All Kinds of Monster Information

Annie Ovenden (British, b.1945)

Green Cay Wetlands, Florida

Parrotina for Parrotina

The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don't have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.

And then there's the kea, straight-up titled "clown of the mountains", that has a specific vocalization for "playtime!". Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go "great idea, disembodied voice! it's TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!" and start wrestling.

Humans aren't the only animals with advanced language learning that have Plexin in their genome. We can actually find homologous plexin between humans and PARROTS!

Using genomic alignment search tools, we can actually break down the sequence of human Plexin and directly compare it to the Plexin found in parrots. (This was actually a project I ran for an upper division genomics class, and running the program literally takes like... ten minutes.) I wanted to see how similar the plexin gene was between humans and parrots, so I queued up the human sequence against all of the available records from parrot genomes and sorted by greatest percent identity (i.e., which bird species had the closest plexin to ours?)

It was this funky dude right here:

THAT'S RIGHT BABY! The kea, notorious for being a straight up motherfucking prank god, carries Plexin with a 79.42% identity comapred to humans'.

THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE HAS A HOMOLOGOUS LANGUAGE LEARNING GENE WITH US!!!! A GENE THAT IS THOUGHT TO BE CORRELATED TO HIGHER LEVEL LEARNING AND INTELLIGENCE!!!!! AND THEY USE THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO WREAK HAVOC ON TOURISTS

–Any wild animal in a house/being treated like a pet. Yes, even if they say they “rescued” it. No legitimate rehabber would EVER treat a wild animal like a pet. Repeat after me: it does not matter if the animal is not suitable for release; they still shouldn’t be kept as a pet.

–Free contact with big cats. Even if it’s a “sanctuary”.

–People interacting with wildlife. Feeding, petting, playing with, etc.

–Free handling venomous snakes.

–Predator and prey interacting. Cats and birds, dogs and birds, literally anything else with birds. Cats or dogs with rodents, etc.

–Any video that claims a wild animal is domesticated. Wild animals are NOT domesticated, but they can be tamed. These are two very different things and anyone who doesn’t understand the difference shouldn’t be owning one of those animals.

–Any video claiming that (insert wild/exotic species here) is “just like owning a dog/cat!” i.e. the video that went around saying foxes are “the best characteristics of cats and dogs”.

–Facilities that breed hybrids or morphs (i.e. ligers, white tigers, coywolves, etc)

–Any video by the Dodo

–Obese animals being portrayed as “cute and chonky”.

–Click bait titles about dangerous/exotic animals i.e. “bitten by my king cobra!”, “my pet fox did what?!?”, “letting my pet alligator pick out a toy!”. You get the idea. Anyone using wild animals to get views/publicity does not have their best interests at heart.

–Any “dog trainers” promoting dominance theory (this shit has been disproven so many times and is not even accurate for wolves…)

–Owl cafes, otter cafes, or any kind of wild animal cafe.

Canyon magic

ig: @instagallerychrislindhout