I bet you’re fun at parties.

P.S. Humans stink if you don’t properly care for them. Worse than otters, arguably.

The Otters are very cute, have been given cutesy names, and have been taken by this family on all sorts of “adventures”—out to eat, to the beach, to wander along local streams, to meet and interact with their new baby, etc.

When you think about it, though, it appears that this Japanese family has rearranged it’s life around the behaviors and needs of these Otters.

Moreover, in a cautionary note, someone who actually has Otters, I think it might actually be this family, wrote that Otters stink, properly caring for them is expensive, they scratch and bite, and they make all sorts of mess, thus, they’re not a particularly good “pet.”

This is yet another example of the Disneyfication and anthropomorphisizing of wild animals.

A “comprehensive” guide to Singapore’s top 3 otter families: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL1vJBG_OdE

It’s sort of reminiscent of a high school production of West Side Story, i.e., earnest but amateurish.

Be sure to read the comments. Hilarious.

The otters don’t hurt each other in these dust-ups. They just sort of wrestle around, squeaking and peeping, until one of the clans decides to break it off and run away.

Otters are all over Singapore. The government allows them to go wherever they want, and they do. They stroll through parks and across busy streets and through business districts.They are not in the leastways hostile to humans. The Singaporans, by and large, love them.

And, yes, they are very cute.

That was sad and tragic for all involved.

A chimp can also rip off a human’s face and hands. Some of Neo’s readers may recall the case of Charla Nash, a Connecticut woman who was attacked by her friend Sandra Herold’s pet chimp Travis in February 2009. From the account at “All That’s Interesting”:

When police arrived, they found Travis stalking the area, covered in blood. The officer fired several rounds into him, and Travis, bleeding, fled into the house. A trail of blood followed his path through the kitchen and bedroom, into his room where he died grasping his bedpost. Bits of Nash’s body littered the yard — flesh, fingers, and nearly half her body’s blood. Travis had ripped off her eyelids, nose, jaw, lips, and a large portion of her scalp.

Full account of Herold’s relationship with Travis and the chimp’s attack on Nash here: https://allthatsinteresting.com/charla-nash

Nash has since had a full face transplant. She gave testimony in support of the Captive Primates Safety Act in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6DxrYHa5Dc&ab_channel=CNN

Interesting that the cartoonist Steven Bell repeatedly portrayed George W. Bush as a chimp: I don’t recall W getting violent enough to rip off anyone’s face.

It’s the Planet of the Apes … and the Sea Otters!

Brrr….