Lucy

In class, we had to listen to a podcast about chimpanzees, and how close you could get a chimpanzee to be human. Before we had to listen to this podcast, we have been studying the subject of EVOLUTION and have been looking at how we are similar to apes, and how we may or may not have a common ancestor, and looking at how evolution may have happened.

The podcast was a about a chimpanzee named Lucy, and how when  day after she was born, she was taken away from her mother and given to this scientist and his wife for research to see how human you can make a chimpanzee. The results were pretty shocking and as it turned out a chimpanzee could become very similar to a human, and even become attracted to humans. But after ten years, Lucy, had become to strong for anyone to properly take care of her, and she was sent off to Africa, to live alone. One of the scientists there saw how unhappy and stressed out Lucy, and other chimpanzees like her had become and took all them to an island in the middle of a river, to have them live out of a cage. For the first few years it was rough for the scientist to live on the island and made a cage for herself to live in. After a while all of the chimps left to go live on there own, all of them except Lucy, she stayed there with the scientist until the scientist came out and showed her how to live properly in the wild. The scientist left the island, and would come back very often, and one day she noticed that Lucy wasn't with the rest of the apes and went off to for her, and found her bones next to the cage where the scientist had lived in, when looking at the body, Lucy didn't have any hands or feet. The scientist thinks that Lucy went up to a group of poachers not knowing she was in danger, because she had been around humans her whole life, and they took advantage of that and left her body on the island.

Lucy taught us that the barrier between our species can almost be broken down completely, and they can become 'human'. She also taught us that chimpanzees are quite intelligent and can learn sign language. After hearing this story, I really want to be ale to work with animals in  way to change others' lives, just like Lucy did. I also learned that the experiment was extremely worth while because it showed us that they are animals because they are raised like animals. Lucy's end made me sad because she didn't know what was coming to her.

Thinking Like a Mountain

Are we really the architects of our own destruction?When we are out and about are we really there for the good of the planet and others, or are we there to destroy the thing that supports our life. When we are hunting during the season its open, are we hunting for the enjoyment, or are we hunting for survival. The two are completely different, are we doing this to hang its head on our wall, or are we doing it to eat it. 

This article really showed how he had taken away a mother, a mother who happened to have babies nearby, and how he had helped along 'natural selection'. The author feels this guilt of killing an already dissolving species, and now he realizes that he probably killed those babies, with out intention of doing so, and now he has reduced the population by a few. The animal that was killed was a wolf, which means that there will probably be an over population of deer, and small animals since those are no longer able to hunt and keep population levels at what is needed for that ecosystem. 

I personally agree with the authors view on how he now looks back at what he did and feels regretful about it. I say this because, you should only kill animals if you intend to eat them, and if you don't than your wasting valuable resources that other animals need to survive. We humans happen to be the most invasive species known to the earth's existence and it shows when we have charts that show us how we have disrupted ecosystems all around the world, we as a species have not learned to co-inhabit the earth with other animals properly. 

Ted Talk Summary

To what extent will researchers go, to understand the unknown language of dolphins. Denise Herzing has been researching in the Bahamas for the past 28 years. What they have come up with, is if you show the dolphin a specific object like a scarf, and the dolphin will have a specific whistle for that object. They have recorded the whistles and have analysed them, and have found that the language of dolphins is not in an average humans hearing ranges. I can say that for me personally I would like to be able to have the opportunity to observe, record, and interact with these playful creatures, because this is a remarkable experiment and has been getting positive results.