Comment on Bear visits library, steals honey on Winnie-the-Pooh's 100th birthday

punkwalrus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

I see security footage like this, and think how alien and strange all this must be to a mind that cannot comprehend purpose at this level. Just think, you’re a bear, with rudimentary intelligence and curiosity which has led to good things over the eons of evolution. You can sniff out things, know how to manipulate objects, possibly even understand rudimentary “tools,” like pushing objects aside, standing on them, or how thing 1 can lead to thing 2. You have memory, adaptability, and power. A lot of leisure time, too, to think. Yet until a hundred years ago, and for some bears, they have no recollection or ancestral memory beyond what they are driven to do or seen another bear do, this building is suddenly in your expanding territory.

You have no idea what this is. You enter a flat area, maybe like a huge cave, with really odd smells. Powerful; fragrances of dried paper, ink, chemical cleaner of the carpet. Humans. There may be colors that only occur in small amounts in nature; if you can detect them at all! Most of this is by smell. You know you have smelled whiffs of this here and there, but this place is a sudden insanity of overwhelming oddities. It would be so alien because everything the woods has to give is foreign here. An alien landscape that you can only grasp small snippets of. Nothing makes sense, though.

My god, this would be a life-altering experience for a bear unused to this environment.

source
Sort:hotnewtop