remember when you were a kid and whenever your parents came into the room while you were doing something for pleasure like looking at something on the computer or watching tv and you’d immediately close the thing like you’d just been caught watching porn when you were actually doing nothing wrong this post was made by strict parents with no boundaries gang
my dad: walks into the room while i’m playing club penguin on the family computer
me:
reminder what an “animal” is
Not only do I run into people who think insects and other arthropods don’t qualify as animals, I run into people who know that they’re “technically” animals but they’re of the “opinion” they shouldn’t be.
What are people actually judging by here, though? Intelligence? Because there are definitely vertebrates like us with barely more brainpower than a cockroach, and then there are invertebrates like octopuses, as genetically distant from us as a cockroach but intelligent enough to learn people’s faces and solve puzzles. Are they going by anatomy?
Let me show those folks something:
Here’s the animal kingdom. The giant pale blue is all the arthropods, the insects and spiders and crabs and things.
The pale green sliver is the chordata, which contains just three groups. One of those three groups is the vertebrata, literally every single animal with a skeleton: humans, horses, eels, owls, snakes, frogs, all the things people apparently think are “real” animals.
One of the other three types of chordata, your closest possible cousins, are these things, the lancelets:
Just like you, they have a notochord, which during embryonic development becomes your spinal column.
The third kind of chordate, and actually even closer to you genetically than a lancelet, is a tunicate, and here’s an example of one kind of tunicate:
This is a colony of several thousand little bags with mouths and anuses and virtually no other organs. As larvae, they resemble tadpoles and also have a notochord like you once did in the womb, but then they absorb it as they mature. We vertebrates are almost all alone in the animal kingdom except for these close cousins of ours.
Anyway, the point of all this is that when you say you don’t recognize an insect as an animal, you may as well say you don’t recognize a cactus as a plant because it doesn’t look the same on the outside as a rosebush.
It baffles and infuriates me that people don’t think invertebrates are animals. It’s like the people who insist fish isn’t meat.
the great thing about that npc is that none of the other ones care if you beat him up or shoot him
Whenever a wise guide in a fantasy show tells the hero they have to “let go of attachments” to be a hero I just want to smack them in their stupid face because our love for others is what drives us to do good you stupid fucking mentor figure.
you can just say the Jedi order
