“Oh that animal doesn’t LIKE you it just TOLERATES you” …..So? If that’s the most a non-social organism can feel towards you isn’t that just as special an honor as whatever it is you think affection means??
“This creature with no natural social instincts outside of mating allows me to freely interact with it, while causing it little stress” is fucking DOPE AS SHIT
also… are you SURE? like, we’re still finding out so much about animals. Wolverines fathers, who we thought were not involved in caring for kits, turn out to travel around and collect all their kits from multiple mothers and take the whole group out on camping trips. Some spiders have tiny frog pets (!) or group up to communally raise their young. Wild sharks, crocodiles, and snakes have formed strong, documented relationships with people.
this man Gilberto (Chito) Shedden nursed this crocodile back to health after it was shot in the eye, and they were best friends for the rest of the crocodile’s life.
this python came in out of the wild as a baby snake and curled up next to the family’s infant, Oun Sambat (or Oeun Sambat?) and they were inseparable for 12 years
Cristina Zenato removes hooks from sharks and they let her stick her hand down their throat to do it and they even bring other sharks who need help to see her.
It’s a relationship that goes beyond a single helpful interaction. For example one of the sharks that would show up when she first started swimming with them was a shark she called Foggy Eye who really didn’t like to be touched. One day, Foggy Eye showed up with a hook in her mouth that Cristina Zenato removed, and ever after, Foggy Eye cuddles when she visits, putting her head in Cristina’s lap and enjoying some petting
We don’t know SO much. Some wolf spiders will adopt unrelated orphaned spiderlings and raise them. We recently discovered that the ant-mimicking jumping spider (below) produces “milk” and suckles its young until they are nearly fully grown.
SO. Don’t assume we know all about what creatures do or feel or whether or not they form social connections or bond with others.
We’re told octopuses are solitary.
That’s the story.
They live alone. They die alone.
Except for Octopus City where they live in a social collective.
Except that I watched with my own fucking eyes a giant Northwest Pacific Octopus who my friend social for an aquariums interact. He hadn’t seen her in a year. He reacted to meeting us and to getting treats? But all he wanted to do was see her, touch her, show her his enrichment items. After a year he recognized her and the response was “YOUR BACK AUNTIE YOURE BACK I MISSED YOU LOOK WHAT I WAS DOING WHAT DO YOU THINK BUT YOURE BACK hi nice to meet your friends YOURE BACK.”
Fucking yeah ok 👍 solitary nonsocial. Idk. If it acts like it loves you then it does. In its way.
The guy who literally wrote the book on wolf social hierarchies realized like pretty soon after publishing that he was completely wrong because he had only been studying animals in captivity, but the erroneous information on “alphas” captured men’s imagination so they still cling to it despite it being just flat out wrong - according to the guy who CAME UP WITH THE THEORY so you know it’s legit. Europeans who first encountered the platypus assumed it was a hoax. Knowledge is seeking the limits of our species’ understanding of the universe Wisdom is looking PAST the limits of our knowledge and staying fucking humble about everything we don’t know.
