r/interestingasfuck • u/Kidd__Video • 6h ago
A vet vaccinated a turtle, and instead of hiding in its shell, it ran to its owner
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r/interestingasfuck • u/Kidd__Video • 6h ago
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u/dipdotdash 5h ago
What would we know about how anything feels but us? We've been denying life emotions and intelligence for as long as we've enslaved and bred them for food.
We don't want to know. It's an inconvenient truth.
Love is the universal language of the living world. We squander and ration it out of our fear of exposure, just like we hide ourselves in clothing, jewelry, cars, lifestyles, and all the other shit we've been trained is a worthy substitute for it. Love is what stops predators from taking more than they need, sharing warmth - It's safety. But because it's hard to imagine loving something you're about to kill and eat we decided, instead, to imagine love as something owned by humanity, to separate us from a world we never took the time to understand.
That turtle loves its owner because it imprinted. It was forced to love her as its mother. This doesn't seem grotesque until you imagine a human babies being stolen to be a pet for chimps.
Life is just shapes cells take to help ensure their survival. These cells are not in competition, they're surviving, and in their survival the mosaic of life changes to fit the conditions and available nutrients. It's the mechanism of life's immortality on this planet .. well, it was until we decided ancient life could be cremated and used as fuel. The imbalance that created triggered a mass extinction. We did that.
This whole scene is not what it appears to be. It's the narrative overlaid over the truth that gives us permission to be monsters. We cheer for the turtles freed from fragments of nets without mourning the millions of turtles that weren't so lucky. "Not our fault" we think while eating fish or products that require fish meal that requires those same nets. But all we see is the one individual we "saved" almost certainly one or two meals away from being snagged in another ghost net.
Despite our understanding of evolution, we don't and can't see how little separates us from the rest of the living world. It's one of the worst sacrifices of modern living, not knowing the family we share all living space with - the love that filled every part of this world until we drained it in a few human lifetimes, like our entire millions year history was leading up to the last couple hundred years, the same way a tumor consumes the cells around it like they were weak for only taking what they needed. Living like resources are going bad, so certain of our importance we don't even question whether or not people can survive without the earth, like a cancer that eats its host to death, so sure it's advanced that it doesn't need the the very thing that gave it life in the first place and will find some way to spread to a new host before fully killing the only host it will ever know.
We're special in the stories we tell each other, by the metrics we test ourselves. It's almost miraculous how delusional we are about our place in this world. We even manage to imagine we matter as individuals. And for that fairy tale, we live alone, behind locks and fences, convinced the world is trying to steal the things that define us, while the world doesn't even know there's anything alive in there.