Social media gone wrong

[Käpt'n]

 

This video has been shared on sites like Facebook, Twitter and imgur and has gotten a ton of attention. Thousands of likes and comments from people who just find it cute or who want a pet lemur themselves now.

No. This is awful. Sharing and liking this video completely ignores one simple fact: The illegal pet trade is killing these animals. It is one of the reasons why many species are endangered to begin with.

And let's think about the story of this little bugger in the video. Most lemurs that are being kept as pets on Madagascar are taken away from their mother at a young age. They are wild animals. They don't receive the proper diet, many people there feed their lemurs with rice, spaghetti or worse. Which explains why this lemur is so fat!
It's also missing part of its tail. Who knows how that happened...

And most importantly, almost all lemurs that are kept alone as pets become extremely aggressive once they get out of puberty. And what happens then? This:

They end up in tiny cages because the folks on Madagascar are poor and have no clue what else to do with them.

It is estimated that over 20.000 ring-tailed lemurs are being kept as pets. And that is just one of roughly 112 lemur species, 80-90% of which are endangered or critically endangered.

So if you see this video somewhere, please link them to these places:

http://lemurconservationnetwork.org/
http://www.lemurlove.org/

They are two of the conservation networks that I support with my photos and otherwise, their sites explain why keeping them as pets is awful.

[weirdfox]

The problem is, the people just see the video and share it. People don't care about the story behind it, they don't see how awful it is.

Sadly enough, in Holland companies like Greenpeace are trying to do something about this, but with how self destructive they are, they aren't taken seriously at all.  So, anything that is trying to be done about it gets cancelled.

[Flake]

1 like = 1 prayer

[major lee snake]

Aww man, with a title like that I was expecting something like, I dunno, girls gone wild, but with various twitter/facebook memes.  You know, those "bae come over", "when u (do thing) and u (do other thing) like (spongebob freeze frame)", and those cursed emoji that has plagued the internet in recent years.

In short, I thought this was about The Emoji Movie.