121–130 of 133 posts
I remember walking the Norwegian mountain trails in late summer in a 'lemming year'. The lemming population explosion is so ridiculous you had to constantly look at your feet to avoid stepping on them, both live ones that sometimes puff their chests and make a big scene, as well as corpses littered all over the path.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That people (usually males) believe this fanfiction also applies to human society and change their behaviours to be perceived as alpha
I don’t think many people would base their behaviour off wolves, parrots, gudgeons, mollusks or whatnot. That’s such a random species to choose. If anything, I would conjecture that the causality is actually in reverse: the ideas of pecking orders and dominance hierarchies were well-established in the scientific communities among zoologists and social psychologists (and even in common parlance), so people who studied…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know. And I think it is interesting to look at how much that costs compared to what we do today. It surprised me that animals aren't that expensive, I would have guessed that killing horses would be way more expensive.
Expensive horses take expensive breeding, training, and maintenance. You can get a good draft horse (one bred for real work) for not much. And "hobby horse" isn't just a fun phrase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think many people would base their behaviour off wolves, parrots, gudgeons, mollusks or whatnot. That’s such a random species to choose. If anything, I would conjecture that the causality is actually in reverse: the ideas of pecking orders and dominance hierarchies were well-established in the scientific communities among zoologists and social psychologists (and even in common parlance), so people who studied…
The wolf is not a random animal. It's a big predator associated in popular culture with aggression and dominance, e.g "a wolf in sheep's clothes", "the wolf of wall street", etc.
Given humanity’s long history of antagonism towards wolves, it is a very strange animal after which to choose to model one’s own behavior.
The scene may have been staged, but Wiki's entry on them suggests the demonstrated behavior is completely authentic, instead taking a more semantic argument about the term suicide: --- "Lemmings have become the subject of a widely popular misconception that they are driven to commit mass suicide when they migrate by jumping off cliffs. It is not a deliberate mass suicide, in which animals voluntarily choose to die, b…
But Attempting to cross a body of water is quite a bit different than plunging off a cliff. A rather low-to-the-ground animal has limited information about the width/risk of a water obstacle, but they do know what happens if they walk off a cliff. That's something they encounter in the course of normal daily behaviours required to provision fitness. Faking the cliffwalk because attempting to cross oceans exists is more than a semantic argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they can swim well and they have thick fur, I don't think jumping into a lake is inherently suicidal for them. They are, however, in lemming years, not very afraid of predators and will even stand up and squeak furiously at you if you get close. I knew of a dog who would walk up to them, watch their tantrum display with interest, and then just chomp them up. I think maybe that's where the "suicidal" idea comes f…
> stand up and squeak furiously at you if you get close Looks like this, no fear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAMMicsN9A4