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My dad use to trap animals as part of his lawn business.
He’d let them go off deeper in the woods, but there was this one opposum that he swore was coming back to the area.
He put a mark on its tail to see how much money he was making off this opossum and I think it ended up being at least 5 separate trips he made with that one opposum.
Dude wasn’t trap happy he just loved tearing up yards
I love opossums so very much
He called my mom for me to come see it one of the time because it was so large. The entire time it was making the agggghhhhh noise and face.
Instilled the love of the little vacuums early.
This is also a problem rehabbers can face! Some patients just don’t want to go, they had the good life and absolutely refuse to wild back up. This is why minimizing direct handling and human socialization as much as possible is a key step.
It’s easy to see why people can think of wild animals like pets when you see them act like that. We all want the same basic thing, in the end. To be comfortable.
I have 3 cats, 1 used to be feral. She is the one that goes outside the least and is now a pillow kween. It took her years to be comfortable with me but now she hugs me back. :) She’s become quite mischievous and chatty too.
Everyone wants to be comfortable is a phrase people should remember more.
I got really confused after you started talking about minimizing handling and human contact right after talking about people in rehab for a second lol
All I can think of is the flipside of that, when people take in a stray dog that turns out to be a coyote. Some wild animal, in fine health, was kidnapped off the side of the big black stripe in the middle of its territory, and found itself in an angular white cave that smelled like too many flowers and had meat piled in a little metal bowl. Then a different biped arrived, yapped at its kidnapper for a while, and reverse-kidnapped it to roughly the same area it got nabbed in.
If it spoke English it would describe an alien abduction.
while my logic knows it’s impossible, highly dangerous to the eco system, dangerous to humans, and dangerous to animals
can we just go and domesticate all the animals please? 🥺 i want to snuggle with squirrels and give hugs to red pandas, maybe even ride a bear a little, give them all pats and the best treats
I’d like domesticated maned wolves, please.
Also, I don’t think it’s impossible, just time consuming. I think domesticating non-mammals is much harder.
I don’t want to domesticate the animals - it’s cruel because we can barely keep the ones we have mentally healthy
I just want animal friends. I don’t need to own them, they don’t need to live with me, but I want them to come visit for pets and the occasional treat
And I could do it too… I’m very good at getting the trust of animals. You just have to establish a common language and show yourself to be trustworthy over time. But that requires being able to live somewhere with a healthy ecosystem…
I saw a video from a dairy farmer once explaining how his automated milking machines worked. The cows bring themselves to the machines, and as an inducement they get the tastiest feed while they’re milked. The cows wear RFID collars so the machines know which cow is which. This serves for a lot of purposes (like identifying when a cow has a teat that isn’t producing so they don’t try to milk that one) but the one that made me laugh was blocking some cows that keep trying to come back because they want the good feed. The system’s like, “no, you were here five minutes ago, you don’t need to be milked again!”
Well now I am imagining cows in silly costumes trying to trick the machine into not recognising them
Silly cows, you have to use glasses to properly deceive people!
Huh interesting I didn’t realize this was a thing but it makes sense
Yeah it’s the same thing some homeless folks do in the United States if they’re sick or the weather is bad.
Commit a silly non-violent crime and let yourself get caught. Free food, medical, room and board until your court date.
Public indecency in front of a group of police officers was goto for many homeless people in my state. It’s a minor crime with up to 90 days in jail.
Flash th cops in late November, get out in early March.
Much safer than trying to live on the streets over the winter.
And that’s how
I met your motgerthe homeless problem becomes the prison problem
In our area, they’ll use suicidal ideation to get a hospital bed a lot
Throw in some anal probing and you got yourself a deal.
Lik going to prison for 3 hots and a cot
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I actually went to a science/nature camp as a kid where a pig part was we would catch pot guts (ground squirrels)!
Almost every animal there had been caught dozens of times. Because they would go in, get peanut butter, be shown to a counselor that would mark that they were caught, then let go. So pretty sure all of them were trap happy since a 100 traps were out in a field 4 months out of the year, every single year.
A Skinner box, you say.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
lol I never thought about that, animals can really be very smart.
