Not To Be A Killjoy (though It Is What I Do Best) But The Unsafe And Rough Handling Of A Baby Pygmy Hippo

Not to be a killjoy (though it is what I do best) but the unsafe and rough handling of a baby Pygmy hippo in a pretty substandard Thai zoo being meme-ed into something funny and cute really shows just how much groupthink plays into public perception of animal welfare.

Moo Deng shows avoidance, threat displays and stress around her keepers that are constantly man-handling her, blasting her with a hose and harassing her. The enclosure is mostly concrete, which is horrible for her soft feet. There looks to be some substrate but there doesn’t seem to be any areas for wallowing or deep water wading.

There’s also very easy access of this hippo to the public with no places to hide. I’d love if someone could shed more light on the enclosures but from what I’ve seen it’s not great.

Also the free contact and forcing into tubs that the keepers do is only going to create an avoidant and potentially aggressive and dangerous Pygmy hippo.

But the public happily overlook that because she’s cute. It’s a similar attitude with seals too.

Stop rewarding bad husbandry with clout. Baby animals deserve agency and respect and to grow up without getting harassed and feeling the need to defend themselves constantly.

Red river hog

I've noticed the way people talk about personality disorders and it just feels dehumanizing? NPD specifically, people make us out to be horrible monsters. No I'm not a monster, I'm just really insecure. But I'm dealing with it.

Pop Psychology is a two-headed dragon. On the one hand you have greater awareness made of lesser known conditions. On the other hand, that greater awareness makes you more likely to be made into a scapegoat but people who have this almost compulsive need to feel superior.

I distinctly recall the whole "Empath vs Narcissist" discourse years ago, which was largely some of the most self-aggrandizing bastards on the planet self-identifying as "empaths."

Brittany loved doing that shit.

That whole discourse was predicated on a false idea of empathy and narcissism as innate traits you're born with. In reality they are something you practice. The same holds true for most psychological disorders. You aren't born with them, they're inflicted on you.

I've said for years, the biggest issue with how we educate people about mental health is that the information is nuanced and complicated and you're trying to explain it to absolute dumbfucks.

Take the "Abuse victims often become abusers" statement people love to parrot whenever you criticize that narrative in fiction. The map of that extremely reductive statement looks like this:

This is probably the hardest thing for some people to understand, especially as for many people their reason for coming to this conclusion is they tried to "fix" someone and got bitten for it.

But that statement at the top, that "short quippy and wrong" statement is a lot easier for the dumb or malicious to remember.

My personal favourite example of this is ODD, which is a diagnosis to categorize a child's behavior for further treatment, but which is treated by parents as a 'get out of parenting free' card. In spite of the fact that it may as well be called "Battered Child Syndrome" a lot of people think it's this mysterious brain virus that magically makes your child defiant. In reality it describes the very reasonable responses to extremely stressful external stimuli.

It's an almost universal constant of mental health. People will use your condition to excuse their behavior. Getting diagnosed with ODD as a child is just asking to never have your emotions taken seriously ever again. Except not really because your emotions were already not being taken seriously and that's why you have ODD.

Being autistic in the early 2000's meant your entire ability to function as an adult was dependent on exactly how lazy and stubborn your parents were, and getting diagnosed with autism meant your parents were likely to be MORE lazy and stubborn now that they have a diagnosis to weaponize.

Shitty people have always loved using your disorder as an excuse to be shitty to you, but without the disorder they would simply use something else.

Wow. This guy is really annoying.