Mmm, if they left the food out to attract some other critters they could indirectly eat healthily thanks to it. They’d be mad at you for making them wait though instead of just feeding them owl food. Eating American Chinese food would not make them happy. Have you ever tried using chopsticks with your toes?! 😜

If he hasn’t yet, I’m sure RFKJr has him covered.

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The job is its own reward! Every animal bite is like a kiss from our dear Mother Nature!

He looked at me funny after I told him not to.

Thankfully I’ve only been in the building once so far when a skunk decided to blast us. The skunk baby was usually sweet and easygoing, but he sprayed 3 or 4 times in the clinic in a week.

It turned out the one pair of gloves (the orange ones) would freak it out and it would blast whomever was going to grab it. At least it was so small it barely had any booty juice, but skunk smell indoors is no joke. 🤢

Correct!

Great Horned Owls will also eat porcupines.

No smallish creature is safe. Foxes, turkeys, bats, fish, scorpions, snakes, other owls. You name it and it’s around owl size or smaller, an owls will eat it.

Skunk spray isn’t great for their eyes though. Here is an owl in with skunk sprayed eyes.

It can cause irritation or ulceration, and then animals will rub at their eyes, potentially causing further physical damage.

A short time ago, I wouldn’t have expected to want to cuddle a groundhog, but here I am…

We shall win them over! We’ve come a long way getting lots of people to accept oppossums and raccoons. A cute little groundhog is just an underground capybara, and the people love them nowadays too!

I’m a bit surprised how popular this was! I guess this was a question a bunch of people had but didn’t want to ask.

Due to my chronic meme illiteracy, I had to have knowyourmeme explain this one to me. We all need a little explaining now and then. 😇

Both could be correct, especially since many folks’ diets are much different today than they were that long ago.

I’m far from a nutritionist, and I don’t think I could really explain the GI Index well enough to give the real how and why of eating a ton of simple carbs actually makes you still feel hungry despite eating enough to feed an army.

With the high salt content, people can feel a craving, that is actually for water, but can be misinterpreted as hunger. We know our body needs something, but we don’t always understand what that something is.

My home ramen is too basic, and doesn’t do much to fill me up, but the ramen place in town I find very filling, as the broth has some fat content, there’s meat and egg for protein, and there’s things like mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and other veg to provide that fiber which either takes a long time to digest or is just plain indigestible so it really sticks with you, literally. I can’t be bothered to prep all that at home. 😁

I try to keep things simple, but I also always want to give the most complete answer I can, so I end up being pretty long winded. If someone takes the time to ask a question, I assume they do want the full answer though. I always worry I’m beating things into the ground, but I really want people to know as much as they can. People are always free to tell me to shut my trap. 😄

The thought is the simple carbs from rice, noodles, and high sugar sauces in a lot of takeout-style Chinese food gets digested quickly, so while one can eat that until they feel stuffed, the body will quickly break it down, and with the volume of fiber and protein in the meal being relatively low to the volume of starches and sugars, your stomach will soon be wanting more due to the low satiety provided. One could eat a smaller amount of, say, steak and broccoli, and remain fuller for much longer, due to the better nutritional balance and higher protein and fiber content which takes the body much longer to digest than starches and sugars.

It is played as a joke since a large number of people experience this overeating, yet soon hungry again situation, and attribute it to the food, although probably not in a way of understanding they’re eating a different kind of junk food than what they’re used to. My understanding is all this stuff is westernized and not really reflective of what Chinese food actually is.

This is also why people talk about Asians getting a “secret menu” at Asian restaurants. It’s not as though Westerners are forbidden to order real Asian dishes, they’re just a completely different taste profile than what a lot of Westerners are accustomed to, whether dishes be too spicy, too salty, or not sweet/saucy/cheesey/etc enough. One time I went fishing in the ocean and got way too many fish. I offered them to the guys in the Chinese takeout place attached to where I was working. They offered me some of what they made for themselves with it but gave me a heads up that I may not exactly enjoy it. I took a bite and it tasted sooooo salty, and I got surprised it still had the soft fish bones in it, and it wasn’t bad but was not what my palette was ready for at the time and I could not finish it, meanwhile they were all grateful and fully enjoying it.

Perhaps not exactly what you are looking for, but Stephen King’s short story “Survivor Type” was written after he got fascinated by this train of thought. He consulted with a doctor friend to see how much he felt a shipwrecked surgeon could use of himself to survive on until rescue.

Hesitant to write anything down, King gained the assurance for the story after speaking with his neighbor, Ralph Drews, a retired doctor who confirmed that “a guy could subsist on himself for quite a while - like everything else which is material, the human body is just stored energy.”

I remember it being pretty good, and is supposedly one of King’s favorites. That’s the first thing that popped in my head after reading your question.

That’s pretty much what the guy did. He preferred something more 3D than a photo, but he also contributed much more than he would have for only a photo.

How do we save these places and animals otherwise? People need a way to pay for conservation. Gabon is about 90% rainforest, and their key financial sectors are oil extraction and mining. Take away financial incentive to preserve that forest and those animals, and the real environmental destruction will happen. It sucks, but I can’t end capitalism in Gabon, so this is what is succeeding at holding that off for right now.

And until I see anyone show this guy was actually a scumbag, I don’t see how he’s any worse than any non-vegan at least. This guy at least owned the fact he killed animals.

Hunting is something that can be fairly easy to manage. Count your animals, stop unregulated killing, see how many paying hunters you can support while still having the animal population still trend exponentially upward. Doing things like stopping global climate change and deforestation are problems many orders of magnitude larger. And it takes a ton of money away from rich people and puts it to a good cause. They could pay less to poachers to come along with and have more guaranteed success. I don’t like people killing things that they aren’t going to at least eat, but we have learned to make lemonade from the lemons, but a lot of people can’t understand that.

There will always be more, and most will probably be a bigger POS than it sounds like this guy was. I’m not mad a trophy hunter got killed. I’m neutral on that. I’m just let down so many seem to be piling on this dead guy that didn’t likely deserve this particular kind of death. Lumping this guy in with the Musk/Bezos rich types or the Epstein people doesn’t seem appropriate here from any details we have.

I usually pass over these posts and just let people do their thing in the comments, but this was just especially ugly in here and this guy really seemed low on the potentially evil guy scale. It can be hard to wrap your head around how killing animals can save animals, and I don’t ask anyone to cheer for it, but it is modern wildlife management practice. It is part of a holistic plan, and one we can have a lot of say and control over.

I would be sad to have to take part in an animal cull. This guy found some enjoyment in it and paid a ton of money to do something that ultimately benefited more animals than it hurt. For most of this guy’s life, his actions likely helped more animals than every commenter in this thread, myself included, because I know I can’t afford to give tens of thousands of dollars to my animal causes.

If people want to get mad at me for my response, I can’t likely change that no matter how reasonable I try to be, but being on both sides of the story to some extent, I feel I know a bit of what I’m talking about.

A retired game hunter in Cape Town who knows the victim said: 'Ernie has been hunting since he could hold a rifle and has many trophies from Africa and the US.

'Although many disagree with big-game hunting, all Ernie’s hunts were strictly licensed and above board and were registered as conservation in culling animal numbers.

'Ernie had booked a hunt for dwarf forest buffalo and duikers, in particular the yellow-backed duiker and, under strict licensing laws, he could not take along his own guns.

'The hunting company would supply a shotgun and cartridges for the duiker hunt.

Gabon seems to be well respected internationally for conservation. The guy killed was a winegrower and winemaking supply seller. I don’t know anything else about him, but those aren’t occupations I necessarily associate with a high evil content, but you do you. People involved say all was above board and legal. Whether folks like it or not, animals don’t fund protection, being as they have no idea what money is. Stuff like these hunts funds conservation.

The duiker is at the same level of threat as zebras, which most of us have probably had no trouble seeing. Near threatened means we have a bunch of animals left, but we need to conserve their environment moreso than the animal itself, something this guy has spent tremendous amounts of money to fund, even if it seems ass-backwards to you.

Conservation hunting is why alligators are not extinct in the US today. It works. It’s a job that takes huge amounts of money and manpower to pull off, and it needs people willing to give that money. I don’t like sport hunting. I do wild animal rescue work myself, and I also attempt to hunt one deer a year to feed our house since I think it’s more ethical than factory farming livestock.

The comments here are pretty gross. There is zero evidence this guy did anything bad, and there are accounts to the contrary. He was paying to do a job that needed to be done anyway, and he died a terrible death. He didn’t need to be there, he’d be alive if he wasn’t there, but this was a legal hunt, for conservation purposes, these hunts are part of a comprehensive plan to manage and support healthy wildlife populations, and you guys are cheering for him being crushed to death. You don’t need to feel bad, it’s part of the risk of hunting, but the gloating sure doesn’t seem called for in this case.

“There was an incident where a child fell off a Jeep because the mother was taking a selfie and the child got jostled out of the way. The guide had to jump and pick up the child – the tiger was a few feet away.”

Yeesh…

In Kenya, private safari guide Zarek Cockar thinks that the issue goes beyond mobile phones and individual behaviour to a recalibration of what we expect from a safari.

“Photographers with large lenses pushing to get onto the ground for a better angle can be far bigger offenders than someone quietly taking a photo on a phone,” he said. “The deeper issue is often poor expectation setting from the outset. If guests arrive believing wildlife encounters are about getting ever closer or capturing a dramatic shot at any cost, the guide is then placed under enormous pressure to deliver.”

My first thought was at least people with actual cameras can at least be annoying from further away, but this comment from the guide reminded me this is still a problem in a lot of areas with easy access everywhere. I’ve seen plenty of scenes where an animal will live in a readily accessible place and people just swarm the location. Just because they can take a photo further away still doesn’t necessarily make it the photo they want. People will always want better.

Ecotourism can be great, but the focus needs to be on the animals, and the tourism needs to come second. Pretty much all of these animals are “rare” because people couldn’t be bothered to leave them alone.

The new rules for Indian tiger safaris

• Visitors are now required to put their mobile phones in a box before entering a tiger reserve, or to put it on silent and keep it in their bag. Per the legal ruling, the use of mobile phones within tourism zones of core tiger habitats is not permitted.

• Roads in tiger reserves cannot be used between dusk and dawn except for emergency vehicles.

• Fringe areas around tiger reserves have restricted development plans.

These seem like basic, common sense rules. I see no problems here. It’s a good start.