Feral Heart

Thank you Eclipse (By the way, I love your signature, LOL. I'llhavetostalkyourcharactersbionow 8I LOL.

Caylx has been added under Katanda

Thanks AlbinoGhost ^_^

So I realize not nearly as many people go into Watermill as they used to but this has been an issue from the get-go when the game came out. For those of you tilting your heads wondering what Watermill is, its the map that appears on the log-in screen. Everyone who has the game actually does have easy access to Watermill but it is not as easy as it used to be. It USED to be (and don't do this unless you want a Watermill bare of plants and rocks) that you could open map maker, hit "Export" and boom, you had a portal to Watermill in Cape. THAT was in early versions. Now if you try to export it, or even just open it in Map maker to play with it, its bare of objects. So the only way in now is to make another map and place a portal in it with the destination as watermill and check the box for a portal for the first map to appear in the Cape. I used to adore RPing there but as of recently its grown more than a little unpleasant because I'll be in the middle of RPing and someone comes in screaming

OMG HOW DID U GET INTO MY MAP!!!?? and they're absolutely /freaking out/ as if its hacking. Its not hacking. Everyone has Watermill. You may have had the game for years and NEVER went in there but you DO have Watermill if you downloaded Feral Heart, guaranteed. Otherwise, your log-in screen wouldn't have anything behind it.

First off. Second, if you make your own map INSIDE of Watermill, that is to say if you make a map and you don't save it with its own name like you're SUPPOSED to, you WILL see people in your map when in reality, they're NOT in your map. They're in Watermill.

So the next time you make a map and you have kept it private OR you haven't even put it up for download and you see people running around in it, do not flip out. Check your map again and make sure its not saved as "Watermill" and CALM DOWN. People don't deserve to be barked at for your mistakes. /End rant.

When I thought about this, I realized its kind of funny. Most of my character's don't have these issues. Most of my characters who have had any dealings with (or even a remote idea of what is a human) human beings have either been positive, neutral, or more often they just... don't understand them. (and often don't care.)

Caylx, one of my canine characters, has had a close relationship with people. Sure, she has no idea that she was originally plucked from the forest as a young puppy to be raised to eventually be slaughtered for her fur but then again, do real animals know that either? Of course not. Circumstances changed, the guy's daughter became attached to her, so she wasn't slaughtered. To her, that family is the greatest thing since sliced bread and that's all she knows.

 My human characters on the other hand, often are affected directly by this "human phobia." One of my human characters who had been (if only temporarily) turned into a wolf turned out particularly interesting because she ended up on the recieving end of a lot of hate when fellow critters realized their friend was "wolf in sheep's clothing" or in this case, a "human in wolf clothing." Thing of it is, she's not a hunter. She's not a logger. Shes just a regular human teenager who was a victim of circumstance. Likewise, another char of mine who has been human throughout, Hailey, has been blamed for the "sins of mankind" due to animal's bad past experiences.

Really when it boils down to it, I think it really relies on the /players/ controlling the reality of how their character percepts things. Sort of like what I said about Calyx. There is NO way she could have known she would have been slaughtered for her fur. Some players on the other hand kind of stick their hand into the OOC background information of their own character and "magically" let them know these "dark little secrets" when really.....odds are, they'd never know.

In real life, does a fox on a fur farm know its going to be slaughtered for its fur? Probably not. Do the deer necessarily know that the /humans/ set their forest on fire if they were in their little home in the thick of it when the blaze started miles upon miles away? Probably not.

And now its time to get a bit technical. X_X
In real life, humans hunt, sometimes to the point of hunting to extinction but....wouldn't any other animal in the same position of "power" I guess you could say,  do the same thing?

If there is an overpopulation of the predator species and not enough prey to support it, predators would continue to hunt prey. No doubt about it. They're not going to suddenly go vegetarian and due to specialization through evolution they may not be physically capable of tapping into other food resources.  

One of two things will happen. Predators will either

A. Hunt prey to extinction and then be forced to utilize another food source (IF they can) OR be forced to extinction themselves.
B. Hunt prey to near extinction, and then have their numbers violently drop off when there isn't enough to support themselves and then gradually build back up as prey numbers build back up.

We don't call the predators "morally wrong" for doing this and hunting their prey to extinction. (However usually they don't hunt prey to extinction because illness/weather/other predators keep their numbers in check but that is beside the point) Yet when a human does the same thing, we consider it "wrong." Usually its because we, unlike animals, understand potential consequences of doing this and often have other means of avoiding this situation.

Really when you think about it, humans are out-competing MANY species on the planet at once rather than a few at a time (which would be the case in most creature's evolution) and that usually doesn't happen too often. But when you get down to it, that's all it is, out-competing other things. Animals don't have that great of a grasp on science and they don't consciously know how things "work" in nature. They don't feel guilt for killing each other. There is no "evil" about it.

So by knowing science/evolution/biology, there is a moral "wrongness" of us turning the planet into our footstool, but from an animal's (hypothetically speaking) perspective, personally, I think they would most likely have NO idea, that we're doing any sort of wrong because they don't understand the science, they ONLY thing they see (IF they see anything at all) is that we are trying to do the same thing they are, compete with them. Without the scientific background, its just a competition and the mass majority of the species on the planet are on the losing end against us. But by nature's standards, that's "fair." The biggest resource hog/utilizers usually takes home the glory and ends up with the greatest amount of individuals of its species in existance. Think about how many bugs there are on the planet. They destroy a good number of resources for their own existence too. Can't say I've ever thought of a cockroach as "evil."

 But its so easy for people to anthropomorphize the scientific knowledge that we as humans don't HAVE to hunt animals all the time/that we dont HAVE burn their homes/that we dont HAVE to use as many resources as we do/etc. "magically" into their animal characters. And with that, they also anthropomorphize  the knowledge of the moral wrong that goes with it.  Since they have already given them a lot of human characteristics (ex: speech, human perception/emotion, etc.) already, they do it anyway.

So if you want to be realistic about this, in a RP, EVEN if the water quality turns bad, all of the fish end up dying, the moose suddenly disappear/their carcasses are laying around with their horns sawed off, rabbits are hanging by strange metal contraptions from the trees, even with foreign smell of "human" in the air, the odds of your wolf-character who has never seen a human being in his life, figuring out that "man is doing this to me" should be pretty darn slim.

Sure, canines are great at making associations between things but there is nothing present to make the connection. All he knows is he's hungry, the water makes him sick, the fish are floating in the river and rotting, there's some species (humans) he's never smelled before, and the moose are lying about dead and missing parts of their anatomy. That is /it./ He doesn't "magically" know its the work of humans. (He /might/ make a connection with the odor and know to avoid places with that smell but that would be the extent of it.) And THAT is what a lot of people end up doing. They let their characters "magically" know.

I think I've said enough for now. /End rant. X.X;