/trumpets and fanfare
Welcome, one and all, to the opening ceremonies of the 3rd Annual Owl of the Year!
They’ve delighted, educated, and entertained you for the last 12 months, and now we see which owls have captured your heart the most.
We’ve taken the top 16 from last year’s event and ranked them by their average scores. Previous winners, White Faced Owl and Saw Whet Owl are still the top of the game, but it is anything but certain who is going to come out on top this year.
Even with just these competitors, there are going to be some bitter matches in the early rounds. But it’s no free ride for the previous owls - they must compete against some looking for rematches and some newcomers to shake things up, and that is why we are here now!
Today I will be putting up 4 groups of 6 for you to vote on. The bottom 2 owls will be eliminated, and the winners of all groups will be ranked based on their final scores.
To vote is easy - just upvote any and all owls you like. Downvotes don’t count, so don’t try. I’ll leave this open for the week, ending sometime Saturday (I’ll be on vacation so I get to it when I can!) and then the official games will begin!
Good luck to all your favorites, and may the best owl win!
They still get a lot of hate in many parts of the world from holding similar beliefs. Respecting them as an omen is one thing, but when they start hurting them to keep them away is something else.
I avoid sharing those stories usually because they’re usually real downers and I don’t know anything else really about the people still hating on owls. I don’t think they should be torturing or killing them, but I don’t want to be weighing in on random ethnic minorities, as I’m sure they get enough of that already.
Owls are a bit spooky if you don’t know what they are, but that has nothing to do with them, we’re just often afraid of the unknown and mysterious.
I don’t have any direct anecdotes about the killing of owls in Mixtec Pueblo culture. That being said I would not be surprised by such things. They had a tendency to sacrifice quite a few organisms.
If they killed owls for ritualistic purposes it’s not like they treated humans any better.
I can’t say that I really understand animal sacrifice, as it goes opposite to a lot of my personal choice of actions, and while most of my understanding comes out of looking up things I’ve come across in historical fiction, there does seem to be respect for the natural world behind it.
The Ainu of Hokkaido and Sakhalin had bears and the Blakiston’s Fish Owl as some of their highest animals they paid respect to. The physical body was just a disguise of their gods, and they felt if they treated the animals well, the gods would look favorably on their village and keep providing them with what they needed to survive. They would hand raise baby animals to show their care and generosity, and then sacrifice them at the end of the year.
The sacrifice was not to other gods, but to the animal itself, as a sendoff back to the realm of the gods after being shown generosity by the people. The meat and furs were a small gift from the spirit within the animal.
Again, my life experience is completely different to what theirs must have been, and I can sorta make some sense of it. From the Wiki article on the sacrifice I don’t know if I’d use any of the methods they used in the drawings for a humane execution, but I can only assume it made some sense to them. I’m off to go deer hunting after Thanksgiving and then the following weekend going to an animal rehab conference to learn new things to save wild animals, so I probably don’t make sense to other people sometimes either.
Native people nowadays are still doing a lot to protect what is left of our waterways, forests, and animals, so there is still a strongly implied reverence to the natural world that is more up front than it seems to be with non-indigenous people. As long as people are doing the best they can to their understanding, it’s hard to ask for anything more.
No I get that.
I’m a vegetarian because I hate animals (I actively despise pet dogs). I never understood the compulsion of people to pet, disturb, or own wildlife out of amusement/joy. Animals and wildlife need to live away from me. Emphasis on “live” since their role in biodiversity serves to keep me healthy more times than not.
That being said I find biology and evolution fascinating. Also as long as they’re outside my window deer, racoons, hawks, bats, etc are majestic in terms of visual beauty.
The spiders in my basement and I have agreed to a treaty that has halted hostilities.
Oh, very interesting to learn those things about you!
I miss having pets in some ways, but in other ways not, and that was one of the things that got me volunteering at the clinic. They weren’t animals born to be commercialized, they are our native species.
While petting them is not so much a thing, as they aren’t into that, I still get to touch a lot of things most people never will, and I get an authentic look into their private lives. It’s not a buddy relationship like with pets, it’s a real sense of giving back to my local wildlife. I don’t get cuddles or signs of affection, I just know I didn’t what I could to help them get back to the wild, if possible.
I love my home spiders at this point. Small ones I let roam and just don’t tell Mrs 6789 about, but the big ones I help back outside to hopefully do their thing somewhere else. I think wolf spiders are cool, but I still don’t wish to be surprised by one in my slipper or what not.