formerly sploon-fic-fan

I think the scientific test for object permanence in non-human animals should be seeing how badly you can freak them out with stage magic.

Housecats are just conceptually ridiculous creatures. Like, yeah, let's pair the threat reactivity of a small prey animal with hypercarnivore reflexes, see where that gets us.

Honestly the biggest mystery of housecat physiology to me is their breeding cycles. They reproduce as often as a prey animal while being carnivores and also a big enough threat that if they reach adulthood most animals won't even try to eat them. So why the possibility of four litters a year? What is supposed to maintain their population naturally?

I mean, the straightforward answer is that you can't define "naturally" as something separate from human involvement in this context. The housecat is the product of thousands of years of adaptation to exploit resource bounties created by the introduction of agriculture to northern Africa. A cat's natural habitat is eating the mice infesting your grain.

I ship it

I've seen posts going around claiming that petting animals is basically tricking them into thinking they're being groomed, and it's bugging me because, like, there's no trickery afoot. Petting and scritching are grooming activities. They help to dislodge loose fur and foreign objects and more evenly distribute protective oils, among other things. Primates are social groomers, and the human impulse to scritch is the legacy of our primate ancestors. We see an animal we like, even a dangerous one, and the monkey brain says "groom that thing".

Movies using red-tailed hawk calls for every bird of prey can be irksome, but shit, at least that one hits the right clade. Sometimes a movie will show you a songbird opening its mouth and a frog call comes out.

Every time a pop science article is like "50 million year old [creature] still [doing thing that creature does]", I like to imagine it's talking about the same individual creature for that entire span. Like one specific clam with a very well established daily routine.

"am I being annoying" are you aware that my heart is trying to crawl out of my chest to get to you