environment

Nature and Play.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

A friend of mine recently went to a informal conference regarding orcas and their attacks on ships, and I wish I could have gone myself. He was kind enough to post some bullets on it which were interesting and reinforced some of my own thoughts.

One thing leapt out at me – that the scientist that was there stressed that these weren’t attacks.

“…We talk to animals quite a bit – maybe more than we should, anthropomorphizing where maybe we shouldn’t. Communication, though, can be different from their end. Maybe they think the boat is an upside down creature that is playing?

It’s impossible to say, but I’m pretty sure it’s not an attack.

I’m also pretty sure it feels like an attack if you’re on the boat.

People do the above to each other every day, accidentally causing harm when trying to be playful. Maybe the answer is to let the orcas know that it hurts when they do that.”

‘The Unattack‘, RealityFragments.com, November 20th, 2023.

What I was getting at here was that I have seen and experienced way too many times destructive behaviors that, when someone is held to account, they respond with, “I was just playing”. “I didn’t mean anything by it…” Normally these seem to be responses that you don’t hear about beyond lower maturity levels that we associate with teenagers and below, so it’s part of the learning process, but I’ve heard people well down their temporal paths say the same or similar.

Well, if you didn’t mean anything, why did you do it? What was the reasoning behind it?

That’s pretty simple when we look at our own species, but across species, it’s much more complicated.

Another friend complained to me about her cats digging up her plants, which to the cats are play. It’s a behavior she doesn’t like, so of course she got upset about it (and that her housemates walked through the dirt rather than clean it up before she awoke), but it’s in the instincts of the cats to hunt. Cats are hunters. They may be domesticated, they may defecate in boxes and eat from dishes, but they are still cats. The damage done from that play should be expected from a cat, and I gave her some tips on how to avoid it that she didn’t use. The cats dug up her plants again, she got upset, cycle continues.

Dogs, as domesticated as they are, sometimes like digging holes, sometimes like going past fences, and all manner of other things – not because they are ‘bad’, but because they see no value in not doing it and find entertainment in doing it. It’s play.

Play has a practical use in our world. That’s why parents buy children educational toys, or at least things accused of being educational. It’s to prepare them for the world that we live in, which we as homo sapiens have a lot of control over. That’s why cats and dogs, despite hundreds if not thousands of years of ‘domestication’ retain some habits. Is it genetics? Some of it probably is. Have you ever seen a husky that doesn’t vocalize? A cat that doesn’t chase things around at some point in it’s life?

Taking this back to the largest carnivore on the planet, the orca, these are creatures that have worn salmon as hats during one of their fads, that love slapping stingrays into the air, and many other things. I love the research we see on them, and to date we have no reports of orcas attacking humans outside of captivity. No one knows the exact reason that these particular orcas are having fun with ship’s rudders, and scientists apparently agree that it’s play.

Play can be destructive. Whether spiteful or not, the damage from play can be real. More knowledgeable people than myself don’t know why the orcas are hitting the rudders. When we pull what they consider food out of the water, how do they view that? When we make noise in their environment, our cacophony of engines and rudders causing sounds around them to change, are we irritating them, as it did the baiji (Chinese freshwater dolphin) and which quite possibly is extinct?

Is this play, or are these orcas taking control of their environment? Can it be both? Or do they have TikTok challenges?

I think being able to disable a ship might be useful for a predator. It might be useful for disabling competition for food, or it could be the same as banging on the floor or ceiling when the neighbors are playing the song of their people too loud.

The Line.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I’ve written about all of this before, and yet it’s still something that amazes me if we imagine through history.

You’re born into an environment that’s artificial beyond the natural challenges. Nowadays, natural challenges are rare, it’s humans we mostly have to worry about, those creatures like ourselves. They are like ourselves, remember that.

A little over 2,000 years ago, you might have been born into the wonderful life of being a peon – the odds are much better for that than what many written stories and movies suggest. Statistically, less people on the planet.

The peon could run away somewhere else and disappear, or move to the top of the mountain to avoid people only to have them show up asking for advice. That might have been a nice option for the hardy individuals.

Nobility, too, was born into – like wealth is born into today.

So let’s go further back. Let’s say your parents were hanging out with the crew drawing pictures of deer in the caves, your mother did a swish of the tail just so and… 9 months later you show up. Childbirth wasn’t very easy then for mother or child. Suddenly, you’re in a tribe, including that whacky guy who keeps wandering around chewing on poppies. What’s for dinner? What the tribe gets.

What the tribe gets. So that’s pretty much changed, hasn’t it? How often do you hear of a group of people born into a group working together? I know, in a perfect world we might call that family, but in a family the goals aren’t always aligned – unless it’s Disney. Everyone has their own thing going on.

What else?

If you go back far enough, the focus was on ‘staying alive because our environment will kill us’.

Slowly, we pushed back on that environment. Thousands of years later, nobody’s worried about the environment hurting us. It’s the other way around, but we’re more worried about all the civilization stuff that comes with it – paying bills and other things have become more important to use as individuals than worrying about the environment killing us – and us killing the environment that will kill us.

When did that happen? When did we cross that line? I wonder.

Into The Flower.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

I found myself revisiting a thought from yesterday when I was in conversation with someone who was challenging me on my lack of belief. I had pointed at a flower that happened to be nearby and said, “Most people would just say, ‘Oh, that’s a pretty flower'”, but when I look at it, I know I’m staring at thousands of years of evolution of that flower that it didn’t pick, but the pollinators chose. That there were plants didn’t make it because they were off a shade of color or shape from what we see now.

The conversation moved on and I didn’t get to finish the thought. I finished it earlier.

Flowers are pretty because pollinators made them so and because we said, “oh, these are pretty” and cultivated them further. So when I’m looking at a flower, I’m looking at seemingly infinite amount of chances to be something else. But these changes to make the flower what it is now came from choices made by more than one species.

Each of those species are affected by seemingly countless factors. Seasons, temperatures, food sources, oxygen levels, rainfall, and species evolution for all of those.

It’s amazing. It’s beautiful to consider, all those little things that made that flower a flower that is appealing to us, and why would it be appealing to us? There’s an interesting question too, maybe that’s how we found the bees to get at their honey. I don’t know.

Yes, that is a beautiful flower, and now maybe you’ll see how beautiful they are. They are the survivors our world picked.

For now.