these are hyraxes! they’re not rodents or canines or anything like that. they belong to their very own order known as hyracoidea. their closest relatives are elephants and manatees, and these mamas and babies have FREAKY teeth
also important to note that the
and:
aren’t they also the ones that do that “AARRABA” “ARABA” scream?
[ Image description: Tweet by Brian Jansen @BDJansenPHD:
During my PhD someone mentioned to me in passing that the vet closest to the college was the primary care provider for four different cats named Judith Butler
TIL that the Audubon Society has released officialstatements on the difference between a “bird”, a “birb”, and a “borb”, featuring such gems as:
[ Image description: a small, round bird perched on a plant stalk.
Transcription:
It is a truth (nearly) universally acknowledged that birds exist. It is a truth somewhat less universally acknowledged that a portion of them are “birbs”: a somewhat ambiguous online avian classification encompassing the small (usually), the round (often), and the cute (always). To create clarity around this popular meme, Audubon proposed a set of carefully considered rules for parsing the birbs from the birds. Among the masses, a great rejoicing rang out–as well as much debate. And amid the hubbub came further questions: What about the other words that the internet, in its unending love of neologisms, has bestowed upon birds? What about “borbs” and “floofs”? Where do they fit into Audubon’s taxonomic rankings?
Rule 1: Birbs are often (though not conclusively) small. Adult Ostriches are thus disqualified, as is any bird larger than a turkey; warblers, sparrows, flycatchers, and other songbirds are the most likely demographic. Even large birds start small, however: An ostrich or crane chick is absolutely a birb. We may understand, then, that while “birb” can be a developmental stage, some birds are birbs their whole lives.
Consider the borb. Urban Dictionary provides the canonical definition: a fat bird. This perceived fatness isn’t incidental to their appeal but central to it: Where the roundness of the classical birb is merely a component of its appeal, the borb is roundness. Their plush, planetary shapes exert a gravitational pull on our hearts and minds.
This, then, is Audubon’s taxonomy of birb: Birbs are small, round, and either cute or absurd; borbs are those birds that carry apparent roundness to an extreme; and most birds can floof when the mood suits them. Any amorphousness in this taxonomy is a feature, not a failure: Birds and words are both shape-shifting things, shrinking and growing by turns, flitting between categories. We can cage them for a time, but in the end, it’s always better to see them fly.
[ Image description: A drawing of a capybara, seated and eyeing the viewer. It has an orange speech bubble that reads: “Recognizing that police officers are guilty is important, but it must not turn our attention from the fact that the problem is systemic and structural, not individual. It’s the police system that’s at fault.” /end ]
[ ID: A Chinese mooncake, wrapped in plastic. The mooncake is shaped like a kneeling piggy. It has raised details like ears, a tail, a snout, and two black eyes made of beans. ]
Often heard but not seen, American pika sing out with what sounds like a squeaky and adorable “meep.” Related to rabbits but resembling a hamster, you may hear them as you hike in higher elevations on western mountains near rock piles. In late summer, pika will gather mouthfuls of vegetation to build “haystacks” for winter food and defend them vigorously. This pika was spotted at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska along the Savage River Loop Trail, resting on the top of a rock. Have you ever seen this mountain floof? Photo by David Turko (www.sharetheexperience.org).
my favorite example of “reinforcement drives behavior” is canine narcotics detection because on one hand you got the k-9s false alerting all the time because they know alerting is what gets them their ball, and then you ALSO got the cops who enable the false alerting all the time because they know alerting gets them probable cause (thanks Florida v Harris!) and probable cause means they can snoop through ur shit and even use civil asset forfeiture to take it. i have a 6000 word essay festering in my heart about narcotics detection dogs in america
soooooo in Florida v Harris, SCOTUS ruled that detection certification on its own is sufficient evidence for the presumption of reliability for a specific dog’s alert. like, dog passes whatever its specific jurisdiction requires in terms of certification; bam! its alert (arf arf little Timmy has a kilo) is considered credible till the end of career/certification. yet despite the curious amount of credence by the US justice system, narcotics dogs lack uniformity of standards for certification to an absurd degree.
we all know behavior is malleable and never truly ~finished!~ especially when it comes to one so precarious as detection, with dogs so wildly motivated as Malinois and field Labs. the contingency of “odor = reward” must diligently be maintained or the contingency will blur to “alert = reward” and then you have a dog who tells you what you want to hear but nothing of merit. and due to the myopic decisions of the courts, the dog becomes a probable cause dispensing machine. :|
ultimately, no litmus test exists for the credibility of a certification program. but, certification programs are the litmus test for the credibility of a k-9’s narcotics alert. in other words, anything that the government designates as “certification” means that the courts will take the dog’s sniff seriously.
this is also despite a low bar prefacing police ability to perform a dog search. SCOTUS doesn’t consider k-9 detection to be a true search, because it doesn’t invade privacy (i.e. rifling through your underwear drawer?), merely determines whether or not you are in the possession of contraband. assesses its presence or absence. the Fourth Amendment provides meager comfort in the face of k-9 searches due to circular reasoning from SCOTUS re contraband… but that’s tangential. as long as a cop doesn’t extend a traffic stop, he has every power to pull out his dog to search the exterior of your vehicle during a routine stop. since a dog’s nose theoretically only assesses the presence of absence of contraband, their search is not considered a violation of your right to privacy.
the major issue here is that dogs are considered infallible. equivalent in reliability and accuracy to a mechanical precision instrument. but SCOTUS fails to take into account multiple factors to the fallibility of k-9s. no one doubts the physical olfactory prowess of a dog. what’s at question is the training and the handling. i.e. the interpretation of what the dog has to say. the degree of trust our judicial system places in both the dog’s training and the continued competency of the handler provides yet another tool of exploitation for the cops.
narcotics detection dogs feature a sickeningly high rate of error. the most common number stated is around 50%. given the certification inconsistency regarding k-9s, it probably isn’t a surprise that there is little data recorded on searches conducted around the US. but what studies are indicating about training and handling practices is not flattering. specifically, they demonstrate the sinister extent of false positive alerts by detection dogs. a 2011 study in Animal Cognition revealed pervasive false positives. in the words of the lead author,
“It isn’t just about how sensitive a dog’s nose is or how well-trained a dog is. There are cognitive factors affecting the interaction between a dog and a handler that can impact the dog’s performance. These might be as important — or even more important — than the sensitivity of a dog’s nose.”
as followers of this blog understand, high drive dogs are extremely motivated to elicit their reward. as frequently and fully as possible. and they are always learning. it’s like having a toddler with the unique ability to detect ghosts. it’s nice that your toddler has this ability, now can you actually harness it? or will you end up with a toddler smugly aware crying ghost leads to sugary reward?
of course, this analogy quickly falls apart because presumably the toddler’s parent has an investment in accurately detecting ghosts. meanwhile cops don’t have much investment in accurately detecting drugs. in fact, dogs who churn out false positive alerts behoove them. by the CredibilityTM invested in detection dogs by SCOTUS, whenever a k-9 alerts, they are providing probable cause. in other words, what SCOTUS said before about detection dogs merely providing a Y/N answer re contraband? yeah, no. cops can take their false positive and search through all your stuff and find “evidence” of a “crime” and use it to retroactively justify their search. even if the evidence and crime they scrounged up has nothing to do with the drug claim. or if they don’t find anything they will write false positives off to drug residue, i.e. stale flecks of bud from your last summer vacation in Colorado. and there is no consequence! for the cops anyway - you are looking at being arrested and undergoing civil asset forfeiture. i would be super curious to know how much asset forfeiture each year is predicated on the word of a dog hankering for their ball.
and this is open and egregious and still drug dogs are viewed as credible! for more horrifying numbers: in 2011, the Chicago Tribune published an article stating: “…a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.” the drug dog in US v Bentley had a 93% alert rate! that is BONKERS! utter abuse of a purported tool. but hey, it explains why cops call k-9s “probable cause on four legs”
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