confinement in the sensor cavity can’t be the best experience for an animal that normally roams over large fields.
Anybody know where I can buy free-range cruelty-free crickets? The macrobiotic ones, if possible.
Your cellar, probably.
That’s nothing. I heard that English people regularly engage in some bizarre ritual where they hit the things with big wooden bats for fun.
Aren’t people outraged over this?
crickets
That sort of thing is just not cricket.
can’t be the best experience for an animal that normally roams over large fields
Animal? Really? Are we Jainists, now?
This toy is weird and maybe wrong, but I think crickets actual prefer hiding in small enclosed areas. My friend had them to feed to her frog (and had a separate enclosure to feed and house them - they love grapes apparently), and they loved the inside of toilet paper tubes. Now…a transparent moving vehicle with lights is not the same thing as a nice calm cardboard tube… So I’m not defending this toy. Just countering the fantasy of crickets loving the open range.
Do you have something against non-chordates?
As you may note below, insects are animals.
[quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:70500”]Many kids handle crickets as part of the care of their pet reptiles[/quote]And many kids probably seek them out in the wild and squish them, because kids, and crickets.
A more practical concern is that it seems to me a fine means to transport crickets indoors, where they will hide and be obnoxious and noisy and not have the best experience before they are tracked down and squished.
Previously on BoingBoing:
Ever since Biology was invented as a field, Entomologists have been able to rely on a enormous amount of research from Botanists, from Microbiologists, from Zoologists, from Ecologists, from Geneticists,from Herpetologists and so on. The notion that animal is perfectly synonymous with mammal is obsolete
On the other hand, the welfare of individual insects is beneath my concern.
This seems wrong somehow, but as was pointed out elsewhere, I’m more concerned about the factory workers that are making these things.
I’m more upset that the toy maker hasn’t credited Garnet Hertz:
http://www.conceptlab.com/roachbot/
Way back in “the bad old days” my 5th grade class watched a film about model rocketry. One scene showed the triumphant landing of a capsule containing a live mouse. The teacher was quick to point out that no one would be doing that.
But when MIT does it it’s science?
Bonus: when you’re done playing with 'em, you can toast them up with a little teriyaki sauce!
I prefer the drone that you have to stuff full of angry wasps, now that is fun for the whole family!
Fascinating, and utterly ridiculous. A waxworm that “died of natural causes”? I guess the SPCA could shut down a shoot for such a thing? But wouldn’t that be an infraction that could be appealed? Did the SPCA person also note how many flies had been killed by the vehicles people drove to the studio lot?
