cute trash cans

None Pizza with Left Beef is 10 years old today.

From the mouth of a One Percenter -

An allergy is an extreme sensitivity to something that might not bother most people.

There are common ones and rare ones

They range from mildly annoying to life threatening, depending on the degree of sensitivity.

Not everyone has them. Some people might have several.

There’s no need to include allergy warnings when your audience is small and well known and you know no one present is allergic to anything you’re bringing.

When your audience is wider or unknown, it’s courteous to include warnings for the more common ones (peanuts, milk). Because better safe than sorry.

If you find out that someone with a rarer one might be present, you should include warnings for things you usually wouldn’t (cayenne pepper, mint).

If you set off an allergic reaction, you apologize even if you didn’t know they had that allergy, you do what you can to help, and you take care not to do it again.

Teasing someone for having one is stupid.

People don’t choose to have them, and those that have them wish they didn’t.

Faking one that you don’t have is bad form.

PETA: They’d rather spend their money on publicity campaigns than on the animals in their care. PETA killed 73.8% of the animals in their care in 2015 (x)

FCKH8: Is a for-profit company that exploits oppressed groups for money. They’re also wildly uninformed, and spread misogyny, cissexism and bi/panphobia, as well as stealing their posts/designs (x)

Autism Speaks: They spend most of their money on researching a way to eliminate autism, heighten the stigma against autism and don’t have a single autistic person on their board (x)

That’s 1972

29 years before AVEN was started online,

and 47 years before the present.

And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.

That’s only people with DID, that does not include OSDD/DDNOS/UDD, places that don’t use that diagnosis, systems that aren’t disordered or medical, systems that don’t seek treatment, etc. 

The actual percentage of plurality as a whole is much higher than that (if you assume that systems without DID are real, which I should hope you do). I’ve seen some estimates of up to 5% or 7%. 

I’m also pretty sure that estimate also doesn’t include soulbonders, thoughtforms, and other similar experiences. Or people who are plural but don’t label it with terms we might use.  

If we add together ALL forms of plurality, not just DID/OSDD, it could easily be around 7%, we’d wager. That’s-- as the world population stands at the exact moment of this typing--  541,520,770. That would be ALL of the United States, plus the entirety of Brazil, with about 10,000 left over.

We are not rare. We’re just silenced, scared, don’t have the words for what’s going on, ignored, misdiagnosed, divided by community politics and by malicious/ignorant singlets, etc. We’re not alone. 

Short answer: Some animals appreciate music, some don’t. Some can dance, most do not. It’s dependent on certain types of intelligence.

Long answer…

Birds do like music, they understand rhythm, and they can truly dance! Birds are incredibly intelligent animals, not because of the size of their brains, but the density of neurons means they pack a lot of smarts into a very small braincase. Birds also have some specializations in their intelligence that other animals do not that can make them more likely to dance!

Birds are vocal animals! They learn vocalizations (and in some species even names, called signature contact calls, that they use to identify and find individuals) from their flock, and use sound to navigate their social environment. This means that birds, namely songbirds and parrots, have adapted to have large portions of their brains dedicated to processing sound. They spend a lot of time and energy hearing, paying attention to, processing, mimicking, and thinking about sounds that they hear because their survival depends on it! Now what does that have to do with dancing? A lot, but perhaps not as much as the next thing:

How animals communicate with each other and form social connections. Many birds live in flocks. Their ability to survive, thrive, and reproduce depends on their interactions with other birds. Now sound plays a huge role in socialization, but so does body language! Parrots especially have very complex social lives and subtle nuances to interacting with each other, and they have evolved very elaborate ways to communicate with each other using body language, both behaviorally and physically!

They have brightly colored eyes and control over their pupil size:

Macaws blush;

And cockatoos, arguably some of the best dancers in the parrot family, love to raise their crests, spread their wings, and bob and duck and do all sorts of dance-y things naturally to communicate!

Perhaps most remarkably, black palm cockatoos actually create their own music, using rocks and sticks as drumsticks to bang rhythmically on trees! All with absolutely zero training or human intervention.

Birds don’t perfectly match up with the beat when dancing to music. Actually, their rhythm-keeping skills are about on par with human toddlers. But they do do their best to get into the beat. It just feels good to dance when you’ve got a brain complex enough to process music!

But what about other animals? Dogs dance, right? And horses?

… Not exactly. Almost every single example of other species of animals dancing are either trained behaviors, or coincidence. Except for one other animal. Can you guess what it is?

Well,

It’s elephants! And they fulfill all the characteristics of dancing animals. Complex brains? Check. Auditory intelligence? Check. Highly social? Check!

This isn’t all to say that other animals don’t enjoy music– many animals enjoy listening to certain kinds of music for all sorts of reasons. But so far, only birds, elephants, and humans are proven dancers.

My science may not be 100% spot on– I encourage you to do your own research and debunk anything I got wrong or add something I missed!