“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-mimickingjumping 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.
Eddie Martins and Richard Hall, the cops who resigned after the incident involving the then-18-year-old Chambers, were sentenced to five years of probation after they pleaded guilty to 11 charges, including bribery and misconduct. Both men admitted to having sex with the teenage girl while she was held in their custody in 2017, an act that, thanks to Chambers’s case, now constitutes rape under the law (and always constituted rape under any moral reading of the word).
The pleas and the light sentences — handed down in a secretive court hearing — come at the same moment that NYPD officers and their belligerent union are protesting the long-overdue firing of Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who choked Eric Garner to death. Together with the closure of the criminal case surrounding Chambers’s ordeal, it could not be more clear the extent to which police impunity continues to rein.
“It’s completely outrageous,” Chambers’s attorney, Michael David, told me on the phone Thursday night. “They admitted on the record to having sex with her in their van. No jail time is just outrageous. Anna is hysterical.”
Chamber’s case should have been clear-cut from the moment in September 2017 that a hospital rape kit found semen matching Martins’s and Hall’s DNA inside the teenager’s body. The young woman had been detained, handcuffed, and taken into the officers’ unmarked van, having been found in possession of a small amount of drugs. Chambers performed oral sex on both officers and had vaginal sex with Martins. Then the cops left her on a corner.
At the time, state law did not assert the most obvious of facts: that a person in police custody cannot consent to sex. The egregious legal loophole has since been closed, but it was too late to benefit Chambers — or to stop Martins and Hall from getting away with rape. All rape charges against the officers were dropped in March as prosecutors questioned Chambers’s credibility — an issue that should have had no bearing in a case with such clear-cut facts.
These cops raped her, they admitted to raping her, the DNA proved they raped her and they still get off - hell they didn’t even get fired, they fucking resigned themselves. Despicable.
The parallels between Brazil’s Amazon crisis and its bee die-offs are many. Just as the relaxation of forestry rules has led to more fires, so have loosened pesticide restrictions exposed more bees to lethal doses. Nearly 300 new products have been fast-tracked for approval since the beginning of the year, including known bee-killers banned or strictly regulated in other countries.
