One of the true Cincinnati Bengals.
I have never in my life met a person who thought that insects aren’t animals, what are you talking about?
I mean, considering that this is a successful meme on two different platforms and that there are multiple comments giving their own examples, I would assume that it’s a behaviour that a lot of people come across, regardless of your personal experience.
We live in a world where people who believe in jewish space lazers and think they’re going to get 5G from vaccines exist, and you find this hard to believe?
Lots of people think that animal means mammal. They are animals, but they are not mammals.
is that kinda like how beastkin aren’t monsters because they can speak?
if that’s the case, are elves people or demons?
further, dragons that talk, should they be considered beastkin or monsters?
I believe some people consider elves demons, but they aren’t really “people” or demons, they are their own classification of beings. I believe they are considered a type of humanoid.
I think the form of the dragon probably matters for determining beastkin or monsters, since monsters is more about the form than the lack of intelligence/lack of speaking ability, I think.
A lot of people appear to think that animal=mammal or animal=vertebrate. I remember when in history class we had to discuss differences between humans and other animals. The girl I had as my partner told me fish and dolphins weren’t animals.
i envy you. i’ve met people who don’t thrnk birds are animals, including one veterinarian.
Do they also believe that birds aren’t real?
I mean, yeah, government drones are not animals, I don’t see the problem here.
people that
people *who
“People that” is fine in informal writing, which a meme certainly qualifies as.
And imagine telling someone that Sun is a star…
Imagine seeing Earth from the planet Moon.
It hurts to listen 😫 “Moon is not a planet. It’s a star!” 😩
Just try telling people that they are animals as well.
Say them that they are from regnum animalia and they will understand it as an insult, as some “anomaly”…
I’m an animal too
Heretic!
You too!?
I’m more of a slime mold myself.
When I was in third grade I had an argument with my teacher who told me that insects were not animals. I was really into nature documentaries and books at the time and I knew that insects were in the animal kingdom. I remember going home and being really mad about it. That really soured me on school for the rest of my life. I’m still bitter about it!
My third grade teacher told me that negative numbers aren’t real.
Reflecting back on it thirty years later, it’s clear what she meant, but the poorly communicated statement and arguments she made were very upsetting to me, someone who at the time was very proud of having just learned the concept.
In the moment, I had the same reaction as you. Shortly thereafter, my mom - who was not at all a fan of that teacher - took my brother and me out of public school and we started homeschool.
I really wish teachers understood that the correct response to that is “yes, but that’s something you’ll be learning later, for now we’re going to not deal with that.” That’s how my Jr high math teacher dealt with me forgetting algebra and attempting to invent calculus because the rate of change seemed the easiest solution to the problem.
That said, I’ve met education students. You’ve got some bright people who really love kids or teaching, but you’ve got plenty of people who never really understood stem subjects. It was a revelation to learn that yeah a lot of grade school teachers don’t get math.
Sometimes teachers repeat a lesson plan over and over, and a small innocuous statement grows in intensity with each retelling and each argument with students as the teacher digs in their heels, until it’s ballooned into something silly. I’ve also heard that suction and centrifugal force are a myth.
OK, I understand that you’re trying to make a point to better my understanding of the material you are currently teaching, but now I’m hung up on this weird thing you said. It usually comes down to something “the language to describe this thing is insufficient when expressed this way” but the way they say it is like “this concept is a lie, full stop, no more thinking.”
Maybe they initially wanted to use more definitive statements to make students listen in class or something.
Yeah, I’ve been on the same page.
Fortunately I haven’t been in a formal classroom setting in years.
I had a teacher in 6th grade who told us that God placed the earth the perfect distance from the Sun; a few inches closer and we’d all burn, and a few inches further and we’d all freeze. I got detention for standing on top of my desk and asking why I wasn’t on fire yet.
That kinda shattered my view of teachers being arbiters of knowledge.
he’s out of line but he’s right
I wish teachers like that actually learned from these experiences
The problem isn’t teachers, it’s that religion is a severe mental illness.
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
- Douglas Adams
“Oh no, not again”
- bowl of petuniasWas that Douglas Adams? I remember Richard Dawkins using that as an example. I always thought it was a really good analogy.
Yes, it was Douglas Adams, first published in The Salmon of Doubt.
Also, that’s a specious argument because if the Earth wasn’t in the Goldilocks zone it would be a dead planet and we wouldn’t have evolved on it over billions of years to make the observation that it is the right distance from the Sun to harbour life.
Silimar, I had a teacher ask us to write down the first animal that came to mind and I wrote, “wolf spider” because to an 8 year old, there are few more bad ass sounding animals.
She said “really? That’s the First animal you think of?” Eye roll
Me: looks down at doodles of giant spiders battling tanks that shoot lightning, “it’s the only animal I’m thinking of right now…”
I guess compared to the other examples at least she didn’t try and persuade you it wasn’t an animal, just a bit crap at embracing a child’s natural enthusiasm and kind of immediately killing their sense of enquiry by making it in to an experience of being judged.
autism has entered the chat
Maybe. I’ve wondered if I’m on the spectrum. Either way that teacher was definitely wrong.
I’m mostly joking, but not getting over it so many years later is a symptom of autism, fyi
I was mainly joking, I’m definitely over it.
Actually, this is how I look at people who think stating that insects are animals makes them big brains… Its right up there, with “Spiders arent incests because they have 8 legs.” or “The sun is actually a star!” or “America is actually a continent”. Its always the most basic of shit that people who try to make others feel small use during these annoying conversations.
Insect? Or incest? Freudian slip?
“Spiders aren’t incests because they have 8 legs.”
Umm, actually, spiders sometimes ARE incests. In fact, an article I saw when googling that said that it was actually safer for the male when they were incests (as they’re less likely to be killed and eaten). And they can be or not be incests for reasons other than their 8 legs…
“The sun is actually a star!”
The other ones being, there is actually no such thing as a fish, and a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable.
same with birds, like people don’t count them as animals where i live
Well, yeah. They are government drones. (/s just in case someone needs it)
Today I learned about a whole new type of stupid I didn’t even know existed 😩
i’m guessing it’s some old kind of classification idea, where only furry things are counted as animals, so not stupid per se, just an outdated thing people were taught decades ago
Like mammal = animal?
yeah, even my father in law, a farmer, argued with me honey isn’t animal product because it’s made by bees
Or metals for an astronomer
It’d be more like a century and a half… I’m guessing it might be from the places that teach creationism, if there’s no evolution there’s no tree to clarify things into I guess. It’s very sad
I would be more inclined to believe that it is due to the archaic Linnaean classification
Even Linnaeus classified everything as “animal vegetable or mineral”
It’s annoying as shit though, in some countries when you ask if a restaurant has vegetarian options and it turns out they mean the ones with chicken because they don’t consider chickens animals.
That’s insane wow
I was staying with my aunt and uncle in France when I was around sixteen, after about 12 years of vegetarianism, due mainly to my squeamishness, and we went to my aunt’s mother in law’s (my grandmother/great aunt in law?) for dinner. My aunt was desperate for me to behave perfectly because of some family drama I was too young for and made me promise to eat the dinner.
My uncle’s mother was a rural French woman born in ~1910 who was not familiar with the concept of vegetarianism (or maybe she was being an asshole to my aunt, but she seemed very sweet to me, just extremely formal), so she prepared whole rabbits just for me to avoid all of the examples my aunt listed.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen or eaten rabbit meat, but it looks like a dead cat with tons of tiny bones and tastes oppressively gamey and greasy. I know how it tastes because I’m a fucking bro, but it was awful. I couldn’t eat the whole portion I was given, but we implied that I had my period, which she accepted and changed the conversation topic asap.
It sounds like your great aunt just doesn’t know how to cook rabbit.
Could be, but honestly, even if it was great, I wouldn’t have been into it. It really looked like a cat and I stopped eating meat at age 4, so anything other than chicken breast would probably be too gamey for me.
That’s definitely fair. I’ve never eaten a whole rabbit, but I’ve had it cooked properly and it’s not bad at all.
But I’m half Cajun, and the rule of Cajun food is not to think too hard about what’s in it. So that philosophy bleeds into other foods as well.
Same thing with fish
A chicken is a vegetable that can count and ask for hugs.
That’s pretty normal, historically-speaking. The modern classification system isn’t really very old compared to how long we’ve been talking about animals.
Exactly! Everyone in this tread is hating on people that just learned a different “truth”. In 50 years everyone here will be wrong about something as fundamental as the animal kingdom and insist on being right. Science advances and previous truths become false.
There is also the aspect of biological classification not being very useful for everyday live. Do people go “uhm actachully biologically fish don’t exist” every time they see a meal advertised as “fish …”. People can have a concept of “animal” that is different from the taxonomy. And classifying mammals+reptiles+amphibian(+birds) as something different than fish and different than insects is a pretty reasonable classification (based on phenotype and not on phylogeny)
Aristotle thought bugs and fish and birds are all animals. I literally don’t know any classification system, or definition, that doesn’t.
This is historically the case in Japan (birds and fish/seafood not being considered “meat”/animals when it comes to eating them). It started with Buddhism proscribing a meat-free diet, with that being impractical for the vast majority of the population unless some animals were still okay to eat.
It swims; it’s a fish.
I was at a trivia night and a question was, “Apart from humans, what’s the two highest populated species in the animal kingdom?”
Now, I’m not the smartest brain inhabiting a future corpse, but I did do basics in school.
I say to my group, “Maybe plankton? But I don’t know if there’s some technicality over that being a plant or something. If I were to guess, probably ants and then flies.” We agreed and went with that.
NOPE!!!
Cats and dogs apparently!!!
This didn’t even make sense to us if considering just the mammals.
I protested.
The quiz master said “The question is about the animal kingdom.”
“Well, if insects aren’t animals, what are they?”
He dug in his heels, we weren’t getting the points. And to make things even more bizarre, most other teams said cats and/or dogs to get 1 or 2 points.
We found a new trivia night.
Arson out of the question due to rain?
“What animal breathes through its butt”
I answered sea cucumber. They wanted sea turtle. But we complained and they accepted our answer too :)
Cats and dogs aren’t even species; they’re vague categories. I tried to find the actual answer to this question, but trying to nail down individual species is proving impossible. Every source is like “copepods” or “ants” like that isn’t incredibly broad. ChatGPT says it’s the Antarctic krill with 5x10^14 individuals. Going from there, the WWF says there’s over 7x10^14 , and Wikipedia only says they’re one of the most abundant species. I’m not going to get an answer to this question, and I’m going to be mildly annoyed about it infrequently for the rest of time.
Krill were my first choice, squids might be up there too, but the word ‘species’ instead of a more broad taxonomic term is a special limit.
Some kind of jellyfish might be a good candidate, but I’d probably go with smaller plankton for sheer numbers (as opposed to biomass).
Humans aren’t even in the top 10. They’re probably not in the top 100, really.
I would have guessed ants, but I think they’re just in the top 10? I wonder if humans are even in the top 1000, lol.
The most annoying part of that is that cats and dogs both eat meat! He thinks there are more cats and dogs than the chickens and cows (etc) we feed them? What demented food web did they teach him in elementary school biology?
im really intrested. what is their answer for if insects were not animals?
They didn’t have one and just doubled down on them not having vertebrae so therefore weren’t part of the animal kingdom.
There might be the nuance that there are many species of ants and flies, though still idk if any one of them outdoes humans, their pets and chickens.
Wikipedia’s page on biomass says that ants can compete with humans in global biomass (though the estimates vary wildly), but there are 15700 species of ants.
Antarctic krill is the safest bet with shittons of them in just one species.
Also isn’t there like 12 bazillion chickens per person? No fucking way could it be cats/dogs.
26 billion chickens globally, apparently.
That’s a lot less than I expected.
We probably churn through that amount every six months 🫤 But would they even still exist without us? The existential crisis of the chicken.
Fucker crosses the road gets made kebab.
Thought I’d make a “What is my purpose?” meme
Needed a picture of a chicken to cover the robot…
Welp, no need to make the meme anymore…
Rats? They are millions and millions of them. They breed rapidly. But, I would’ve assumed it was some type of insect.
Yeah, we had originally thought mice until our brains went exoskeleton.
Edit: That makes it sound like we were so open mind d our brains fell out 🤣
If they’d fallen out you’d probably have gone with cats and dogs like the other brain dead people at that quiz.
If he meant mammals the answer is mice and rats.
That’s suspiciously specific.
I’m impressed how common these “sightings” are given how rare I would have assumed this type of person would be. But lo and behold…
I was visiting the aquarium some years ago and there was an expert at one of the exhibits talking about “these animals this and these animals that” when suddenly I heard a woman who had several children with her exclaim “Fish are animals?”
I don’t recall at the moment how the staff member responded, other than I remember being impressed because it was a very non-judgmental and informative reply to her.
Admittedly, my partner in crime and I were struggling with the darker elements of our animal nature – beet red from holding back our laughter and our eyes-only conversation wasn’t helping.
Guess that dealing with public in that context everyday ot would be a common occurece and they already have a easy non judgmental answer for that
You think these people know biology nowadays? Come on now, look around you. If anything, they’re trying to get rid of biology courses in schools
Really they’re trying to get rid of education as a whole in schools.
Indeed, especially science that explains reality in any form
In the US, yes.
Everyday language don’t care about biology. Language is about communicating concepts. Sometimes the evolution history may be of relevance. Sometimes it is a hindrance.
Don’t worry ladies and gentlemen, language doesn’t matter anymore.
Or that mushrooms aren’t plants.
Mushroom = sex organ of alien invaders
mutters to self don’t take the bait
Chill, he’s just being a fun guy!
If you’re serious, I think you’re mistaken who’s making the statement. I’ve had conversations with humanity majors who made comments about mushrooms being plants despite the obvious fact that they don’t photosynthesize. Never mind that they breath oxygen in and release co2.
Some plants don’t photosynthesize either (e.g. Orobanchaceae). Its not the photosynthesis that makes the plant
Mushrooms were considered plants until the 70s, maybe they just had outdated textbooks in school.
Um, ackshully, mushrooms are vegetables!
Then why is the mushroom (that we see) called the fruiting body?
Mushrooms are obviously fruit.
Because eating them turns frogs gay.
keep your crockpot ideas out of my biology forum
To be fair I had a good crack at convincing my missus that manimals are a subclass of animal and she’s smarter than me - just at practical humanities subjects instead of STEM bollocks.
manimals
Heh.
The look to which my response is “Oh… I’m sorry I didn’t know about your disability”.
