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?

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      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.

      • Ellia Plissken@lemm.eeOP
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        9 days ago

        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.

        • marcos@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          but South Americans usually farm them if they’re a pest, rather than exterminating them, as they are very good meat animals

          As a South American… Eww! Are you getting your facts from ChatGPT?

          Catholics aren’t allowed to eat meat on friday

          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.

            • marcos@lemmy.world
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              9 days ago

              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.

              • Ellia Plissken@lemm.eeOP
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                9 days ago

                you could try actually reading the source 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.

              • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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                7 days ago

                Dude, I’m not even Catholic, but I went to Catholic school, and all during Lent every single lunch was fish on Friday, and the freaking fire departments had fish fry Fridays randomly throughout the year.

                True it isn’t the entire year, but during Lent there is absolutely a proscription against eating meat on Friday, except fish.

          • Kitathalla@lemy.lol
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            7 days ago

            Again, as somebody that was grown catholic, where are you getting that from?

            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.