Yes, these are real.

[yochanan]

I love giant animals, always have. One great thing about living in
Africa, we get everything big here. Especially things like our great white
sharks and salt water crocodiles.

To me there is no such thing as a really ugly animal, they all have their
place.

When they announced that the Baiji (river dolphin) had gone
extinct. I cried. Literally. To see an animal like that go extinct in my lifetime.

Me too! I always loved learning about ancient giant species and island gigantism. Check out the megalodon! I really can't understand why anyone would want other species extinct that pose absolutely no threat to them.

More awesome giant badass animals:









(And for the kind of people who hate harmless vegetarian bats):


AWWWWWWWWW!

[Dusty]

You're telling me you have one of those flying at you, claws out, trying to kill you, you have a gun in your hand and you dont shoot?

They don't kill humans.
At worst, they will take a massive crap on you.

Fear the guano, not the flying fox.

[JeffX99]

I've always thought they were one of the top ten coolest animals on the planet. I only wish they were way bigger...so I could ride one.

[Zenith_]

You're telling me you have one of those flying at you, claws out, trying to kill you, you have a gun in your hand and you dont shoot?

To be honest I lol'ed at that. Only because in the second pic you posted he's clearly nomming on a banana, chilling out with some humans.

No face-ripping, maiming or killing of any kind going on....surprising for such lethal man killers

I get that they're creepy, but they're also kind of beautiful.
Shooting them and stringing em up like some kind of trophy is ridiculous, especially considering the fact that they're endangered.

[Philosiflo]

Unless they started making gigatic gigantic pocket knives, like the one @ top of the first picture. That first picture is fake. The second one is lens distortion, and the third one has an obvious tangent on the girls right (our left) arm where the wing is.

Also didn't read the wiki.

[yochanan]

They don't kill humans.
At worst, they will take a massive crap on you.

Fear the guano, not the flying fox.

If anything he should fear the stone fish! Touch this bad boy and you'll enter a world of pain. You can die if you aren't treated within just a few hours and the fish blends in very well with it's environment, so it's almost impossible to avoid before it's too late.



If he's going to shoot animals just to get rid of them, at least I'd somewhat understand it with these guys. Then again I heard they make for awesome sashimi!

[Barefoot]

I'll be right back, I just gotta go commit genocide, rape a few orphans, tell people that the cure to aids is to have sex with virgins, explain to millions of people that condoms and gays are sinful, rob an old lady, lend trillions of dollars to people who cant possibly pay me back and then sell all my debt, enslave some children in some sweat shops and force them to be soldiers on the weekend, suppress some Libyans, take part a race war by attacking civilians, occupy a country and force my army to disarm roadside bombs and blow their arms off and then give them meagre aftercare and almost no compensation, manufacture some radioactive baby milk, torture some prisoners with pliers and jump cables, keep some other prisoners in solitary confinement for years, and murder some prostitutes.
Its such a busy schedule being all that is wrong with mankind.

[Star Eater]

If anything he should fear the stone fish! Touch this bad boy and you'll enter a world of pain. You can die if you aren't treated within just a few hours and the fish blends in very well with it's environment, so it's almost impossible to avoid before it's too late.

If he's going to shoot animals just to get rid of them, at least I'd somewhat understand it with these guys. Then again I heard they make for awesome sashimi!

Yeah, after I saw Blue Lagoon as a kid, I was terrified of stepping
onto one of those.

[Slothboy3000]

I always thought the male platypus was scary. I heard a story where a man died from the pain alone!

[yochanan]

I'll be right back, I just gotta go commit genocide, rape a few orphans, tell people that the cure to aids is to have sex with virgins, explain to millions of people that condoms and gays are sinful, rob an old lady, lend trillions of dollars to people who cant possibly pay me back and then sell all my debt, enslave some children in some sweat shops and force them to be soldiers on the weekend, suppress some Libyans, take part a race war by attacking civilians, occupy a country and force my army to disarm roadside bombs and blow their arms off and then give them meagre aftercare and almost no compensation, manufacture some radioactive baby milk, torture some prisoners with pliers and jump cables, keep some other prisoners in solitary confinement for years, and murder some prostitutes.
Its such a busy schedule being all that is wrong with mankind.

You seem troubled. Here, have a picture of a giant stonefish!

[Clean3d]

I guess I haven't done anything dumb on the Internet for a while, so I'm going to post here.

I think the reaction to Barefoot's opinion is a little bit much. I had the impression that CA.org was just a bunch of lovely artists who tried to be decent folk, but it can get ugly fast. The problem isn't with any one post here, but with the sheer quantity of them, if that makes sense.

Plenty of people have irrational fears, often ones they cannot help. If you don't like giant bats, I'm glad you're not around any. If Barefoot had actually killed some poor creature (which he has not) just because he didn't like it, that could be worthy of admonition, but probably not by any of us. Probably by whoever protects endangered species. Really, a bunch of strangers ganging up on some random person for their opinion is kinda... mean.

Now I'll get off my pompous soapbox, because I'm just another random person from teh interwebs, whose opinion is likely worth less than the time it took to write it down and goodness knows I'm no professor of ethics anyway.

I agree with Whirly, though - the idea of a bat that can give human-size hugs may be the cutest thing ever, along with bats in general. One time on the job I ran across a little bat clinging onto a tree. It didn't seem to care about how close I got, so I took a couple cellphone pictures and spent a good deal of time looking at it. My evil human curiosity made me prod it (gently! I promise!) with a stick to see if it was alive. I think it gave me approximately the same look I would give someone else if they poked me with a stick while I was resting. (I feel bad. Won't do it again.)

[JFierce]

It's the same thing with spiders. Some people can hate me but if I saw a Tarantula which is deemed as relatively harmless crawling around my house I would get a shoe and smash it to pieces while screaming then go running out of the house still creeped out. I hate spiders with a passion, I'm not going to go out murdering them. But they still trigger a fear response once they reach a certain size.

[Star Eater]

Really, a bunch of strangers ganging up on some random person for their opinion is kinda... mean

I appreciate your post, but I'd like to reply that I don't think its
so much a case of ganging up. When you make a thread on a
forum, voicing your opinion, you are inviting a discussion and
sometimes those opinions have the ability to raise tempers
and strong feelings depending on the subject matter.

Animals are going extinct, in my country, rhinos are being
butchered by the hundreds, recently a mother was butchered
in front of her calf. Not enough is being done to protect nature,
its left to the man on the street to speak out against the cruelty
and slaughter that is happening daily, all in the name of money.
So when someone claims to be happy that a species is endangered
and that they would gladly kill an animal that does not even hurt
people, it is little wonder that the reaction of most sane folks is
one of disgust.

And the whole 'bunch of strangers' argument is not entirely true here
all the time. Sure we may not have met in person, but many of us here
know each other at least on some personal level so as not to be strangers.

I speak to people here the same way I do in real life, I stand firm, I'm
not rude without reason, but I don't take shit and sometimes, some folks
just need a strong dose of reality.

[N D Hill]

I'll be right back, I just gotta go commit genocide, rape a few orphans, tell people that the cure to aids is to have sex with virgins, explain to millions of people that condoms and gays are sinful, rob an old lady, lend trillions of dollars to people who cant possibly pay me back and then sell all my debt, enslave some children in some sweat shops and force them to be soldiers on the weekend, suppress some Libyans, take part a race war by attacking civilians, occupy a country and force my army to disarm roadside bombs and blow their arms off and then give them meagre aftercare and almost no compensation, manufacture some radioactive baby milk, torture some prisoners with pliers and jump cables, keep some other prisoners in solitary confinement for years, and murder some prostitutes.
Its such a busy schedule being all that is wrong with mankind.

The right thing to post would be "Wow. I'm Sorry. I didn't mean to come off like that. I was talking out of my ass." Then call it a day.

As it stands now, you're making posts that you'll be embarrassed of when you look back on them a few years down the road. Stop digging.

[Elwell]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pteropus:

Status

Many species are threatened today with extinction, and in particular in the Pacific a number of species have died out as a result of over-harvesting for human consumption. In the Marianas flying fox meat is considered a delicacy, which led to a large commercial trade. In 1989 all species of Pteropus were placed on Appendix II of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and at least seven on Appendix I, which restricts international trade. The subspecies P. hypomelanus maris of the Maldives is considered endangered due to limited distribution and excessive culling. The commerce in fruit bats continues either illegally or because of inadequate restrictions. Local farmers may also attack the bats because they feed in their plantations, and in some cultures it is believed their meat can cure asthma. Non-human predators include birds of prey, snakes, and other mammals.

[Star Eater]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pteropus:

I rest my fucking case.

[Elwell]

Bat Conservation International's page on their programs in the Philippines:
http://www.batcon.org/index.php/what...ilippines.html

The 7,107 islands of the Philippines one of the world's top ten biodiversity "hotspots" are home to a diverse and invaluable community of 74 species of bats. But their very existence is threatened every day. Philippine bats are relentlessly hunted as bushmeat, and their cave roosts are lost to improper guano mining, recreational caving and the commercial harvesting of swiftlet nests used in bird-nest soup. Their populations are declining throughout the islands.

Bat Conservation International has been working with dedicated partners in the Philippines since 2006 to reverse the dire threats to these bats through conservation, education and research.

[Dracontes]

Barefoot: as the other people above I see nothing wrong with pteropodids. You might want to go out, cool off for a bit, and then inform yourself about the animal instead of overreacting to how it looks.

Now some love for weird animals. These did indeed take me aback when I discovered they existed but I dealt with the situation by searching for more information on them.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_Loaghtan
There are a good number of sheep breeds selected for four horns and goats aren't immune to it. The more you know...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM9o4VnfHJU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macropinna_microstoma
This one just plays with your expectations: the eyes don't look like eyes and what looks like eyes are actually the nostrils.

[Elwell]

Being called out for saying stupid stuff, and having our stupidity explained to us, is how we learn not to be stupid.

[s.ketch]

It's the same thing with spiders. Some people can hate me but if I saw a Tarantula which is deemed as relatively harmless crawling around my house I would get a shoe and smash it to pieces while screaming then go running out of the house still creeped out. I hate spiders with a passion, I'm not going to go out murdering them. But they still trigger a fear response once they reach a certain size.

Except insects don't feel pain the way a fruit bat would. They don't have the equipment necessary nor show the same response to stimulus as higher order species. It's not as big of an ethical conundrum. Though bugs are still living creatures.

But I get what you're saying, people have irrational fears of other species. In OP's case, it's like joking about killing an endangered Great Dane because it's bigger and scarier than a chihuahua.

[Black Spot]

When I was in Malaysia it was a standing joke that if you couldn't identify the snake that bit you, you had to run after it, catch it and take it to hospital with you. There were some species that they'd only found one of. And I still like snakes.

[JFierce]

Obviously there's the main issue of population effecting ethics.

No one wants a species to go extinct (or they shouldn't) then there's obviously more ethics with that. Once again insects but I would genocide stinkbugs in a heartbeat. They're at plague levels.

But also why I don't have an issue with say killing deer as long as it's not to extinction. In fact I hate deer now. They're beautiful creatures but they're everywhere, tick carriers and spread lymes. When something is overpopulated there's little issue, when something is facing extinction there's huge issues.

[Velocity Kendall]

man i came into this thread expecting improbably large tits and just found a massive dick

ha ha ha look at that bat its nailed to a tree ha ha ha

fuck off and die?

[dierat]

Is it just me or is Barefoot particularly apt at making threads that backfire on him and become about how much people like the thing he's complaining about?

[Slothboy3000]

But also why I don't have an issue with say killing deer as long as it's not to extinction. In fact I hate deer now.

I'd be happy if you brought some over to where I come from! They're pretty rare here, not to mention I just like how graceful they are.

[Demo]

This one day at the college where I am at, a baby bat accidentally flew inside
I tried catching it before it got any further in, but it was able to get inside
it was lunch so there were quite a few people around and everyone freaked out,
some random dipshits took turns trying to bat it out of the air with books
one eventually trapped it in a hall way and beat it to death with his book
I took the body and buried it outside under a cherry tree,
it was one of the saddest things Iv ever witnessed it's body was no bigger then a key

[Dusty]

I see two sides here.

Barefoot:
"Man, these guys can't take a joke".

Everyone else:
"That joke sucked".

Learn to read your crowd, dude. It's not that you are a bad person, your joke just fell flat. Not a big deal and not something worth making a drama thread about. Just move on and try...wait, let me step back a bit. DON'T try too hard.

[s.ketch]

ha ha ha look at that bat its nailed to a tree ha ha ha

This. It's not that his joke fell flat, it's that it wasn't really a great joke to begin with. It fell flat like Holocaust jokes fall flat. Anne Frankly, it's very ignorant.

[Elwell]

But also why I don't have an issue with say killing deer as long as it's not to extinction. In fact I hate deer now.

I'd be happy if you brought some over to where I come from! They're pretty rare here, not to mention I just like how graceful they are.

In large areas of the US, white tailed deer are a pest. Over the last several generations, due to elimination of natural predators and suburban sprawl, they have become acclimated to human presence, and populations have exploded, moving from woodlands into semi-rural and suburban areas. They cause property damage and car accidents, and are a major factor in the explosive spread of tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease. And yet, efforts to control the deer population continually run into people's emotional opposition to "killing Bambi." It's the flipside of the "kill it because it's scary" attitude.
http://wildlifecontrol.info/deer/pag...tionfacts.aspx

[Arshes Nei]

Is it just me or is Barefoot particularly apt at making threads that backfire on him and become about how much people like the thing he's complaining about?

Nope not just you.

Watching quite a few threads since he went on the finger waggling spree on how much the people of CA are jerks.

The ironing.