By Eric Lendrum
January 18, 2022
-American Greatness
A group of scientists at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have been conducting studies into so-called “inequality” among animals in the wild, attempting to find similarities with alleged inequities among humans.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, these studies first began with a group of behavioral ecologists at UCLA who “saw how COVID-19 was highlighting health disparities and other inequalities around the world,” and eventually “began to wonder if they could learn more about inequality by studying it in animals.”
“When we started looking for it, we found lots and lots of examples,” Dr. Jennifer Smith told the New York Times. “To see this across so many different species was quite surprising. And we’re just touching the surface.”
The group came to a conclusion that has already been a well-known fact, which is the assertion that baby animals that are raised by their parents are more likely to survive into adulthood, which the group redundantly described as “species that share resources such as territory, tools, and shelter between generations.”
Among the examples they cited were the fact that baby red grouse that aren’t abandoned by their fathers in infancy “are more likely to succeed in establishing their own territories,” while baby squirrels that survive off food hoarded by their mothers for the winter “are much more likely to survive until the spring.”
“Those young, pine-cone-rich squirrels, the scientists say, are children of privilege,” the New York Times concluded, without actually citing any evidence of “inequality” as a factor in these studies.
