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Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

bbc.co.uk

111–120 of 165 posts

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#111
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoos are are a terrible entertainment business. All the primates and megafauna especially, it is a tragedy. I'm certain they'll be looked back on with shame. Even as zoos market videos of animals "eating birthday cake" on social media. See also zoos' dark history entwined with ethnological expositions https://archive.is/xsuEU

Factory farms will be looked back on with 10,000x more shame and horror than zoos. Zoos barely scratch the surface of the immense and unnecessary cruelty we inflict on animals. We torture 70 billion land animals to death every year and the poor things will never even understand why - they're just babies, mentally speaking. It's objectively the greatest evil humans have ever committed, and for our own pleasure at that…

What? We eat meat. We need to eat meat. So we need to kill animals for that. Zoos absolutely not required for humans to survive.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#112

Many years ago I stopped by a zoo in France, with my 7mo son. I was pushing him in the stroller while he was napping, and at the orangutan exhibit, one came up to the window and gestured towards the stroller. I turned the stroller to face the window, and removed the hood. The orangutan blew my son a kiss, waved then went back to the otherside of its enclosure. Made me rethink what I knew about animal intelligence.

The way we treat animals is terrifying as they’re likely much much more sentient than we make ourselves believe (mostly for our own convenience)

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#113

Many years ago I stopped by a zoo in France, with my 7mo son. I was pushing him in the stroller while he was napping, and at the orangutan exhibit, one came up to the window and gestured towards the stroller. I turned the stroller to face the window, and removed the hood. The orangutan blew my son a kiss, waved then went back to the otherside of its enclosure. Made me rethink what I knew about animal intelligence.

> The orangutan blew my son a kiss

Excuse being the kill joy: the fellow might be mimicking a gesture it learned from other visitors. That's not to say they don't have an inner life--we're all made of the same substrate, after all.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#115

Many years ago I stopped by a zoo in France, with my 7mo son. I was pushing him in the stroller while he was napping, and at the orangutan exhibit, one came up to the window and gestured towards the stroller. I turned the stroller to face the window, and removed the hood. The orangutan blew my son a kiss, waved then went back to the otherside of its enclosure. Made me rethink what I knew about animal intelligence.

> The orangutan blew my son a kiss Excuse being the kill joy: the fellow might be mimicking a gesture it learned from other visitors. That's not to say they don't have an inner life--we're all made of the same substrate, after all.

Isn't this what humans do?

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#116
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The orangutan blew my son a kiss Excuse being the kill joy: the fellow might be mimicking a gesture it learned from other visitors. That's not to say they don't have an inner life--we're all made of the same substrate, after all.

Isn't this what humans do?

Yes. We are particularly accomplished mimics. Originality is exceedingly rare. We like to think of ourselves as different, but we are just inhabited by far more ghosts than animals without language.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factory farms will be looked back on with 10,000x more shame and horror than zoos. Zoos barely scratch the surface of the immense and unnecessary cruelty we inflict on animals. We torture 70 billion land animals to death every year and the poor things will never even understand why - they're just babies, mentally speaking. It's objectively the greatest evil humans have ever committed, and for our own pleasure at that…

What? We eat meat. We need to eat meat. So we need to kill animals for that. Zoos absolutely not required for humans to survive.

> We eat meat.

Purely for taste.

> We need to eat meat.

False. 10-20% of the world population does not and we're just fine.

> So we need to kill animals for that.

No, you want to kill animals because you want tasty food. Not because you "need" meat. No one living in an industrialized country does. It's trivial to create a plant-based balanced diet (and a tasty one at that.)

> Zoos absolutely not required for humans to survive.

Neither are factory farms. They exist to satisfy "taste buds go brr." But that is not worth literally torturing[1] an animal to death.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#118
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my wife was pregnant the doc said to let them know if she had any cravings for minerals, clay, or something weird like that. Turns out it can mean a vitamin deficiency. Not sure how the mind knows to send out a specific craving besides food and water.

There's a school of thought that says a lot of thinking happens in the gut, which delegates tasks to the brain, so to speak.

There is communication between your gut and brain.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/the-gut-brain-con...

Your gut microbiome also has more living cells than the rest of your cells combined.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/25201-gut-microbi...

So, it's a team effort :)

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/1/10/team_effort.png

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#119
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trial and error?

Bingo. We only know which mushrooms that are tasty or give us a fun time because a lot of people died finding out.

At some period in our evolution, it gave us pre-dispositions to certain tastes. Like our fondness for sweet & salty is universal.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#120

It's interesting for sure, but the mystery is how he gained that knowledge. Is he just repeating what he's seen humans do or his ancestors?

Aren’t we faced with the same fundamental mystery of human insight? Where does it come from?

Some tribes have a drug with sophisticated preparation steps from multiple plants and they claim the plants spoke to them about their ability. Carrots were pencil thin woody roots, almonds were fatal, bananas were half rock hard seeds, rice was just another grass, wolves were skittish and bare their teeth at humans. How did ancient humans see potential in them?
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