Once again I beg you people for the love of god please read Kropotkin.

As soon as we study animals — not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains — we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: “Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, since it favours the development of such habits and characters as ensuring the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.

The 'selfish struggle of survival' is fascist pseudoscience that capitalism teaches despite it being incorrect because it makes selfish rich assholes feel better about being selfish rich assholes.

Nature documentaries focus on struggle because it makes for dramatic TV.

And we aren't perfect closes of each other, we are a blend of those that came before us, forming something new. Animals can be hard to tell apart for us sometimes because our brain from a young age is forced to focus on the minor differences of human faces and we lose the ability to notice those differences as efficiently in non-human animals over time.

yeah, discovery channel freaked me out a lot as a kid

i remember seeing a documentary about global warming and then one about ancient aliens and the antichrist and then watching the new War Of The Worlds and I became convinced the world was gonna end and was constantly looking at numbers and thinking that if I saw 11:11 it was the 11th hour and God was gonna come and end the world but that was after the space aliens took over

I was like ten years old lol :agony-consuming:

i get existential dread but not because of that but because it reminds me that "nature" is basically already gone

i like the ones with iguanas in them. the way they swim is soothing to me

Yeah but not for those reasons at all. I just see the animals all being animals and get upset knowing that we will never get to experience that freedom the way that our ancestors did. I would not have chosen to be born human if I had the option to be born as just about anything else.