I feel like there’s a real missed opportunity here to lean on this particular otter’s gene pool to breed the seafaring version of St. Bernard alpine rescue dogs.
Though it’s also possible I’ve watched too much Octonauts with my kids.
Just what we need, more kooks on Wavestorms in the water!
(Explanation for non-surf adjacent folks: kook is a “n00b” and Wavestorm is a brand of foam boards that you used to be able to buy at Costco for $99 or whatever. Forget the fact that they are actually quite capable boards and many really good surfers will paddle out on them, it became a symbol of good surfers having a bad day dodging people who can’t surf. Note: I am most definitely a kook / horrible surfer who doesn’t anymore, but never actually owned a Wavestorm)
Some animals learn to use tools to solve problems, for example crows [0]. What if that otter was just using the board to travel longer distances (=> finding more food) by keeping nearby a safer place to rest on?
Unfortunately there’s no great answer — any mammal that bites could carry rabies even if not obviously rabid, and there’s no way to test for that when the animal’s alive. Running the prophylactic for rabies also ain’t cheap and runs the risk of human noncompliance, meaning someone ends up rabid (and eventually, dead).
If the State does not euthanize it after a bite, they could be found liable if someone gets bitten again. There’s also the question of rabies, the detection of which requires examination of the brain tissue.
It's not a liability issue. States generally have sovereign immunity over such things, and there is no legal requirement to protect people from wild animal attacks. This is more a matter of public safety, and humans generally come first.
We've been enforcing this rule for long enough that most animals avoid attacking humans even if they could easily kill us. The rule has been written into their genes through sheer evolutionary pressure.
Except house cats, of course. Somehow we've bred them to attack us with impunity.
If they were more lethal we would probably do more about it.
I startled a cat I had when it was sitting in the window getting worked up about a cat outside and it turned on me with all it's murderous power, clawing my shins pretty bad.
They can capture it and keep it, if possible, but that is difficult, expensive, and not always available.
There is a recent popular book on it, Fuzz: When Animals Break the Law, by Mary Roach. She goes into the challenges facing human animal interaction. There's a lot to it, much of it unfortunately bad for the animals.
I suppose it is gross because it highlights how completely we lack respect for nature (all other species), prioritizing the safety/dominance of 7 billion humans?
This and the recent orca stories have made me wonder about animal meta-learning: the mental processes that go into motivating, succeeding and sustaining non-instinctual behaviors. Clearly different kinds of animals can be trained to behave in certain ways. Is it possible to train an animal to train other animals?
In 1589, Leonard Mascall explained his method of training oxen by yoking them together with others in his book the 'Government of Cattel' (extract abridged by me):
"Some doe yoke them together... ye shal likewise take good heede that one oxe touch not another with their hornes, so within two or three dayes that yee see them waxe more tame... to frame a young oxe to the plough or carte, yée shall matche him best with an olde oxe that is tame, very strong and gentle, which will holde the young oxe backe if he be too hastie, or plucke him forward, if he be too slowe, or if ye will ye may make a yoke for three oxen, and put the young oxe in the middes, and by that meanes ye shall make the most hardiest oxe to be tame, and refuse no labour at the length. For the young oxe (being neuer so stubborne) in remaining betweene the two olde oxen, they will if he be too flacke, constrayne him to drawe, or if he would shoote forwarde, they will holde him backe and stay him, or if he would draw backe, they will holde him forwarde. Also if he would lye downe, the other wil hold him vp. Thus by pollicie he may be let of his stubborne frowardnes. Also yoke him to wilde bullockes that haue not laboured before, and so let them gee yoked lose together for two or three daies, and so they will waxe tame. And a little chastening after willmake him endure to labour wel..."
Link to the book's text[1] if you would like to read it in full. For a book which predates copyright it took me far too long to find an openly accessible version!
Similarly, horses have traditionally been broken into harness by having at first the foal run alongside the vehicle, which is pulled by older horses (I have heard that the foal's mother is ideal). When the horse is old enough, it can be harnessed itself, again next to experienced draught horses. Essentially this is exploiting the animals' instinct to follow the example of their elders. I think it sounds like a rather humane method of horse training, but I don't think it's as common as other methods these days.
I sometimes wonder how much "animal culture" might exist in the wild that we are somehow missing, simply because it doesn't survive the transplant to environments where we can do detailed studies. (Either because the environment itself is so strange it gets disrupted, or how the individual animals were rescued/abducted/raised and introduced, etc.)
For example, what all if those notoriously-non-reproducing zoo pandas just... didn't get the right bad-influences when they were growing up? Some zoos have even attempted to use panda-porn to address the issue.
I had a pet chinchilla once. I got him after he finished what amounts to chinchilla school. The breeder explained to me that she can’t immediately separate a chinchilla after it starts eating normal food as it needs to be taught to bathe, chew, and other chinchilla things by the older chinchillas. There can definitely be animal culture, and from what I have observed most animals have some level it. I find that humans give ourselves way too much credit. We may be smarter, but I don’t think it’s by all that much really… just that the last bit of smarts makes a rather large impact.
An Immense World by Ed Yong about sense and sense processing of living things convinces me there is a lot we human's misapprehend or uncomprehend about the world.
Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.
I have not the academic studies to support it, but I have personally witnessed many occasions where mother animals teach their offspring how to behave in context, as well as externally introduced animals influencing the relatively "indigent" population. Cats and dogs, I mean. Cats and dogs both can and sometimes learn behavior from other animals that were in a place first, and from newly introduced ones.
I wonder sometimes if there are certain instinctual behaviors "unlocked" in some way. I have a cat raised from infancy without other cats (an unsanctioned rescue that I eye-dropper fed and wet wiped to the point of self-sufficiency); she never purred in my presence for 6 years, but seems to have learned purring from an adult cat temporarily introduced into our home for a few months. That other cat is gone, but now my cat purrs frequently.
Dogs do similar - they learn behaviors from all influences, and behaviors learned from other dogs (and other animals) seem to be more "sticky" than treat/avoidance training strategies.
Your's and the parent's story makes me wonder if dogs are best socialized among humans in intergenerational clusters of dogs. For all the dog parks there are I have a feeling from many dogs I and my dogs meet on the street that there is an epidemic of dog loneliness much that that spoken of regarding humans.
Otter gets habituated by humans feeding it. Researchers capture the otter and it loses even more fear of humans. Researchers release the otter, and now plan to capture and interact with it again because it isn't afraid of humans. I presume it will become even more habituated to humans after researchers recapture it.
Wouldn't this problem sort itself out if a few kayakers gave the otter some harmless smacks with their paddles to instill a little fear?
The article indicates that it was 841's mother who was likely fed by humans. 841 was born in captivity and care was taken to prevent human association:
The pup was raised by her mother until she was weaned, then moved to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. To bolster her chances for success upon release, 841’s caretakers took measures to prevent the otter from forming positive associations with humans, including wearing masks and ponchos that obscured their appearance when they were around her.
"Nearly all domestic animals have been shown to have smaller brains than their wild counterparts [1–7]. Those that are most important to humans, mostly for consumption or companionship, display the greatest amount of reduction. These include pigs (approx. 34%) [8] and sheep (approx. 24%) [2], and dogs (approx. 29%) [3] and cats (approx. 24%) [3], whose brains reduce more than twice as much as those of other domestics"
"Bullfighting cattle, which are bred for fighting and aggressive temperament, have much larger brains than dairy breeds, which are intensively selected for docility."
So if you are aggressive and violent, you have a bigger brain, but does brain size correlate to intelligent? Maybe the recent musk v zuck is an indication of throwing off those social constraints.
Either way, the state stating they have to kill the otter would mean this is a smart otter not fearful of predators like humans. Interesting that hormones are also cited for the increased aggression, is the oestrogen choline pathways giving the otter ideas?
As if the whole captivity experience isn't inextricably colored by those silly humans running the show and all their associated machinations. Ponchos? seriously?
Assuming the article is accurate, areas that have a lot of surfers don’t tend to be ideal for kayaking. A small subset of kayakers would definitely disagree though.
The right number of surfboards to acquire, much like the acquisition of bicycles or classic ThinkPads, is N-1, where N is the number at which either your spouse kicks you out or the DNR stabs you with a tranquilizer dart and relocates you to a remote shoreline.
It seems so senseless. Why does she destroy the surfboards instead of selling them? I know plenty of surfers that would buy a slightly used surfboard from a sea otter, no questions asked.
Though it’s also possible I’ve watched too much Octonauts with my kids.