Zoological inaccuracies & mistakes

For some people 'lemur' seems to be a catch-all term of any unknown mid-sized animal: marten, meerkat, prairie dog, cuscus.

In documentaries, notorious is gluing together scenes from stock footage - for example a chase scene of a cheetah catching an antelope obviously shows different animals, in different background, in different light, filmed using different quality film.

Maybe not a mistake, but an inaccuracy, is that wildlife films in recent years almost always cut the predator scenes to remove all blood and killing. A predator chases prey, the predator catches prey, the next scene is the predator sitting with remains of its meal. For me it is cutting the interesting part, and also spoiling it for most of the people because 'maybe some old lady in the audience protests'. While, of course, the reason why predators are popular in film, instead of guinea pigs and rabbits, is because they are predators.

And it is faking that nature is happy and idyllic. As the result, people e.g. stop caring about nature once they discover it is not always beautiful, or jump into bear exhibits in zoos to make friends with bears.
 
Also CGI animals lack genitals in movies, even if they're portrayed as real animals (for example dogs in Call of the Wild), not talking characters like in Planet of the Apes or Lion King.
On the contrary, anatomically correct animal toys like Schleich & Collecta are not banned. Yet.
 
When it comes to doing basic research on dholes, I have a few rules I follow.

1. I don't believe anything old colonial stories tell me about their prowess. "But Kenneth Anderson was so reliable blah blah blah." Okay, and in his accounts, he wrote about black magic and even a guy who could turn into a tiger. Now I call that being very ASTOUNDINGLY full of crap.

2. I don't take a lot of western sources seriously because they use the old colonial stories as legit sources of information and thus believe the stories on command, my brain simply doesn't work that way. Therefore using many western sources to do dhole research would break rule number 1.

3. I use eastern sources, whether it would be in a book written by scientists from India like Dr. AJT Johnsingh or a scientific study.
 
I went to an exhibition yesterday that said a unicorn is often depicted as a horse, despite one exhibit showing a unicorn with cloven hooves
 
Dassie rat said:
That sounds fair but the exhibit made no reference to cloven hooves or the Arabian oryx
Click to expand...
Surely the issue is that unicorns are mythical so how can anything to do with unicorns be a "zoological inaccuracy" other than any suggestion that they exist?
 
The 'Fantastic Beasts' exhibition combined information from the J.K. Rowling book/film with interesting living animals. For example, the Chinese 'dragon' was linked with the Chinese alligator
 
Just watched "Gladiator" the other day. Apparently, the film crew could use a local Egyptian cobra during the scenes playing in North Africa, but had to switch to a nonvenomous milksnake from North America for the snake assassination scene...:rolleyes:
 
Dassie rat said:
The 'Fantastic Beasts' exhibition combined information from the J.K. Rowling book/film with interesting living animals. For example, the Chinese 'dragon' was linked with the Chinese alligator
Click to expand...
Why is that inaccurate? Sounds like a clever way to educate the public about animals.
 
Batto said:
Just watched "Gladiator" the other day. Apparently, the film crew could use a local Egyptian cobra during the scenes playing in North Africa, but had to switch to a nonvenomous milksnake from North America for the snake assassination scene...:rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Same as snake pit with harmless pet shop stock in ''Vikings''. The only snakes available in reality those times could be only non-impressive European vipers (that have to be made with CGI for bite shots). And any exotic snake species would perish soon from poor husbandry (not to mention transportation by cold sea).
 
Rule #1 for when learning about tigers.

Don't believe hardly anything in Indian media. They apparently think solitary tigers can kill adult elephants. Remember, there is one lion pride that hunts elephants, but they need teamwork to do so, and they target the juveniles.
 
A couple things from the Facebook page of the Dhole Conservation Fund.

Not too long ago I made a list of rules I follow when doing research on dholes. Rule #2 is to be cautious of western sources on dholes. Well, here's an example of that.

1. "Not seen in many other pack animals, dhole family groups will sometimes meet up with another or a few dhole family groups and live together for a bit, even hunting together. This is thought where historic sightings of packs 30+ dholes come from. After some time the families go off on their own ways, sometimes their members move off with a different group than the one they came with."

I don't know where this came from, but this common belief is a bunch of malarky. When AJT Jonhsingh did his study on dholes decades ago, he never saw two dhole packs use the same area, which suggested they are territorial. In fact, scientists and other people in the Indian forests have observed dhole packs fighting over territory. So there's no reason for dholes to behave the way described above, actually, the only other big land predator that acts even remotely similar to this is the spotted hyena, and even they don't act the way described above.

Now for the part that drives me really fricking crazy.

2. "However, they are still one of the few animals that will actively stand up to a tiger to defend their kill or pups. For the dhole its a numbers game, a tiger can easily over power a single or even a pair of dholes, but when it's a full pack of 5 or 7, a tiger will often give way to the pack."

Oh really? In India, the country with the most dholes, packs normally have 6-8 members in them. However, tigers are socially dominant over dholes, and if what you, people at the Dhole Conservation Fund say is true, then how are tigers dominant over them? and actually, a study published last year found that tigers actually suppress dhole pack sizes by killing them and stealing their kills. The researchers suggested this might be because if a tiger kills a "normal" pack member, that means a lower hunting success rate and less food for the pups. If a tiger kills a whole litter of pups or one of the breeding pair, that will lead to a lower reproductive rate, and an alphas death may lead to pack destabilization. So I fail to see how the Dhole Conservation Fund people are correct on this. (Unless they know they're full of crap and are just saying this to make dholes sound cooler so more people will donate to them.) (What? Best I can come with for now.)

Also, if this really is the case, then why haven't any wildlife tourists caught one of these events happening on film? Here's what you have to remember about India. The national parks are puny compared to let's say Yellowstone. Nagarhole National Park is only 248 square miles for example. So many tourists go into these parks to the point where the jungles are overcrowded with people, and these people have done very well at catching dholes on film. They've filmed dholes interacting with deer, elephants, gaurs, sloth bears, leopards, and yes, tigers chasing and killing dholes. Yet not a single film exists of a tiger "giving way" to a dhole pack. Along with that, someone from the forest department should've reported an instance like that happening by now, yet it hasn't happened.

So rule #2 even applies to conservation organizations for dholes in the west.
 
Jurek7 said:
For some people 'lemur' seems to be a catch-all term of any unknown mid-sized animal: marten, meerkat, prairie dog, cuscus.
Click to expand...
At least “lemur” is more of a household name that it used to be? But yeah. Also, because non-lemur prosimians are so incredibly rare in media, on the rare occasion one does appear, it will often be mistaken for a lemur by viewers, which is more understandable. Examples: the bushbaby in The Lion King (2019) and the tarsiers in the new Illumination film Sing 2.
 
evilmonkey239 said:
At least “lemur” is more of a household name that it used to be? But yeah. Also, because non-lemur prosimians are so incredibly rare in media, on the rare occasion one does appear, it will often be mistaken for a lemur by viewers, which is more understandable. Examples: the bushbaby in The Lion King (2019) and the tarsiers in the new Illumination film Sing 2.
Click to expand...

The only named bushbaby in fiction (at least that I know of), YooHoo, is depicted in a way that certainly doesn’t help this problem. His tail is ringed (with blue, I should mention) and he has small ears like a sifaka lemur or a New World monkey. Perplexingly, in the same franchise there is a Ring-tailed Lemur depicted with relatively correct colors (and correctly sized and shaped ears).
 
While most of the K&M Wild Republic Audubon Plush Birds are designed quite accurately and are quite recognizable as their intended species (although most don’t have feet), there is an error with the California Gull.
Wild Republic Audubon California Gull

Wild Republic Audubon California Gull

It has a black tail (instead of the white one that any adult North American gull would have) and is missing its black wingtips. This may be due to confusion of the trailing wingtips on this species with the tail.
 
Birdsage said:
The only named bushbaby in fiction (at least that I know of), YooHoo, is depicted in a way that certainly doesn’t help this problem. His tail is ringed (with blue, I should mention) and he has small ears like a sifaka lemur or a New World monkey. Perplexingly, in the same franchise there is a Ring-tailed Lemur depicted with relatively correct colors (and correctly sized and shaped ears).
Click to expand...
I mean, there were a couple bushbaby characters in the Disney Junior show The Lion Guard, which at least looked accurate?
 
Birdsage said:
The only named bushbaby in fiction (at least that I know of), YooHoo, is depicted in a way that certainly doesn’t help this problem. His tail is ringed (with blue, I should mention) and he has small ears like a sifaka lemur or a New World monkey. Perplexingly, in the same franchise there is a Ring-tailed Lemur depicted with relatively correct colors (and correctly sized and shaped ears).
Click to expand...
..And a red squirrel, "Chewoo", which is bright magenta with white stripe on its tail :p
If anything I don't think they are necessarily aiming for biological accuracy..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top