DISCLAIMER - I am not planning on fighting a pelican.
there’s a brown pelican that hangs out on the railing of a very narrow portion of a boardwalk nearby. the only reason it makes me nervous is because it’s huge, but their nails look short, and their beaks are pointed, but curved downwards so they would have to try to bite me with that long thing instead of pecking me.
like, if a bird capable of clawing or eating my eyes out attacked my face, I’d honestly have no qualms about killing it immediately. but if I ever get attacked by a pelican, it looks like I could just kind of hold it off without having to hurt it. am I right in that?
I wouldn’t worry to much about pelicans. Fun fact - pelicans try to eat people sometimes. They basically try to eat every animal, because they have no sense of scale for their food they can swallow. And they don’t risk much by trying - most large animals have the same incredulous reaction we do
They are not very bright birds nor very quick ones. They are also not very agile. And as a bird, they have hollow bones and you could kill them with a solid fist to the chest… I once saw the aftermath of two shin high dogs tearing one apart. On a small balcony. There was blood everywhere… The dogs were covered in it, completely uninjured and very pleased with themselves
I wouldn’t worry, even if they have the sharp bits that could injure you, they lack the instincts to use them properly
there’s a video out there of one trying to eat a duck
And a capybara
And a pigeon. It succeeds in that one.
there’s one of a Holstein cow successfully eating baby chickens.
There’s more than one video of horses eating a chick.
Um… are we talking about in Mexico? Because 40 year old virgin gave little me so many horrible thoughts.
Oh, dear. No, I meant like a baby chicken. It’s apparently a reasonably common thing.
There aren’t many videos out there of creatures trying to eat a capybara.
It takes some ferocious kind of predator to even attempt it.
capybara get eaten in the wild all the time. average lifespan of a wild one is 4 years, and the primary cause of death is predation. they can live 10 years in captivity
their main form of defense is reproducing about as quickly as rabbits. they are sometimes competition for grazing land, but South Americans usually farm them if they’re a pest, rather than exterminating them, as they are very good meat animals. the Catholic Church classifies them as fish, so the more Catholic of community is, the more of them they’re eating (Catholics aren’t allowed to eat meat on friday, and somebody along the way decided fish weren’t meat. it wasn’t unusual to write the Vatican with a description vague enough to get something declared a fish; both the capybara and beaver were classified as fish because the people submitting the request just emphasized the amount of their lives they spend in the water), and there’s a medicinal grease produced from their skin that they use like petroleum jelly.
As a South American… Eww! Are you getting your facts from ChatGPT?
Again, as somebody that was grown catholic, where are you getting that from?
Mostly large snakes and jaguars eat them. Otherwise, nothing is really a danger.
the first fact came from the Bristol Zoo, and the second from Archbishop Bernard Hebda.
You might want to check that first source again.
About the second one… WTF? You’d wish to consult your Catholic traditions from some Catholic authority. Not whatever that is. But the first paragraph is almost normal, stick to it.
you could try actually reading the source
yourself.
and who the hell am I supposed to trust about Catholic rules if not a freaking archbishop?
In the US, the USCCB (that is, the bishop’s conference for the United States) has ruled that Catholics should abstain from meat every Friday outside of Lent but may substitute that for some other suitable form of penance. What that penance is isn’t exactly delineated. here’s an archdiocese saying the same thing . I’m not catholic, so if you want to argue what Catholics are and are not allowed to do, please take it up with the archbishops and archdiocese.
Then, like most catholics in the wild, you don’t have much grasp of the tenets of the religion. It’s weird that I’m the only one in my family who actually remembers anything from the catechism classes, but it seems standard in my see (that I’m not a part of anymore, but when I was forced to attend mass and such) that no one has any idea of the various positions of the faith espoused by the church. Catholicism is one of the interesting christian sects because it actually has a long history of ‘reasoning’ its way to the conclusions that shape the beliefs, and its sort of sad that the average person claiming catholicism as their religion knows so little of it.
Anyway, back to the original point: No meat on Fridays has been a thing for a very long time, in the actual annals of the religion’s leaders. Go look at the council of Trent and their declarations. For the philosophy of it, read Thomas Aquinas and his (now) laughable idea: The idea that fish don’t inherit original sin because they don’t have sex. For the practical reasons, go read the NPR article that details some of the history behind it.
May I subscribe to Pelican Facts?