Skunk
Skunks really are deceptively adorable. There’s a family of them that hang around the area between my home and the gas station I sometimes walk to at night, and I’ve caught them out there crossing the street and thought “Aww, how cu- ohfuuuuck walking back home, walking back home, runningbackhome”
I used to work with somebody who says she kept a de-glanded (not sure what the term is) skunk as a kid, and apparently they make good pets and allegedly have “fat ferret energy”. But apparently they still stink even without their gland.
Yes, they can’t spray you with the stink, but it’s still coming from them. I love skunks, their intelligence, their playfulness, their sociability, but nevertheless would not like to own one or ever come anything close to a wild one because I react strongly to smells.
Yes ?
You’re pretty, but stinky.
Thanks! We Skunks work hard to achieve this perfect balance.
Stelllllaaaaaaa
A coworker of mine got skunked last fall. He hatched this whole revenge plan to trap it and then shoot it on halloween night, when the shot would be mistaken for a firecracker. The skunk must have caught wind because he skipped town.
Was camping one time, got up to take a whiz in the middle of the night. Met the skunk at the campfire. I slowly backed up and noped out of there.
They’re basically stinky cats. I kinda want one but sadly they’re illegal here unless you buy one from a breeder.
A blue ringed octopus - they’re a cute looking tiny octopus but quite capable of killing a human.
What’s worst is that after getting bitten by one you will be mentally alert but completely unable to do anything as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)…
as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)…
As I understand it (and to be fair, I’m no octopus scientist or human medical doctor) it’s pretty much just breathing that’s the issue. It doesn’t really directly cause any damage on its own (though the consequences of not breathing can and will of course cause quite a lot of damage in pretty short order)
The venom causes paralysis, basically by (someone correct me if I’m wrong) clogging up the receptors your body uses to send signals to your muscles. It will all get cleared up in about 24 hours or so though.
Problem is that you use some of those muscles to breathe. But if you make it to shore (you also need some of those muscles to swim) and if you get put on a ventilator right away (to do the breathing for you,) your prognosis is actually pretty good and there’s a nearly 100% survival rate (although that has to be two of the biggest “ifs” in all of medicine)
Another thing that comes to mind is your heart also uses muscles to do its thing, and I’m not totally clear on why that doesn’t seem to be a factor here, since paralyzing those muscles is basically just instant cardiac arrest. I did a bit of googling, but I’ll be honest I was in deep over my head in medical jargon and couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. I think my takeaway is that tetrodotoxincan affect the heart muscles, but I guess for whatever reason (dosage? Different kinds of muscles? The way your body processes the venom and moves it around your body? I really don’t know) it just kind of doesn’t, which I guess is lucky for us. I’m kind of hoping someone who speak doctor will maybe see this and give an ELI5 answer to that.
I suspect there’s probably a lot of minor consequences, like I bet your next trip to the bathroom once you recover in going to be some sort of event after your bowels stopped moving for 24 hours, but otherwise it seems like if you hang out on a ventilator for a day unable to move (which, to be fair, is probably one of the last ways I’d want to spend a day, but I guess it narrowly beats out a refrigerated cubby in the morgue) you’re pretty much in the clear to get on with your life.
An anaesthesist friend of mine once told me that there are two kinds of muscles - the ones you can actively control (such as muscles in arms and legs and also the muscles for breathing) and those you cannot, such as your heart and intestine-muscles (around the gut etc.). The latter has a different kind of receptors and isn’t affected by the stuff that they use in hospitals to put you down, but since the breathing is stopped, you’ll always be intubated.
I guess this poison is of the same kind but I don’t know the technicalities…
To explain it in simple terms, your heart doesn’t get its beating signal from the brain, the sinus node takes care of that and is located in the heart. What the brain (and other parts of your body) does is tell the heart to beat faster or slower when required. So the kind of paralysis caused by the octopus doesn’t affect your heart because it doesn’t need to use any external pathways to send the signal to the muscle to contract.
Bear. I wanna bear hug, but not really.
I think those brains are the wrong way around
Here we go again… /s
I give you that, they look fluffy.
I came here to say this. If anyone’s interested, here’s unedited footage of a bear.
Oh god. I’m not strong enough to watch that again right now.
Otter. They’re a bunch of water gangster, they are fierce and they will bite. Even crocodiles and snake fear them when in group, human should leave them alone. Freaking cute creature though i just wanna pet one.
It helps that they smell godawful. They’re funny and cute and adorable but the whole otter smells like a butthole, which stops me from petting them. Barely.
“Oh look, they gonna head up on him!”
Some river otters seriously fucked up a couple of women up not long ago.
Most big cats are extremely cute and do silly kitty-like things.
Big cats can also be more-or-less tamed if they’re raised from a very, very young age by people. The issue, most of the time, is that big cats play just like house cats, and that kind of play can easily be fatal when the cat is the same size or larger than a human. House cats aren’t actually domesticated; they’re just tame, most of the time.
There are a number of IG accounts of wild cat rescues, or other big cats that live with humans, and they’re quite friendly because they were raised with and by people. But they’re still potentially deadly.
That is part of the reason why I’d get terrified - I have a scar on my leg from a house cat. (A friend of mine brought a kitty that he just adopted here, I was holding the kitty on my arms, Kika saw it as an invader and… well, she attacked the thing nearest to the invader that she could reach, i.e. my leg.) So when I see those big cats I can’t help but imagine a 30x larger house cat, with all the dangers that it entails. And the associated cuteness.
Oh, you are absolutely right. Feral cats can fuck you up, because they have zero qualms about using ultraviolence.
We’ve only had cats for 12,000-15,000 years. We’ve had dogs for almost 200,000 years. Give them another 30,000 years and we might have actually domesticated some cats.
I find it more likely that the cats will finish domesticating us
It seems that dogs actually domesticated us far more than anything else, thus far. If cats manage that, hopefully they avoid the trap of being domesticated along with us, because at this point we aren’t the angry chimpanzee, and orangutan hybrid that evolved into Neanderthal and Homo Erectus.
A big cat, any of them really. They look so cute and I’d have my guard down because of how much they remind me of little cats. And then boom it’d hit me, they might be running the same Cat Brain OS but they’re capable of taking me out in one swift swipe if they wanted to and if I accidentally irked them somehow (also not having any positive attachment to humans they might not hold back). But it’d be too late, and I’d die terrified but also beholding the cute, cute kitty.
I saw a tiger pacing back and forth and thought “yup, predator” and then it rolled on its back and exposed its fluffy belly and I was immediately disarmed.
Tickle that belly… might be the last thing you ever do, but on the upswing, giant cat belly tickling
Mom had mountain lions that were abandoned as kits that she raised in the house. I fought one. I no longer have an illusions concerning big cats.
Cougars. We have them where I live and they’re adorable and beautiful, but I prefer not to meet any in person.
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I’ve seen a couple taxidermied ones. They are big cats indeed.
Bobcats and lynxes in particular.
The realest answer: baby bear. Because the mother is right around the corner.
Baby grizzly cub. Because if you can see the cub and not the mother…
Definitely polar bear. They look so cuddly but I would be terrified to even see one from afar.
You don’t see them. You are on the ice and so are they. They hunker down and purposefully cover their nose with their paw when you look in their direction. When you look away, they creep closer until your head starts to turn again. They don’t want you don’t see the little black spot getting closer and closer. If you are lucky and looking around while you are out on the ice, you will see a little black spot disappear. If you do. GET OUT NOW. If the spot was big enough to notice, the bear is probably close enough to charge. I hope your snow machines are close and ready to go.
That makes me want to pet it so much more.
Agreed. The death floof is one of the cutest things on the planet.
Especially when they have their baby with them and drink Coca-Cola Classic from a glass bottle.
hippopotamus
The Blue Ringed Octopus is a cutie. Tiny little guy, you could just scoop up with your hand… has one of the most potent toxins on earth, and there is no antidote.
Wolves. Fuckers are fierce but they look like good boys.
They are wild animals, but are almost eerily human.
They are incredibly smart and highly emotionally intelligent. Their families are very much like our own human families, and knowledge is passed down through generations. Some families pass down specialized knowledge that puts them on par with hunter-gatherers. I’d put wolves on the short list of intelligent species who could eventually evolve into a species that could be capable of much more, given a long enough timeline where they self-select for intelligence. Same with elephants, ravens, dolphins, chimps, and whales.
Though that would have to exist on a planet where we didn’t kill most of them and wreck the environment.
Domesticated dogs are still one of the most deadly species to humans. Wild and smart is a hell of a combination. BTW, one of the other most deadly species to humans are humans, so they being “eerily human” is kind of frightening. Not trying to argue here, just, I still think they are cute and deadly.
Read “A fire upon the deep” by Vernor Vinge. For a multitude of reasons.
Oooh, I’m reading through the Hyperion series again right now. I will have to check this out afterwards. Thank you!
Elephants are smart as hell. Give one a canvas and a paintbrush and it will draw with incredible skill
My friend had a hybrid once, the goodest of boys. 75% size of an actual wolf, thought himself to be a lapdog. Training involved a pack mentality, but all was well once the pecking order was established.
There are some very cute cobras.
WATCH A VIDEO OF SNAKES DRINKING WATER RIGHT THE FUCK NOW
Platypus. So goofy looking on one hand. Poisonous spurs on the other.
Venomous, platypus produce venom.
Just touch the goofy looking hand then 🤷🏻♂️
Sloth. From what I’ve heard, they can move fast when they want to and will fuck people up with those claws. B
And they smile like fucking maniacs.
I got to meet a sloth at a an event sponsored by an animal preserve. They do seriously have murder claws.
Sloth Facts: despite their wicked claws, the sloth’s primary defence is to be unappetizing. They’re so sedentary that algae grows on them, which makes them smell and taste bad to predators in addition to not being particularly nutritious.
Every few days, a sloth might leave the tree to defecate. This is because while predators might not be particularly interested in eating them, if their droppings fall on a jaguar it might be pissed enough to climb a tree and settle accounts.
A wild haggis.
Nothing more dangerous than a female haggis guarding her neeps.
Aye lethal little beasties.
