Ok, this if funny

[Bellaon7]

I think it was on the Today show, but I could be wrong & that's not  important. But one of these ran a story with video showing dolphins batting jelly fish around with their tails for what apeared to be nothing more than their own amusement. Now if humans trained them to do this, it wouldn't be cute, but these dolphins were clearly doing this on there own, & if laughing at that is a sin...

[V M]

Dolphins much like Seals don't care much for those that do harm to others and take great joy in batting them about and laughing about it 

[aubrey]

I want one for Christmas!

[Jester]

I think it'd still be funny if they were trained to do it.  Jellyfish suck.

[Miniar]

Dolphins aren't the happy, cute, cuddly clowns that most people believe them to be.
In fact, they kill for sport, not just jellyfish and porpoises but even their own kind! They hunt them down and ram them, effectively battering them to death.
They also practice kidnapping and they have sex for fun.

They're aggressive and they display sadistic behavior. They have been known to do good things yes, but they're not just wild animals, they're more like us humans than we'd like to admit.

[Bellaon7]

I know they're very socially complex, other than that I only know it was hilarious watching them bat the jellys up out of the water a good 20-30 ft ahead! I could watch dolphins all day long! 

[Janet_Girl]

I saw a 'Mythbusters' recently where they set out to prove that sharks are afraid of dolphins.  They pulled a silhouette for a seal behind a boat.  Great whites would attack the silhouette, but when they pulled a fake dolphin close to the seal, the sharks would swim away.

So if you are in shark infested waters, act like a dolphin.


Janet

[heatherrose]

They're aggressive and they display sadistic behavior. They have been known to do good things yes, but they're not just wild animals, they're more like us humans than we'd like to admit.

The same anthropomorphic characteristics are displayed by chimpanzees
and other great apes, behavior including warlike raids on neighboring "clans"
and cannibalism practiced as a spoil of war. The question that comes to mind is,
if these behaviors are natural to beings in the higher order of intelligence,
who is the one who is insane? The one who behaves "naturally" or
the one who demands the natural behavior be repressed.

[placeholdername]

'Morality' is an invention of humanity... nature really doesn't care (or more accurately, nature doesn't have a facility which is capable of 'caring').

[Bellaon7]

I think the level of playfulness that is in an obviously recognizable way makes them irresistably enduring to humans.
Post Merge: October 19, 2009, 08:39:18 PM
There was a very intersting dvd I saw about an old world whaling comm in a(SW?) Aussie bay. The killer whales would gather near the bay to let the whalers know "it's time the other (humpback?) whales are near", then the killer whales would lead the whalers to the prey, help corral them, & then the whalers would kill their whales & in return for their help, give the killer whales first dibs on their fav part(lower jaw) of the kill. This went on year after year, until some idiot killed one of the killer whales.   

[heatherrose]

I watched video footage, with mouth agape, as a "Killer Whale"
jumped onto an ice flow grabbed a baby seal in it's jaws and proceeded
to play "baby seal volleyball" with its pod mates, thrusting it up into air
with their noses and batting it with their tails. When the pod lost interest
in playing with the baby seal, the "Killer Whale" returned the baby seal
to the ice flow, where it was able to waddle away seemingly unharmed.
I have also watched a horse chose a stick and use it to scratch a
part of it's belly that it was unable to reach with it's tail or muzzle.

[Bellaon7]

Elephants are another one of those super cool & fascinating animals.
Post Merge: October 19, 2009, 10:57:42 PM

Post Merge: October 19, 2009, 09:01:46 PM

[Miniar]

Chimps cannibalize outside of war as well.
There are several recorded incidents where a clan-member will walk up to a mother with an infant, and snatch the infant from her arms and start eating it, even sharing the meat with the rest of the clan, while the mother stands there screaming her lungs out cause... well.. they're eating her baby!

[placeholdername]

I totally regret reading this thread again right before going to sleep .

[Jester]

Oh my god nature is cool.

[heatherrose]

Oh my god nature is cool.

Until you end up in "Yogi and Boo-Boo's" pik-a-nick basket or
in a dumpster when a bi-pedal animal is done with you.

[Jester]

And that's why we, the weak, pink fleshed creatures have developped this thing called technology, specifically designed to take care of that which troubles us.  One could even call technology part of the human animal's nature of survival.