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Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

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Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#51

Post by stickfigure »

bluebarbet wrote: post #27
rurp wrote: post #18

I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of sunfish that have encountered humans. This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lo…

Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy. This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes pu…

I've seen some very large farms and they didn't seem like a horror show to me. Maybe they exist somewhere but I'm starting to get the feeling that "factory farm" is a term that people throw out to conjure a mental image of something that doesn't actually exist (or is the exception rather than the rule).

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#52

Post by theultdev »

daveslash wrote: post #24
elzbardico wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most zoos nowadays are important research centers. Besides that, they have an important educational component that surely contributes politically for conservation efforts.

Big Zoos, yes. And they do some great research, as well as preservation and rehabilitation. But I've also been to a few small zoos in rural America that are essentially someone's private animal collection that they charge you a fee to see. I think those are less common than they used to be, but they do exist.

I don't think those can be considered zoos from your description.

And maybe stop going to them (you went to a few?) and they will become even less common.

Never seen one of those, but there's plenty of private animal habitats I've seen that take injured and stray animals.

Usually just ran/funded by someone who loves animals.

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#53

Post by hinkley »

lostlogin wrote: post #5
classichasclass wrote: post #3

We "met" a king penguin at Singapore Bird Paradise that would follow people around at the edge of the tank (an acrylic sheet separated you from their enclosure) and try to interact. It swam up to my wife and followed her around, then went to another bunch of people and did the same. It seemed to enjoy watching people watching it and waving to it. Not every animal does, but this one did.

I’m not sure if it applies with all birds, but many seem to become fixated on humans. This can happen if you care for very young, sick or injured birds. My wife cares for various sad cases and if she isn’t careful they stay with with us. We have 4 pigeons at the moment, with various issues. I call them our rehoming pigeons. Do you want a pigeon?

Some of them fixate on one kind of person. They have a type.

I knew someone who got a bird at a pet store. The bird's favorite caretaker looked like a younger version of my friend. So the bird was intrigued. When she surrendered the bird about five years later, the girlfriend of the man running the sanctuary also had the same hair color and skin tone. So again the bird was eager to check out the new person. Most other people could fuck right off.

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#54

Post by hinkley »

world2vec wrote: post #7

These animals yearn for their mates. I understand the conservation aspect of aquariums and all the good things that come out of it (research, etc) but it still makes me a bit sad when I read things like this.

I think it's better to think of zoos and arboretums and sanctuaries as embassies than as conservation.

Except in the direst of circumstances, your connection with that experience of seeing an African Elephant is a much more potent predictor for survival of the species than the benefit of having the elephant here where poaching is nonexistent but gene inheritance is complicated and limited. The star power of the animals triggers positive steps and slows or stops negative ones.

There's a conservation group I was involved with who thought they were going to save the world with a half dozen acres of land. The longer I knew them the more I realized that some of them didn't mean it figuratively. I love them but that's deranged. Meanwhile I treated it the way I think of zoos. That first hand experience re-establishing a human connection with Nature. The first or second domino in a long series of dominoes.

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#55

Post by zargon »

stickfigure wrote: post #51
bluebarbet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy. This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes pu…

I've seen some very large farms and they didn't seem like a horror show to me. Maybe they exist somewhere but I'm starting to get the feeling that "factory farm" is a term that people throw out to conjure a mental image of something that doesn't actually exist (or is the exception rather than the rule).

If factory farms were so benign, they wouldn’t need laws designed to encumber whistleblowers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#56

Post by James_K »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #50
James_K wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication here is that it would be impossible to fund conservation without zoos. As a counter argument: we could just do it. Increase taxes by the amount people spend in zoos and spend that on conservation. The only argument in favour of the zoo over that other approach is that people want to look at animals in cages.

> As a counter argument: we could just do it. Increase taxes by the amount people spend in zoos and spend that on conservation. Why do you think we could do that? I say we could just increase taxes by $5,000 per person per year and spend it on breeding and releasing mosquitoes in Los Angeles.

Yes, we could do that, but what would be the benefit? I'm saying that whether we want nature conserved and whether we want them to be in cages for us to look at are entirely separate issues that should be evaluated separately. The best argument in favour of zoos is assuming that the people who want to look at dancing bears would be sufficiently enraged by their absence that they would decide to condemn the whole of nature in not doing conservation.

As for why I think we could do it, the answer is because we obviously can. The world become a much worse place once you realise the many things of which humanity is capable, yet which we choose not to do.

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#57

Post by mongol »

daveslash wrote: post #23
observationist wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being cared for by conscientious humans, providing enrichment and variety, can be better than living in the wild. For any animal, living in the wild, life span tends to be short, and life tends to be brutal. Prey animals are hunted, and they scrounge for food; finding a steady, reliable, nutritious, and tasty source of food in the wild is vanishingly rare. Dealing with parasites, illness, injury, predation, and all t…

I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.

I think this is probably right. But does that mean that cancer, cardivascular disease, ALS, Parkinson, etc etc human diseases are incredibly rare among animals?

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#58

Post by weakfish »

jerrysievert wrote: post #49
classichasclass wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough, my late father was a veterinarian and we had a pigeon that we raised from a chick (we weren't sure what this thoroughly ugly bird was and it turned out it was a pigeon). It was very tame and lived in a hutch on the back porch, and would watch for us to come back from the electric pole out the front. Unfortunately its knowledge of cats was limited to our extremely lazy ones and one day it disappeared; we…

I became friends with a mallard while living near a pond, he would follow me when I walked to the bus stop, and greet me while on my way home (closer to home, he wouldn't typically leave the apartment complex, thankfully). one year, he disappeared, which added a lot of sadness to my life. that summer, he reappeared and walked up a hill to greet me, with his mate and ducklings in tow. his mate had had a shattered (and…

This made me smile, thank you for sharing!

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#59

Post by somishere »

During the pandemic / lockdown I was lucky enough to visit one of the reef pontoons off Cairns (Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef) that had been shut for several months. The resident Maori wrasse (a very large fish) at this pontoon, and others, has been known to have a relationship with some of the regular staff - often rubbing up against them in the water. When we jumped in the water that day the fish's reaction was the wildest thing I've ever seen. It was like a small puppy who has been locked inside all day. It literally jumped into my arms, flapping its tail to get closer. I'm going to repeat - this is a big fish, maybe a metre long and stocky, covered in a nice thick layer of slime. It would then swim away and come back and rub up against us. It did this to all three of us in the group ... only one of us was a regular. She hung with us for the whole snorkel and it was a bit sad when we had to get out of the water. Amazing experience. Made me feel differently about wrasses, that's for sure.

Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends

#60

Post by why_at »

somishere wrote: post #59

During the pandemic / lockdown I was lucky enough to visit one of the reef pontoons off Cairns (Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef) that had been shut for several months. The resident Maori wrasse (a very large fish) at this pontoon, and others, has been known to have a relationship with some of the regular staff - often rubbing up against them in the water. When we jumped in the water that day the fish's reaction…

While I was scuba diving in Belize with some friends we encountered some Goliath Grouper which would follow us around. Later we were amazed when we saw another diver hold out her arms to one and it swam right up to her so she could hold it and pet it. Keep in mind this was a massive fish that probably weighed as much as a person.

We asked her about it afterwards, turns out they just like being petted :). Eventually got to try it out ourselves on another dive, fish can be really friendly.

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