Just a Big Blue Bird Blur

First and foremost: Happy World Tapir Day! (Yes, April 27th is indeed World Tapir Day, go Google it!) It's always to a joy to see certain species given a day to be celebrated on! But keep in mind, everyday is a day for animals in general to be celebrated and cherished. I actually learned of this from wandering my feed and suddenly seeing ＃世界バクの日 everywhere with plenty of pictures of tapirs from Japanese animal photography accounts! Here's a Japanese lesson for y'all to decipher the hashtag! 世界 (se / kai ) = world バク (ba / ku) = tapir のひ (no / hi) = day of

Twitter feels like a blur - a simultaneously stressful, panicky, and fun blur to say the least. Over in the domain where the blue bird rules all, there was news of an amazing victory and a dangerous loss. In Australia, Zoos Victoria has released the critically endangered Plains-Wanderer back into the wild for the first time and on their Youtube channel I was fascinated to see their story and the collective efforts to get the birds back to the wild! Despite the attachments from watching the birds' families grow, I greatly admired the conservationists and experts' work to return the Plains-wanderers to their true place. On the other hand, Idaho's senate has recently passed a bill that could potentially lead to a significant portion of the wolf population to be killed off. After reading through Carl Safina's chapter on wolves and seeing Doug Smith's talk about valuing wolves and nature, I couldn't believe how current the human vs. wolf issues remained even to now! A prevalent topic that came from that bill passing was the idea of veganism and how people remain firm on meat they love despite things like bycatch and incidents like above in which wolves will be killed to protect livestock. The meat and fish industry versus animal welfare is another interesting "fight" to observe. As someone that can't personally go vegan but also wants to support the protection of animals, I'm more on board for at least working towards getting legislation or better preventative measures so that animals aren't harmed just so we can eat more of them.

All right to the blog-mobile! Anyways, Emily Flores's research blog included an article about chimpanzees' using tools and inference and it made me wonder if preference with food is something attributed to intelligence. Food is just food for a creature running on instinct. So what does food preference mean? Christine Nguyen's Week 4 Twitter blog brought up manta ray communication with their fins and it made me remember again: just because humans don't know how to personally understand it, doesn't indicate an absence of communication. Allison Liu's Twitter blog update included talks of pigeon rights and I asked if she could elaborate on examples of this. Animal rights is a peculiar thing with the infamous monkey selfie dispute coming to mind, but this is more in line with property rights than "human" animal rights? Again, definitely needed elaboration because I didn't think humans were at war with pigeons neither.

Honorable Mentions I Couldn't Fit in this Blog: -Stop buying exotic pets, because you probably can't even take care of yourself let alone an illegally imported animal from another continent -Check out this video "Inside the minds of animals", some familiar topics we've learned condensed into ~5 minutes -Stress synchronization between us humans and the dogs we've domesticated Well that concludes this blog. 'Til the next episode!