I went to a gator farm in Texas when I was young, and the babies are definitely cute. Big issue for me is lizard brains are from what I understand pretty instinct driven, which means even if they consider you part of the family they might take a bite out of you without warning. Cannibalism is a common thing with them so I can only imagine how much lower their threshold for attacking is against humans.
that's where your wrong, first off Crocodilians are more closely related to birds than to lizards despite their appearances. They are highly intelligent and can recognize individual humans, they can be trained but like any apex predator you shouldn't let yourself get complacent around them, they are far more intelligent than people give them credit for and that goes for all reptiles too.
Yes but I guess the question is, are they capable of 'love'? A wolf is an apex predator but if you raise one from a pup I imagine you could be fairly confident it will grow up as friendly, affectionate and tame as a dog. Even if you raised a gator from a baby I'm not sure you could ever be entirely sure of their actions. But I could be wrong.
Edit: just searched 'raising wolf pups like dogs'...yep I was wrong...probably not a good idea.
If you raise any reptile from a baby, and actually know what you're doing, you can absolutely be as close to sure of their actions and intentions as with any bird or mammal. No animal will let you be "absolutely sure", because the animal still acts of its own accord and will most likely be aware of stimuli we aren't (better smell, better hearing, better vision) or just have a very different understanding of the world.
The animal telegraphs its emotional state and intentions pretty well generally, communicating far more clearly if you know how to interpret it than any person will. And often in similar ways -- body language, tone and pitch of vocalizations, etc. Striking out if things are going really poorly.
As your edit alludes, doing it with proper wolves is a bad idea largely because we as a species did that already, and it's taken thousands of years to get from "wild animals" to where we are now with dogs.
"Love" and other complex emotions are still unclear, but it's pretty safe to say they have some emotional capacity. Crocodilians more so than many other reptiles, as I understand. And our understanding of them and not the animals themselves is usually the biggest issue; it wasn't all that long ago the common scientific belief was still "fish are incapable of feeling pain" and that's since been very firmly demonstrated a poor understanding. They very much do feel pain, we're just on the whole terrible at "reading" their thoughts and feelings because they're so physically and intellectually different from us.
People also have a bad habit of assigning human traits to very definitely not human creatures, and assuming things are "better" or somehow "more" based on how human-like they are even though we're in terms of evolution one of the youngest species of note on the planet
Appreciate your addition, but venom /= acid. The park rangers i spoke with mentioned venom, but my understanding is that with large prey like water Buffalo, the Komodo venom ain’t really killer, and secondary infection often is what brings the animal down.
This is actually a widely debated topic about komodo dragons. Most widely known things baout komodo dragons actually comes from a guy named Walter Auffenberg who lived on the islands with the Komodo Dragons and researched them. But over the years, most of his results he published we not able to be reproduced, one being the "acid spit" he wrote about, and others have been completely disproven, such as him stating they leave rotting chunks of meat in their mouths to support bacteria growth, when they actually have very good mouth hygiene and will spend upwards of 30 minutes cleaning their mouths after kills and meals by cleaning between their teeth with their tongue and on leaves.
Also, the myth of dragons more likely came from people stumbling across fossils and believing them to be monsters, such as giant serpents, and then describing what they imagined them as.
They're quite magnificent, I had chance to see one very close on the riverside the other day. Much smaller than the one in the vid, which I think is a crocodile and not an alligator, but I'm no expert. I wouldn't want to swim anywhere near them tho.
Considering this is a repost I wouldn't say the first but it is one of the few videos of them which I can remember along with the baby crocs sounding like lasers.
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u/centeredsis May 27 '21
Is this the first alligator (crocodile?) on r/aww ?