[ID: Four art pieces showing a lion, a seal, a wolf, and a bear beside their common ancestor, a miacid, who looks a bit like a large weasel. They’re each drawn in realistic style, in matching poses. /End ID].
Oh I love them
Sorry to correct the visual description (no harm meant, I’m just autistic and pinnipeds are my special interest) - but that’s a sea lion (family Otariidae), not a seal (family Phocidae)
in Finland, it is illegal to kill a bear when it’s hibernating. If you ask a hunter why that is, a number of them will tell you it’s wrong simply because it is the law, and they don’t make a distinction between what is right, and what is legal. Most people like that are perfectly normal, decent and respectable people, just like the rest of us.
But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.
Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.
In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.
Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.
One’s waking soul is elsewhere when they sleep and dream. A bear’s soul is somewhere else when they are hibernating - there are two words for “hibernation” in finnish, one of which is talviuni, “winter sleep”, and that is the one that bears have - and if you kill a sleeping bear, their soul is not in the body, it is still out there, and it can find you, and as a revenge for killing its body, Ghost Bear will kill your entire fucking family.
Extremely City white people are so fucking weird they see a pic of a deer and theyre like “its an Old God, tell me the wisdom of the trees Forest Lord … wow this is just like game of thrones” its a deer. Its a fucking stupid idiot animal it doesnt know shit
Yes deer are dumb panicky dinguses in real life, but sometimes a picture will capture one looking all majestic and we just… want to believe…
Case in point: this dude
Yes he got like that by being so hormonally addled that he tried to fight a tree. But try to tell me a forest god wouldn’t have big leafy antlers just like that if he were to take a physical form.
who says the old gods aren’t stupid animals who are so hormonally addled they’d try to fight a tree
@librariansheart for your enjoyment
Look, I’ve lived a good chunk of my childhood in a halfway abandoned mountain village in the middle of nowhere. Which meant wildlife galore whether you liked it or not.
And that meant sometimes we saw a deer in the middle of the road at midnight and the majestic motherfucker just stared us down until my mom shredded our tires to stop from hitting him. Once we stopped he did a little half-bow as if saying ‘You have not committed an act of godslayer this night. Your bloodline shall bear no curse of mine’, and walked away chill as you please.
The next day a neighbor told us a deer with fucking big antlers got tangled in his fence because it was trying to steal his grapes.
I went on a hike with another neighbor to collect yarrow for tea. A bear came out of the woods towards us, went on its hind legs and inquiringly roared. And he pushed me, tiny as I was back then, behind me out of sight and spread his jacket wide to make himself seem bigger than he already was. He let out a sound I had not known humans were capable of making. He and the bear looked at each other for a moment, and came to an understanding. The bear went down and walked away, respecting a powerful opponent protecting its young.
A week ago, there had been a bear that completely tore apart our trashcan and gorged itself on half-fermented apples we threw away. My cousin had to chase it away, drunk out of its tiny fucking mind, with an umbrella that made weird noises when opened. The bear ran for its life, crashed into our wall, fell on its ass, and scampered away.
I was playing on a swing once, all alone, and a fox came up to me, the most beautiful animal I had seen in my ten years of life. Thinking it wanted to pass, I stopped swinging and sat still not to spook it. But instead of passing, the fox circled the swing, found it wanting, and came to sit before me perfectly poised and looked me in the eye, and I could swear it wished to tell me something but I could not understand the language spoken before human time.
Then my mom came out of the nearby inn, shrieked at the fox and swung her purse to chase it away. The fox jumped, ran off and fell into a ditch, all notions of grace gone with the wind.
What I’m saying is: the old gods are absolutely idiot animals who embraced the life of constant sex and hedonism in return for losing their higher power. Whether or not they regret it, we’ll never know.
Our neighborhood black bear population is exploding, I see baby bears every day. Do you have any thoughts on how to handle a situation with a baby bear and a Mama bear
do everything in your power to avoid getting into a mama bear situation in the first place
Ok as someone who lives in Black Bear Intense Country: -Practice Situational Awareness- When outside, stop every few minutes and reveiw your surroundings. What do you See? Smell? Hear? Feel? Can you taste anything? practicing being aware of your surroundings is the #1 thing you can do to improve your safety- regarding wildlife, humans, traffic etc.
-Make note of when and where you see the bears. bears are very much creatures of habit and tend to be at the same places at the same times. My local sow would never come out before 10PM when the restaurants closed- after that, the humans had left and the dumpsters were full.
-Avoid making your home smell like a bear buffet. Keep your garbage cans inside the garage, only putting them out right before the trash pickup arrives. If you have a communal dumpster like at an apartment complex, only take your trash out in the middle of the day when you are unlikely to encounter them. Suspend any composting you’re doing until November.
-Bears can be discouraged from breaking into houses with motion-activated lights and sprinklers that come on at different times at night over the week.
-If you need to be outside regularly (we are still in Quarentine, but I understand we have dogs and cabin fever) make lots of noise- bear bells, singing, talking loudly on your phone with someone. This will alert bears of your approach and avoid surprising them, which is when most dangerous encounters occur.
-Also Carry Bear Spray. I ended up using it on my neigborhood roaming feral dogs rather than the bears, but it also works on coyotes, rabid skunks, frat boys and other nighttime menaces.
-In the event that you do end up close (AKA, Less Than 300ft) to a bear, stand up straight, and walk backwards exactly the way you came. Black bears, even urbanized ones, aren’t terribly aggressive and the majority are willing to stay put or back off if they see you respecting thier space.
-In the event it does come closer, scream, throw anything you can at it as hard as possible and hold up your jacket to make yourself look bigger. if the bear is within 20ft of you, use bear spray as instructed on the can. in the extremely unlikely event that all of this does not discourage the bear, your best odds to survive are to fight back- bludgeon, stab, kick or otherwise hit the black bear as hard as possible, in the face if possible. (it’s gizzlies you curl into a ball and protect your face/head from)
Bear attacks are extremely rare, and black bears are the least dangerous of the north american bears, but getting between a sow and her cub is the most likely circumstance. Stay alert, carry and know how to use bear mace and be ready to beat her like Cain taking a rock to Abel if push really comes to shove.
but yeah, #1 thing? Stay indoors like you are already doing for quarentine.
Lock your doors and windows at night! This includes second floor windows and doors. Bears can and will break into your house in search of food. A man was mauled in his home in Colorado just the other day because a bear broke into his house in the middle of the night. Staying indoors is good, as long as you make sure the bears can’t join you indoors.
Also. Don’t climb trees to get away. I promise the bears are better at climbing trees than you are.
Keep your dogs on leash AT ALL TIMES. You should be doing this anyway, but it is especially true with bears around. No matter how well you think you’ve trained your dog, you have likely NEVER seen them around a bear before, so you have zero idea how they’ll react to a 100% new situation.
Katy is also from the BEAR ZONE and i forgot to put all these in the above post. Thank you!
photos by lassi rautiainen, susan brookes and staffan widstrand of a rare friendship that developed between a female grey wolf and a male brown bear in northern finland.
notes lassi, “no one can know exactly why or how the young wolf and bear became friends, but i think that perhaps they were both alone when they were young and a bit unsure of how to survive alone. it seems to me that they feel safe being together.”
the photographers also note that the two share every meal together, bringing each other their kills (as seen in the third and fifth photos).
me at half the animals on the post: “BITCH THAT’S H U G E”
THAT COW IS A HORSE.
That first maned wolf is a model.
reblog this post with a cool animal species lets make a wholesome thread
ok ill give a headstart:
i really like leopard seals
axolotls are p rad
I LOVE THOSE
potoos look like muppets and i ove tem
here’s a quokka it’s like someone decided to splice together a wallaby and a teddy bear they literally always look like a benevolent cartoon
i don’t think you can get more wholesome than that adorable lil seed-eating smiley face. they’re not even like dolphins, cute on the outside and evil on the inside. they’re herbivores about the size of a cat. there is nothing wrong with them.
The Springhaas, or “irl pikachu” as it is sometimes known, is basically a rat shaped like a bunny abruptly caught in the middle of trying to evolve into a kangaroo. This is why they tend to look startled.
This is a dik dik. They are tiny antelopes from southern and eastern Africa–seriously so smol. With teeny hooves and teeny horns and big soulful eyes. And the name is fun to say. It comes from the alarm call that the females make. They live together in monogamous pairs.
Long Eared Jerboa
The adorable mash-up of a hamster, bunny, and kangaroo. Whiskers with no end, ears that put a fennec to shame, and adorability beyond measure!
bringing this back on your dashes
a sichuan takin bull and his daughter
often the color of donald trump’s hair and looking like a cross between a bison and a guinea pig, the takin is actually a bloody big goat-antelope. they have splendid noses, a natural smile, and share their habitat with pandas. which should be good enough for anyone.
This is an okapi. They are related to giraffe, can lick their own eyeballs and kind of always look like you just asked them for a ride to the airport but look at those ears and the little striped legs ~(*^*)~
Chambered nautilus! A living fossil! I also love axolotl though.
A cinnamon bear! Actually a member of the black bear family, they’re one of the more calm species out there. We also have matching hair <3 Enjoy this one with a heart on its chest!
HIGHLAND COWS
This is the most wholesome post on tumblr.
I love echidnas
ESPECIALLY BABY ECHIDNAS
Fennec foxes!!
I love all of these!
Capybaras! They’re the largest cavy species,(cavies are animals like guinea pigs) They’re BASICALLY a giant golden retriever in the skin of guinea pig.
MANATEES
They’re just big lumps that float around the sea. They’re non-aggressive, non-territorial herbivores that spend most of their time sleeping or eating, or they might be socializing with other manatees or investigating interesting objects.
Best of all, as of this year they are no longer endangered!!
Maine coons!! So soft and friendly!!!
Look at these babies!!!
Majestic af!!!
MANED WOLF. Basically what a fox would look like if it was a supermodel.
Favourite post.
Tawny Frogmouth “Owl” (not really an owl). I love these angry logs. Near my old house I used to be able to see them sleeping during the day (hence not an owl, who sleep in hollows), and they’d shoot me this intense rage-filled glare if I woke them.
Coati! They are native to my country of Panama and they are basically raccon, possum, civet, meerkat hyrbid aka an animal straight outta Avatar the Last Airbended
They come in blonde and red variations too :)
This smol egg is called a pika
This is a baby South American Tapirs or Tapirus terrestris are unique for their stripes. It is also called Brazilian Tapir and is the second largest land mammal in South America next to the Baird’s Tapir.
Here’s a full grown one with it’s baby for reference.
And then there is the Malayan (or Asian) Tapir and it looks like a panda that mated with an anteater.
Pangolins, or as I like to call them, Spikier Armadillos.
Dragon headed caterpillars! :D
Kiwi bird! Running potatoes
Look at this beautiful flower:
Malabar giant squirrels! (Also known as Indian giant squirrels) They’re purple and cream and are the size of a small cat!
The platypus!
This good friend is a horseshoe crab!! They’ve been around for 630 million years (even older than the dinosaurs!!) and have 10 eyes!! They are very good and completely harmless to people and have blue blood very important in medical research!! I love them so so so much!!!
And this little honey is a swell shark!! They’re a species of catshark and when they get scared they bite their tail and suck in water to make themselves look bigger!!
Absolutely chungy!! So big!! So talented!!!
Not enough reptile or bat love here so you get one of both!
Thorny Devil
Grey-headed flying fox
Bintarongs! they look like a cross between cats and bears and supposedly they smell of popcorn.
sea dragons aka sentient seaweed
also can we get some rat positivity up in here???????
Is Russia even real
I think it is necessary for me to transcribe what she’s saying because it is EXACTLY how I babytalk to my cat:
“Oh Stepa! So little – little Stepa! My little kiss, where’s my little kiss?? Where are my little fingers? Where are my little legs? Where are my little paws? Stepa!” *shakes his paw* “Say hello! Hello my little one! Hello!” *lies down on him* “Oh how nice, how warm. Good boy…”
to be clear, this bear is named the russian equivalent of “steve”
Horrific
Looks pretty funny to me
