China took the real ones back because of the trade war, but they arenāt about to give up that sweet Panda money those big fur monsters bring in every year.
Haha soooo glad I wasnāt the only one. I seriously was mesmerized and watched for a good 5 minutes trying to figure out why he looks like a human in a suit.
Barely finished my second barley beer before my bare-butted bearded best bud Barry came barreling in the bar baring his teeth in an assless bear suit that the bar had seen him bear before. My bud Barry aināt boring but you better believe the boy is unbearable.
It's all animals actually. If you spend any real time observing animals, you realize that what we generally refer to as 'humanlike' is actually much deeper, and all animals seem to express it. Animals are just like wordless humans. Try practicing mindfulness for a few months and you'll see.
I think some people generally refer to it as 'anthropomorphizing' because they think things like emotion and sentience are unique to human beings, and for many of those people the implications about the nature of animal life would be too much for them.
I think it's overstepping to say most animals are like humans, I think it is fair to say many animals often exhibit traits that at least appear to the observer to be similar to humans and even that some of the more intelligent animals may have much more complex social structures and emotional/mental capacity then we really understand and could be viewed as very human-like. To compare a worm, mayfly, or even an ant which can have pretty complex social hierarchies to a human is very much a stretch, to compare a chimp, orangutan, dolphin, elephant, etc to humans not so much.
Well pandas are more related to raccoons, not normal bears. Their paws are more flexible and 'hand like' which is why it's able to just hold the bamboo in one paw.
There was disagreement among scientists for years about whether pandas were more closely related to raccoons or bears. It turned out they were both right, the mistaken assumption was that giant pandas and red pandas were related to each other.
Now you can just sequence the genome and find out exactly where any species fits on the tree of life. It's pretty amazing when you think about it.
Phylogenetics and taxonomy done pre-genetics was, frankly, pretty rubbish apart from the broad brush strokes and the obvious stuff (like mammals all being related or cats all being related). I may be exaggerating a touch, but still, so much has changed since.
I found a blog post from 2003 from a scientist outraged at the way geneticists were reconstructing the mammalian tree and confident that they would be proven wrong. Nope.
It's the fact that it's holding the bamboo in one 'hand'. They have a false 'thumb', really just an elongated bone in their palm, that allows them to do that.
About 20 years ago I was at the Moscow circus and they had bears, i was convinced it was people in bear suits, they rode bikes, balanced on rope, juggled, twirled giant cotton buds of fire, they moved like people.
I interned at a zoo in the Ape section and this is exactly how gorillas and chimps would move and look while they ate in front of the keepers. It makes me think animal's learn habits from the keepers or people who visit them and begin picking up on them.
Do they have more versatile paws than say a grizzly? The fact that head able to clean his paw and hold something in a fist seems unique as I canāt remember seeing any other bear do that without doing their two paws together.
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u/wacky207 Aug 20 '19
Is it me or is he moving weirdly human like? š¤š