I’ll ruin the rest of your Friday by pointing out that keeping slow lorises as pets is a really horrible thing to do.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1393036/Killer-cuteness-The-slow-painful-death-slow-lorises-latest-pets.html (sorry about the DM link but it’s actually a decent, if disturbing, article)
The one of the loris with a tiny umbrella is basically a video of an animal being horribly miss-treated and its reactions miss-interpreted through our anthropomorphised perceptions of it.
The animal in the video has probably had its teeth ripped out, otherwise it would be eating something meaty, not a ball of rice.
Please stop encouraging this. Animals like Slow Lorises are not domesticated and should not be kept as pets.
You beat me to the punch, and better. My rant was too long anyway. A quick search shows they’re threatened or endangered, the pet trade pulls their teeth or snips them off with nail clippers which causes a lot of them to die from shock and infection, the lot of a pet loris is often doomed. And they aren’t that great as a pet – they smell bad, they secrete a toxin on their arms that they lick and spread over their fur that in the wild protects the young when the mother leaves the nest, etc.
Hi Guys,
From the video summary:
Her name is Kinako. She has teeth and is domestically bred. Kinako was born in a Japanese pet shop.
I don’t know whether you think that’s unreliable testimony or whether you’re outraged about the general situation regardless of how this particular Slow Loris lives, But it helps to address that in your comment or else you come across as a bit of a crackpot.
I’d find it far more delightful to see her in the wild.
Unfortunately, regardless of the circumstances of this particular slow loris, which are debatable given how the animals are treated as pets even when the best of intentions are present, encouraging their use as pets is very unhelpful.
That made me sad.
I you really want to save a species from extinction then domestication is the best way to go about it.
Dogs, Cats, Chickens and cows dominate as the most numerous species on the planet for a reason.
Yes and no. Lorises are apparently difficult to breed in captivity. (Maybe not as bad as giant pandas, but the same idea.) When combined with the buyers’-remorse-inducing problems (bad smell, poison) and their apparent lack of useful attributes other than adorableness, that makes it hard to imagine a successful path to preservation-through-domestication for the loris.
Seems like lighting-wise, it would probably prefer a dimmer environment. You don’t evolve eyes that big to better discern the output of horrible headache-inducing fluorescent tubes.
We get an endangered rhino franticly humping while Mrs. Rhino eats grass. We get an endangered panda masturbating with a goofy look on its face. And then, just when our hopes are highest, the loris just sadly eats some rice.
I recently spoke to a primatologist who works with Strepsirrhini primates (Shawn Lehman at the University of Toronto) about this very issue, and there really is no justification for the captivity and abuse of this animal. Even if they are allegedly born into captivity, lorises cannot be domesticated and must be force-fed rice mixed with milk from infancy. The trapping and shipping conditions from their native habitat mean that for every loris that lives to breed or be sold or filmed in the West, there are dozens which die along the way. Posting this video is complicit with poaching and I urge Boing Boing to take it down and refrain from such practices.
The Wikipedia article asserted that the ones born and raised in captivity (which is sometimes falsely claimed) suffer, citing to this:
http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0313-hance_umbrella_loris.html
which seems to be authoritative on the matter. I’m not PETA or knee jerk.
I also would like to see BoingBoing take this down, or at least add some of the information on the ethical problems with keeping these creatures as pets that you and other commenters have described.
Let’s see you domesticate a white rhino.
Domestication requires a very specific type of animal. That’s why the number of domesticated species is vanishingly small. You can’t just domesticate any damn thing.
i’m sure Putin can do it.
It makes me sad that this makes your day cheerful. The video may be cute but the reality behind it is cruel. And yes I have read the video description.
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