Animals you don't like

[Bruno]

Animals you don't like

No, if you watch Attenborough's Life of Mammals you get to see chimps in the wild going on savage raids against their monkey cousins, literally ripping their heads off and eating them. As well as brutalizing unto death members of their own tribe who they've decided (for reasons unknown to us) need to be ostracized.

[Bruno]

Animals you don't like

To be clear, they're absolutely intelligent, they can learn to use tools and so on, they can express love and affection and generosity, but they can also be savage cunts.

[Sean of the Shed]

Animals you don't like

Lyra wrote:

The fault there lies entirely with the humans. The chimp's not evil, the fuckwits that kept him in captivity are.

And I don't agree that you can't see anyone home. Watch any nature programme or episode of Monkey Life or anything and you'll see social interactions and emotions expressed in their faces just like with humans. And I know you're going to think I'm anthropomorphising, but I think primates' intelligence is pretty well documented.

No doubt Lyra, but have you ever seen the footage of chimps hunting monkeys, or chasing down and killing another chimp that came too close to their territory. Their intelligence gives them the ability to plan and co-ordinate, and it makes them cold and ruthless hunters.
One day they'll take over and we will all become their slaves. Actually I'm surprised nobody has made a film of that.

*Or what Bruno said.

[linus]

Animals you don't like

Social mamals tend to live in very violent societies. For example, gang rape is a way of life for dolphins, and primates like chimps live in a constant state of warfare.

[Bruno]

Animals you don't like

Bumblebees. The queen lays a bunch of female eggs, then when the sisters hatch they set about building more combs for more of her eggs. The queen emits a pheromone that suppresses her daughters' sexual urges so that they don't turn out queens and start laying eggs of their own, until such time as the queen is ready to start making new queens.

So then she stops releasing that pheromone, in order to do so, which switches on all her daughters' sexual, er, switches, and they start laying eggs, too. The queen doesn't like this and she starts eating all of their eggs as soon as they come out, and this pisses them off so they attack her and eventually sting her to death. Then they all die, the new queens hatch and leave to start new, self-destructing fratricidal colonies elsewhere.

[Guest]

Animals you don't like

I know they can be savage! But I'm just saying it's intelligent savage, not expressionless moronic savage.

I saw a photo at an exhibition yesterday of an orangutan in the wild. The text explained that the photographer had seen him coming along, then stop to watch a dragonfly fly past. The camera captured this moment; the orang looks thoughtful and interested as he observes the little insect. (and the yellow flash of the dragonfly against his dark orange & surrounding greenery made a nice composition too) Everyone would accept that humans can do both savagery and intelligence/emotions, I just find it sad that people try to separate themselves from beings that are 99% the same as us. Human nature though, but sad.

[Bruno]

Animals you don't like

If you're talking up the 99% similarity then it's probably not quite right to pretend apes aren't morons. By human standards, they are; they're just really smart compared to every other non-human animal. A chimp would score like a 40 IQ or something wouldn't he?

[Alderman Barnes]

Animals you don't like

Can I just butt in here to register my astonishment at anyone finding crows anything less than ace. Not only are they really clever, but crows, rooks, ravens, magpies, jays and whatnot form a band of avian superheroes called Crows And Their Allies. Have that! Crows And Their Allies - that's your actual technical term, that is.

Which kind of begs the question: if crows are the Allies, who are the Axis?

Fucking cats, I bet.

[Sean of the Shed]

Animals you don't like

That would be the Axis of weevil.

[Bored Of Education]

Animals you don't like

They swagger around, chasing finches and thrushes off the bird table, eating their eggs and occasionally killing them,

That's usually cats that eat all the eggs and kill the songbirds. Cats just have better PR and blame the magpies. Well, they don't obviously but they have probably employ Max Clifford to do it

Back to pigeons, they are to hated for the possibility that some bright spark is going to use them to disprove evolution. How an animal whose shit rots its own feet has survived so long is beyond explanation.

They also can't belch apparently

[Bored Of Education]

Animals you don't like

To be clear, they're absolutely intelligent, they can learn to use tools and so on, they can express love and affection and generosity, but they can also be savage cunts

Back to homo sapiens again, are we?

[Sean of the Shed]

Animals you don't like

Bored of Education wrote:

That's usually cats that eat all the eggs and kill the songbirds. Cats just have better PR and blame the magpies. Well, they don't obviously but they have probably employ Max Clifford to do it

Cats are not common egg-eaters, it's far more likely to be squirrels. They will take song-birds, but that is far more difficult hunting than small rodents or a small velvet toy tied to a bit of string. Ground nesting birds, and their eggs, are more commonly taken by foxes and stoats.

[Bored Of Education]

Animals you don't like

I take your point on the eggs. As I understand it, birds make up a minority of the wild kills that a cat will make.

My point, however, is that it ain't magpies. Also cats are the only ones out of magpies, squirrels, stoats and foxes that have humans feeding them as well

Greedy little fuckers

[Wyatt Earp]

Animals you don't like

Purves Grundy wrote:

It may be the "lights on, but nobody at home" similar-yet-different thing.

"Uncanny Valley", they call it.

[Wyatt Earp]

Animals you don't like

I have a problem with Lyra's line, I think. Aren't you, in effect, invoking our close kinship with other Great Apes--the "99% the same" thing--only when it suits? Only to drop it, I mean, when people try to assign human-specific notions like moral responsibility to them?

I may be misreading you. Or indeed there may be a prefectly good argument for doing just that. I can't see it, though, really: I think we have to acknowledge that in important respects, other Great Apes aren't that similar to us at all. Which leaves the door open for that being true in other respects too.

[caja-dglh]

Animals you don't like

Sean of the Shed wrote:

On the flip side there was that woman who appeared on Oprah a few weeks ago who had her entire face ripped off by a friends pet chimp, even her eyes. They had to shoot the thing just to stop it. It probably just goes to show that some animals just can't be trusted as a domestic pet.

That poor sod had been drugged up to his eyeballs by his owner. Maybe primates are a risk, but if you tank the damn thing up on Xanax, a benzodiazepine, you really can't necessarily place the blame on the chimp.

For one, it would say on the bottle that it was for the use of the prescribed individual only, and I bet it wasn't to Mr. Chimp.