Self Portrait

This black crested macaque grabbed someone's camera and took this self-portrait. He looks remarkably pleased with himself: reminds me of several TV personalities we all know.

Tales from Andrew Sullivan. Also check here for another self-portrait by the same macaque.

apparently the macaque, as photographer, owns the copyright. So sue me.

Nasty porcupines

I was reading Marco Polo on gutenberg.com and came across this little paragraph about a region in eastern Persia.

When you have ridden those three days, you find a town called CASEM, which is subject to a count. His other towns and villages are on the hills, but through this town there flows a river of some size. There are a great many porcupines hereabouts, and very large ones too. When hunted with dogs, several of them will get together and huddle close, shooting their quills at the dogs, which get many a serious wound thereby.

Nasty little beasts. I think this one must be of the same breed.


maybe not.

The course of true love... etc.

Especially when you are a male Darwin's Beetle. BTW, it will make a human female appreciate the fact that male humans simply fall asleep after they are done.

and male humans appreciate the fact that they don't have to fight their way up a three mile tree to meet her. [thanks to Sullivan again]

.

A Tragic Little Story

About a penguin. Is it confused? Suicidal? Was there simply one member of the colony this little fellow could not tolerate any more?

Don't know. No one does. But the little penguin just keeps on going.

There is a profound metaphor here, but I just don't know what it is.

God watches as we head off to our self imposed doom?

Doggy heroism

Watch this little video of a dog trying to save another dog that has been hit by a car.

(I got the link from Andrew Sullivan who makes the observation that the blogger who posts it should chill out about the meaning for religion: Francis of Assisi knew all about this. )

Mythical creatures: a diagram

from a link on the Daily Dish

Dog Stars

Two stories from The Week magazine this week.

Scott Seymour was debating whether to euthanize his 9 year old bulldog, Brittany, who was dying of stomach cancer. Instead .. he decided to give Brittany steroids to ease the pain in her last few weeks of life. Seymour's decision paid off last week when his house caught fire and a barking Brittany woke him up. Both master and pet escaped safely. "She never, ever barks when I'm sleeping," said Seymour. "She was demanding that I get up. And it saved my life.""

"British police believed they had a hostage standoff on their hands when they received an emergency call in which the caller could be heard whimpering and a man shouting, "Come out or else! I'm warning you!" The line then went dead. When police called back, they reached a woman who reported that Bailey, her 14 month old golden retriever, had stolen her cordless phone and, pursued by her angry husband, taken it to his hiding place behind the garden shed, where he gnawed on its keypad."

Bailey claims he won't be rescuing his owner from a fire.

Sophie Tucker - One Tough Doggie

Accidentally falls overboard, swims 6 miles through shark infested water and survives four months on a deserted island.

OK. What have YOU done lately?


reminds me of the time Michael Jacobson told us other TAs about his wartime experience in the Israeli army. The room got very quiet.

A little simian short story

Now that everyone has had a lesson on why chimps are not good house pets, Salon.com brings out a story about primate behavior. Some of the stories are endearing. Some are like this:

A telling anecdote involving Yeroen, the wily old chimp, shows why. When faced with the choice of allying himself with Luit, the strongest, dominant male in his chimp colony, or with Luit's closest rival, Nikkie, Yeroen chose the latter. Yeroen then helped Nikkie displace Luit as alpha male. That left Nikkie heavily indebted to Yeroen, who became the young alpha's puppet master, a far more powerful position than the aged manipulator would have had as Luit's right-hand chimp. The upshot was that Luit had arrogated too much power to himself, for as the colony's sole superpower, he became the leading target for gang-forming alpha wannabes. Coalition-building is everything in the chimp world, where the unilateral exercise of power is insanely dangerous. In the end, the mighty Luit was murdered in the night by Nikkie and Yeroen.

This story, btw, is from Frans de Waal, whose books on primate behavior were consulted to good effect by Newt Gingrich.

the biggest problem is we anthropomorophize them too much, especially the greatest of the great apes.

How to escape a killer whale

This is one plucky little penguin.

Clever too.


courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.

Where there is a will ...

Watch this little beagle escape, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.

Couldn't we put this beast in charge of the economic recovery plan? Seems smart enough and determined enough.

The Human/Animal divide returns

Here is a little film of an elephant attempting to paint a self-portrait. Not sure what to make of it. It may simply be a trick wrought through intense training. Is it self-expression, or merely a trick? Even if only the latter, it's a damn good one.

It may be that elephants are on a par with the chimps and bonobos we were talking about a few posts back.

The Human/Animal divide

Christians believe that the possession of a soul separates humans from animals. Some secularists I know, even the ones who are adamant atheists, claim that evolution has created a distinct consciousness that irrevocably separates humans from animals.

But I don't think either are quite right.

Consider Nim Chimpsky, a baby Chimpanzee who was taken away from his mother to be raised in New York by humans in an experiment to gauge how much, if any, language ability a chimp might have. He grew up thinking he was a human. Then, the experiment ended and funding dried up. Nim was sent promptly off to a dreary lab to reside with other chimps serving science.

Here is a description of some of his behavior among his fellow chimps, as told by the author of Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp who would be human:

There was a children's book all about Nim while he was in New York, basically a photo book, and Nim kept his one copy of this book safe, even though chimps tend to wreck everything. He would bring it down and show the other chimps, then bring it back to his bunk and keep it under his sleeping area so that no one could destroy it. He would just look at pictures of his New York City family, and himself, over and over again.

So where does the soul, that precious human consciousness, begin?

The quote is from an interview for Salon.com that is worth reading.

Cross species love

On Mediev-L, the list serv for professional medievalists, I found a notice of the following video, with a brief set-up.

"This woman found this lion hurt and about to die. She
> took him home and took care of him. When the lion was
> better she called the local zoo. This was the reaction
> she got when the lion saw her."
>
> http://www.telestereo.com/Archivos/video.html

So how friendly are YOUR kitties?

Somedays the lion eats you, and sometimes ...

There are a million stories out there on the veldt. This is one of them. Well, actually this video seems to contain at least three or four of them.

Remember, no matter how grim it looks, watch it ALL THE WAY TO THE END!


btw, this comes from an interesting religious site, aomin.org.