but one, usually the largest, will clearly be senior to the others who are often his sons or brothers. Silverbacks have three main roles
1: defend the group from all physical threats aside from people, these threats are mostly random male gorillas, chimpanzee baby-snatching gangs, and the occasional leopard. Just his alert presence handles most scenarios, and then maybe a few times a year he has to risk his life fulfilling this responsibility. It is this role that provides most of whatever actual power he has over the group, namely this: while he isn’t necessarily the one deciding when and where the group goes on a daily basis, if the most powerful/capable silverback does decide to travel a direction, they pretty much have to go with him, the family isn’t safe without him.
2: make babies. And this is one area where the ladies of the group will sometimes sort of vote with their ovaries, and favor a silverback that isn’t the main one, like “yeah, Frank, you are the biggest, but honestly you’re a dick and we’re going to make sure the next generation of silverbacks isn’t another one of you.” When you see a main large silverback in a group of gorillas, it isn’t, like, his blindly loyal harem, they have to approve of him. Also gorilla females move between groups, and sometimes they take members with them or start new groups and stuff. Anyway i’m getting off track, one of the silverbacks jobs is making babies
3. keep the peace This functions a lot like being in the back seat with your siblings with your parents up front. Basically any disputes within the group have to be handled within a certain parameter of decorum, because if it gets too out of hand HE’s going to come over, and He’ll be upset, which is low-key terrifying because He’s huge, and there’s no telling who He’ll decide is at fault or what he’ll do about it, so letting a situation get out of hand is a losing scenario for everyone involved really. Tho typically he will favor senior females in disputes, in a “don’t you talk that way to your mom” kind of way.
one last thing, silverbacks don’t actually transfer power between silverbacks via battle every time.
Like i was just reading accounts from a multi-generational observational study of some wild gorillas that featured one big silverback just straight up taking over by performing the silverback duties better and becoming preferred by everyone else in the group. There was no fight, it just became, i do the job better, everyone likes me better, kicking my ass can’t change that, and boom, he was the primary silverback. And the other silverback might have been a bit dull, or a bit of a bully, but like us their species’ success is largely dependent on social intelligence; once he saw the writing on the wall, that other, slightly larger sivlerback didn’t even bother trying to change the situation with a physical fight, he understood what had happened.
okay so all that was just to tell you all this story. lol. Here’s what i saw in one documentary:
This very big, getting old silverback, who was hugely popular and successful, with a very large and tightly bonded family group, and a couple of his hulking adult sons backing him up. Everybody in his group seemed to love him a lot, he was particularly calm in that gentle giant sort of way, a safe, emotionally steady presence, happy to help raise his sons and daughters with kindness, and who could become a raging nightmare if pressed by a leopard ... exactly what a band of gorillas wants in a silverback.
But one of his adult sons had plenty of silver on his own back, and was getting itchier and itchier to be main man of the group, and this is where we start our little drama
It seems to be coming to a head, and the observers are nervous about a fight for the position. The silverback and his son are both are huge, probably approaching 400lbs, mostly muscle, with long thick fangs and skulls topped with jaw muscles as big as human biceps to wield those teeth, which nature has given them primarily to fight other gorillas with. 
But then the next day, the old man leads the fam up the mountain.
it’s winter, which is why they have come down the mountain in the first place. But as we discussed, if he goes somewhere, they have to go, so they all follow behind.
up he goes, and then he sits. And waits. It’s cold and there is much less food up here at this time of year. There’s nothing to do but sit hungry in the cold. His size and metabolism makes him the most able to withstand the cold, but even he is pretty uncomfortable. 
And so he sits. And his family, perhaps confused, but loyal, sits around him.
But his son, the other huge silverback, with years of training even as an adult under his wise father, is ready and able to go off on his own. Finally, he stands up, makes clear his intentions to leave this uncomfortable place. A small handful of the other gorillas stand with him -- if he goes down the mountain, then they can safely leave as well. He turns and heads down the mountain. After a moment, a few more gorillas leave the main group to follow. All in all it winds up being nearly half.
The wise older silverback thoughtfully watches his son leave with about half the group. He sits a while longer in the cold, in the company of those most loyal to him, and then takes them along a different path down the mountain
And those two groups still ran into each other sometimes, and were friendly. And sometimes a couple gorillas would change between the two groups. They were still close.
But i just thought that was such an elegant, meaningful way for that gorilla to handle that whole situation. And it makes a completely human sort of sense to me. 
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mesuud · 7 months
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Paylaşmak
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despazito · 21 days
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how many north american cryptid sightings do you think were just porcupines
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these are hairy men of the forest
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bignosebaby · 1 year
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quazies · 2 days
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The most perfect-est creature..
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thagomizersshow · 7 months
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Apes are a kind of monkey, and that's ok
This is a pet peeve of mine in sci comm ESPECIALLY because many well respected scientific institutions are insistent about apes and monkeys being separate things, despite how it's been established for nearly a century that apes are just a specific kind of monkey.
Nearly every zoo I've visited that houses apes has a sign somewhere like the one below that explains the supposed distinction between the two groups, focusing on anatomy instead of phylogeny.
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(Every time I see a graphic like this I age ten years) Movies even do this, especially when they want to sound credible. Take this scene from Rise of the Planet of the Apes:
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This guy Franklin is presented as the authority on apes in this scene, and he treats James Franco calling a chimpanzee a monkey like it's insulting.
But when you actually look at a primate family tree, you can see that apes are on the same branch as Old World monkeys, while New World monkeys branched off much earlier.
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(I'm assuming bushbabies are included as "lorises" here?)
To put it simply, that means you and I are more closely related to a baboon than a baboon is to a capuchin.
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Either the definition of monkey includes apes OR we can keep using an anatomical definition and Barbary macaques get to be an ape because they're tailless.
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"I've got no tails on me!"
SO
Why did all this happen? Why did we start insisting apes are monkeys, especially considering the two words were pretty much interchangeable for centuries? Well I've got one word for ya...
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This the attitude that puts humans on a pedestal over other life on Earth. That there are intrinsically important features of humanity, and other living things are simply stepping stones in that direction.
At the dawn of evolutionary study, anthropocentrism was enforced by using a model called evolutionary grades. And boy howdy do I hate evolutionary grades.
Basically, a grade is a way of defining a group of animals by using anatomical "complexity". It's the idea that evolution has milestones of importance that, once reached, makes an organism into a new kind of thing. You can almost think of it like evolutionary levels. An animal "levels up" once it gains a certain trait deemed "complex".
You can probably see the issue here; that complexity is an ephemeral idea defined through subjectivity, rather than based off anything truly observable. What makes walking on 2 legs more complex than walking on four? How are tails less complex than no tails? "Complexity" in this context is unmeasurable, therefore it is unscientific. That's why evolutionary grades suck and I never want to look at one.
For primates, this meant once some of them lost their tails, grew bigger brains, and started brachiating instead of leaping, they simply "leveled up" and became apes. Despite the early recognition that apes were simply a branch of the Old World monkey family tree (1785!), the idea of grades took precedent over the phylogenetic link.
In the early years of primatology, humans were even seen as a grade "above" apes, related but separated by our upright stance and supposed far greater intelligence (this was before other apes were recognized tool users).
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It wasn't until the goddamn 1970s that it was recognized all great apes should be included in the clade Hominidae alongside humanity. This was a major shift in thinking, and required not just science, but the public, to recognize just how close we are to other living species. It seems like this change has, thankfully, happened and most institutions and science respecting folks have accepted this fact. Those who don't accept it tend to have a lot more issues with science than only accepting humans as apes.
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And now, we come to the current problem. Why is there a persistent idea that monkeys and apes are separate?
I want to make it clear I don't believe there was a conscious movement at play here. I think there's a lot of things going on, but there isn't some anti-monkey lobby that is hiding the truth. I think the problem is more complicated and deals with how human brains and human culture often struggle to do too many changes at once.
Now, I haven't seen any studies on this topic, so everything I say going forward is based on my own experience of how people react to learning apes (and therefore, humans) are monkeys.
First off, there is a lot of mental rearranging you have to do to accept humans as monkeys. First you, gotta accept humans as apes, then you have to stop thinking in grades and look at the family tree. Then you have to accept that apes are on the Old World monkey branch, separate from the New World monkeys.
That's a lot of steps, and I've seen science-minded zoo educators struggle with that much mental rearranging. And even while they accept this to an extent, they often find it even harder to communicate these ideas to the public.
I think this is a big reason why zoos and museums often push this idea the hardest. Convincing the public humans are apes is already a challenge, teaching them that all apes are monkeys at the same time might seem impossible.
I believe the other big reason people cling to the "apes-aren't-monkeys" idea is that it still allows for that extra bit of comforting anthropocentrism. Think of it this way; anthropocentrism puts humans on a pedestal. When you learn that humans are apes, you can either remove the pedestal and place humans with other animals, OR, you can place the apes up on the pedestal with humanity. For those that have an anthropocentric worldview, it can actually be easier to "uplift" the apes than ditch the pedestal.
Too make things worse, monkeys are such a symbol of a "primitive" animal nature that many can't accept raising them to the "level" of humanity, but removing the pedestal altogether is equally painful. So they hold tight to an outdated idea despite all the evidence. This is why there's often offense taken when an ape is called a monkey. It's tantamount to someone calling you a monkey, and that's too much of a challenge to anthropocentrism.
Personally, I think recognizing myself as a monkey is wonderful. Non-ape monkeys are as "complex" as any ape. They make tools, they have dynamic social groups, they're adapted to a wide range of environments, AND they have the best hair of all primates.
I think we should be honored to be considered one of them.
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vintagewildlife · 4 months
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Gibbon By: Unknown photographer From: WWF Threatened Animals 1986
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nemfrog · 8 months
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Human and chimpanzee skeletons. God or gorilla. 1922.
Internet Archive
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[video description: video is a TikTok by @colombuszoofamilyparks. The video features several short clips of aquatic turtles timed to an electronic tune that said in auto tune "turtle" and at the end, the music stops while showing a large tortoise and the audio says in a normal voice "that's a tortoise!"
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jasvvy · 9 months
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river-taxbird · 2 months
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"Isn't it weird when an anthro dog furry meets a real dog? How does that make sense? How can both exist? Wouldn't it make them feel weird?"
Well humans are apes, right? If you asked an anthro creature that question they would probably counter with the old "That's like asking if humans evolved from apes why are there still apes."
Does being around apes make us feel weird? That's actually an interesting question, because when I have seen them at the zoo I have often got a weird feeling. Their expressions and body language are way more dynamic than most nonhuman animals. Of course that's just what you'd expect from our closest living relatives, and research shows we may have a genetic memory of the meaning of apes' common body language.
I think it's probably their expressiveness messing with our expectations around body language that can cause us to have a weird feeling around nonhuman apes, but I think it's a good idea to explore that kind of feeling, and maybe it can even help us understand our place in the world and build empathy with nonhuman animals. Look at this! Those are just some guys! It's just we came down from the trees on two legs, and they came down on all fours.
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Other posts have said it but genuinely internalizing that I am just an animal and have the needs of one is helping my mental health and understanding of myself.
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antiqueanimals · 28 days
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Mother and Son. Watercolor. Maurice Wilson (1914–1987)
The Artist Magazine, 1941.
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knuppitalism-with-ue · 8 months
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A piece from the #MonkeyCruise series, in which I take classic pieces from art history and replace humans with extinct primates and alter the scenes accordingly.
Here it's Mesopithecus witnessing a beached Otodus megalodon.
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