play

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 Unattack.

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

In watching how the world is changing around us, I remembered that there are some orcas playing with boats somewhere near Spain.

Everyone’s saying that the boats are being attacked, but with no expertise whatsoever to support me, I think it could just be playing.

Why? Well, if you check out the USA Today article on why orcas are attacking boats and sometimes sinking them, you’ll find lots of really interesting pictures.

This image, in particular, is very interesting (please open in a different tab). The keel of the boat, that pokey thing in the center – doesn’t that look a bit like it could be a dorsal fin? And the rudder, doesn’t that kind of look like a tail fin?

I’m not saying that this is what orcas see, but it’s hard to un-see it once you do. So what sort of creatures have a dorsal fin facing the bottom of the ocean? I know some fish float upside down when dead, but I don’t think that’s always true.

The attacks, however, happen when the boats are in motion, and generally speaking, dead creatures don’t move on their own as a boat would appear to – but then too, orcas have probably observed fish in nets or that have been hooked. In fact, in that same area, fishermen often throw hooks over the stern (that’s the back of the boat for non-sailors) which is also where rudders happen to be.

However, orcas do swim upside down.

…Orca sometimes swim upside down in order to target prey—by doing so, it can ensure prey cannot fight back when it turns itself back around.

The orca may also have been playing. Orca have been observed displaying playful behavior before, and approaching boats out of curiosity. Orca may swim upside down near boats in order to explore the area…

“Orca Swims Under Boat Belly Up in Incredible Close Encounter in Puget Sound“, Newsweek.com, July 21st 2022.

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 Red Dots of Life.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 36 Comments
_red dot

There’s a life skill to have that I think these days is more important than most. Probably the easiest way to explain it is by the ubiquitous cat and laser pointer that, by now, people in the Amazon jungle likely know about by carrier parrot.

Those of us that have had a cat of any generation have played with cats in one form of the other, but when the Theodore Maiman created the first laser in 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratory I’m fairly certain that he didn’t think that it would become something carried in pet stores. For those of you who don’t know, in the early days of the laser pointer, it was marketed for humans to use on humans for much the same reason.

In the days of boards and projectors, it was marketed as a tool to focus people on things. It worked really well until Microsoft decided to put out PowerPoint and making every meeting involving it a snooze fest. There was that window where the laser pointer had it’s day, only to be promoted to cat tormentor.

We think the cat is playing, but what is ‘playing’? The dictionary definition is doing something for enjoyment, and yet we don’t know that a cat necessarily enjoys attacking something it can’t actually stick in it’s mouth, which is where every other cat toy and other household item that catches their interest ends up. It’s instinctual, and one can argue that it’s a way of practicing hunting.

famous-cat-meme-which-started-and-launched-the-website-i-can-haz-cheezburger

You Can Haz Cheezeburger?
How would you feel if someone kept sticking a cheeseburger image in front of you? You’d practice grabbing it and would never get it. I don’t imagine it would be fun. Granted, moving laser dots on the carpet don’t have a taste other than carpet, but work with me.

Now take a breath and look around you every day and find the red dots in life. These are basically just some group of people trying to direct you to do something. Maybe it’s a good thing like washing your hands.

Maybe it’s a thing where when you’re hungry or thirsty, maybe that last sticky advertisement will guide your money to a place where you think you’ll get what you’re thinking you want.

I don’t even need to name food chains, they likely already popped into your heads. Maybe just the word ‘cheeseburger’ had you thinking of a particular food chain because you associate that word with their product.

no cheeseburger

The movie ‘Detached’ has a clip going around now about ubiquitous assimilation. It’s about those red dots and developing our minds beyond the quick and dirty memes that get passed around like a joint at a barbecue. They get passed around by people who never read Richard Dawkins books much less ‘The Selfish Gene’. They likely have no idea why we call them memes. They’re just memes, which occupy attention like little red dots. We have marketing trying to sell products, we have people trying to market their own ideas with memes, and then sometimes some of those memes work to the benefit of everyone.

And sometimes you just get a mouthful of something that’s blech. Sometimes you might get a good cheeseburger, sometimes you might get a bad cheeseburger, you never know. Social media has people, little ones too, just chasing red dots.

That particular scene from ‘Detached’ has Adrian Body’s masterful delivery of such a simple concept that we should not only be teaching children but also reminding adults of. If your clicky clicky ain’t getting you cheeseburgers you like, stop chasing them.

Criticism is often met by gaslighting, blaming an individual for not getting the cheeseburger that was shown. Somewhere in some very fine print that you need to have compound eyes to read there’s a catch somewhere. As we grow older we learn to expect them – but rarely read the fine print because… you effectively need compound eyes. Imagine having your lawyer look over every software license, copyright license, terms of service document… you’d get nothing done, and you need to get things done.

What do you need to get things done? Are you chasing red dots again? What are you actually accomplishing? Do you have a sense of accomplishment? Do you get the cheeseburger in your mouth feeling, or do you get the red dot on carpet taste?

We need to spend time on ourselves so that we are less susceptible to bullshit red dots. Shine your own for yourself.

And maybe think about what the cat wants when you play with it.