I am currently reflecting on the passage of time - the last two (working) decades have seemed like a flash of missed opportunities and amazing opportunities grasped and children born and growing
But to have two centuries of children and companions ... well that's just amazing.
(On the other hand the whales are probably thinking something like "you harpoon wielding ape bastards, wait till our spaceship returns we'll have you then")
You're comparing your accomplishments to the rest of society. If you feel like you haven't used your last two decades appropriately, and feel like you could really use a couple centuries, remember that if that were the case, everyone else would probably have the same lifespan, and you'd be back to the same position you are now, comparing yourself to others.
I think whales atoms are slightly older on average than human atoms since whales have a slightly higher percentage of hydrogen than humans and all hydrogen goes back to the Big Bang. An interesting question to consider.
Greenland sharks are 500 years old and nobody seems to get worked up about killing them - eating them on the other hand is something to get worked up about [0].
yeah that's because their skin is basically soaked in urine, so it's a kind of niche market compared to the industrial harvesting of whales, a group of species known to be very intelligent.
OMG I read a lot about them last night...Swim less than 1 mile an hour, yet somehow eat seals and sometimes whole reindeer, migrate as far as the Gulf of Mexico..
I woke up this morning with my every thought invaded by those horrific parasites the vast majority of Greenland sharks have hanging from both eyes like macabre baggage tags that feed on the surface of their eyes, blinding them..
IIRC whaling back then wasn't done for food (except by the inuit), but for the blubber (for lights) and extracts (as a daily nutrient boost / "medicine"). I think my parents were still made to eat that. I don't know the details though, I guess it had some essential vitamins and such they couldn't get in regular food? Like modern-day fish oil.
I didn't get it until I looked at the photos, which completely shocked me. There's something about them that reminds me of high-quality science fiction, something about the scale, and the hubris, and something about how disconnected they feel from anything I'd think of as my world. Thanks.
How is anything superior to anything? We are all atoms and molecules arranged in some state, at a given point in time.It is up to the individual to weigh superiority on their own terms, there are no set rules.
Clearly many people believe they are superior to all other species, which may or may not be a good thing depending on how human centric you are.
That's a dark path, and it's not up to the individual to make that decision.
Faced with the choice while driving to swerve to kill a squirrel or not swerve and kill a child, there is only one permissible answer, or else we're endorsing sociopathy.
Pigs are smart and can live to be around 15 to 20 years old, and by all accounts are as smart or smarter than whales.
I don't see how the expected lifespan of a single individual is a determining factor in the moral calculus of what humans should or shouldn't kill.
Why isn't it morally equivalent to kill 10 pigs who could have collectively lived to be 200 years old for bacon and killing one whale who could have lived to be 200?
The age of the animal is a factor by virtue of the sheer length of time it takes to have another individual of the same age.
There are subtle differences between pigs' and whales' situations: most pigs that are slaughtered are bred as farm animals, not wild ones. So getting another pig of similar characteristics is trivial in effort (time, money, work). You are also not really endangering the species.
All whales that are hunted are wild. Getting another individual with the same characteristics as the one you just killed takes a prohibitive amount of anything so nobody is doing it. Their numbers are also dwindling.
Yes, we tend to assign greater value to older things. Which is why it's slightly more out of reach to chop down Sequoioideae compared to say your average bamboo trees. Both being plants to which we assign no intelligence or actual affection. It's purely down to replaceability in terms of the most costly resource, in this case time.
I'd say most modern societies have agreed, but culturally and through years of legislation, that there are unique laws and rules for humans that we don't apply to other animals.
I think we sort of did that in the past with humans (and continued until several decades ago). May be one day we will change our attitude towards animal slaughtering as well.
Your extrapolation is meaningless. I very clearly compared pigs to whales. That's definitely not enough data to support you extrapolating to humans.
Do you eat any plants or animals? Do you have sexual relations with other humans? You probably don't eat humans or sleep with animals so I assume it's clear that extrapolation doesn't always work.
With the advent of modern human rights all humans ended up being officially considered above animals. They are treated according to a different set of rules. Some of these rules may extend to animals to a lesser degree (the humane treatment, not to be confused with human treatment).
The value of my question was to point out that the argument that pigs are bred for slaughter and therefore it's OK to slaughter them whereas for whales it it's not OK doesn't make sense. Pigs suffer greatly in our modern form of farming.
If people consider themselves above animals they should say so honestly and not make up an argument that doesn't make sense.
I flagged your comment again but I will still answer even though everything was plenty clear already:
1) If you raise a pig for slaughter then human society considers it's acceptable to kill it. If it wasn't you wouldn't raise it at all would you? If you raise it as a pet then it's likely unacceptable to slaughter it.
2) People do consider themselves above animals and they are very open and vocal about this. This is a shock to you? You could have ended up being someone's pet otherwise.
3) The argument doesn't make sense because you didn't bother processing it. Or possibly even reading it. Or because you think your personal preferences should be laws of society or nature.
Do I need to go on? Your moral issues with slaughtering pigs apply to you. Refuting my argument based on your personal choices is a bit presumptuous. Society as a whole tends to lean the other way.
I do understand what you're saying. I just disagreed providing arguments that are valid for society as a whole while you only provided your personal preference. That's not an argument. I am willing to revisit it when this is no longer the case and society or law no longer consider this acceptable.
I personally consider sacrificing animals that are bred for this purpose as acceptable. I also consider hunting wild animals as acceptable as long as it's sustainable and the individuals can be easily replaced by "equivalent" ones maintaining a natural-like balance. I might have objections to the way animals are raised or killed but this is a different topic. So where exactly is your argument?
If I considered the name "max" insulting to me and immoral would you change yours? Or would you say "society accepts it and it's legal so I'll keep it"?
Read the thread from avar's comment down and maybe you'll understand. My point is that thinking that slaughtering whales is not OK but pigs is is an arbitrary value judgement. They are the same ethically in my view.
That's all. I made no judgement on killing animals.
The reasoning that breeding something for slaughter makes it more OK to kill it opens a path to arguing that breeding humans for slavery is different from enslaving "wild" humans. That's actually line a lot of slaveholders used. They argued that their slaves are too dumb to live on their own and have to be kept in slavery in order to survive.
> slaughtering whales is not OK but pigs is is an arbitrary value judgement
Perfectly correct. So are human rights and all our laws. Does the fact they are arbitrary discredit them? Does it make my argument wrong?
> They are the same ethically in my view
You're getting close. In someone else's view not eating meat is dumb. Does that make his argument correct?
> opens a path to arguing that breeding humans
No it doesn't. It opens the path to exaggerating. Cutting a tree in your yard opens the path to arguing that you should be allowed to cut the Amazon rain forest?
> That's actually line a lot of slaveholders used
And it was wrong. By today's standards. Judging people with the power of hindsight is a grave mistake. Whatever you do today will be incompatible with values of generations to come and you will be judged. Should people start judging you now according to some possible rules of tomorrow? Let things come when they may.
What I said is not intrinsically correct and it will never be. It's correct only in the context of today's society and laws. When they change the value of my argument changes. Society considers breeding pigs for slaughter acceptable today. Hunting whales not so much. Move to Japan and you might get a different answer.
And regardless, it does not change the fact that there is a difference between uncontrolled killing of wild animals and controlled killing of farmed animals. Regardless of how you feel about this, there is a difference. Which was the crux of the argument.
Which brings us to discussions about conciousness. Lex Fridman had an interesting discussion with Christof Koch [0] as part of the MIT AI courses, and further Koch's TEDx lecture is very interesting.
So you subscribe to a more utilitarian view of ethics? "I'm sorry we're raising you and your species for consumption, but it's more efficient, so you gotta go".
I should have phrased the question slightly differently.
It's more around whether animals (e.g. vertebrates) can suffer and experience pain like we do.
The answer is yes - that's why we use animals in pain research and that's why a pig or cow screams when it's cut with a knife for example.
Even fish feel pain [0].
Plants react to stimuli - but plants don't have a nervous system, they don't have nociceptors (neurons responding to life threatening signals) to experience and feel pain, they don't have any means to 'escape pain', e.g. running away from danger.
No problem. It's a thought that's been consistently nagging me for a while. It kind of throws a lot of things for loops.
For instance, you make a point of specifying you're considering whether things can suffer and experience pain like we do.
Why is that the delineating factor here? We don't really understand intelligence of consciousness and we've been basing our measures of both on the only instance where we're relatively confident exists. We think, therefore we are.
But what if we're wrong. What if our way isn't the only way to be intelligent, to be sentient. Why must they experience pain the way we do in order to be afforded protection? If we're just privileging our type of sentience over others, we're just drawing a different line. And always when someone draws a line, I ask, why there?
I suppose the most inclusive line would be drawn at the point of our own survival. So at the very least we'd eat plants until we figure out some alternative that doesn't 'kill' plants.
Ok, but what gives you more of a right to survival than the plants you kill? If anything, plants are the most benign entities on the planet, they're the only beings capable of producing their own food.
These are hard questions, I don't expect anyone to have the answers.
Plants kill animals by being poisonous, and sometimes by eating as in the case of the pitcher plant. Animals kill plants by eating, and sometimes by poisoning, like when dog pee kills the grass.
Everything kills everything else. Living things are merely temporary storage for genetic information. The genetic information that increase's its number of redundant backups faster then the number of instance failures wins.
I can't think of any other species off-hand that has a developed sense of general ethics. We're not discussing how the world is. It is how it is.
However, if you're of the opinion that is unethical to cause more suffering and that killing other beings just to ensure your own survival then plants having sentience is a pickle.
Something has to give. You have to give in to the circle of life and acknowledge that your survival will bring in some measure of suffering to other beings. Or sacrifice yourself since there is no way to eat ethically by your standards.
Obviously, the vast majority of people will choose survival. But now they have to draw a line. What's friend and what's food? And once you draw that line, you have to defend that choice. You can't just say "because it's X", you have to explain why it is so.
I mean, learning all of this has just made me more of a "speciesist". I don't believe there is any way to resolve the conflict.
But I think we need to go on what we know so far, i.e. look at evidence from the scientific community and use our own observations.
You probably thought I put too much emphasis on 'experience pain like we do'.
What I meant was that - I'm borrowing words from C. Sagan - "They (animals) are too much like us". I didn't mean that they exactly experience pain like we do - maybe they do, maybe they don't. But I'm certain animals trapped in the large scale meat industry do suffer.
There have been numerous studies that show that animals feel pain, they think & feel.
And then there are our own observations - if you were growing up with pets - you'll know that animals have their own personality and do whimper and scream out when they are hurt and they do avoid any sources of pain if they can. Same for farm animals.
I think your questions already contains an answer. The line you're talking about or the circle of protection is growing.
There was a time were we exploited and caused enormous suffering towards other human beings on a large scale. We don't do that anymore and have laws that protect against that. We also think that cruetly towards animals is bad and have laws against that. Just those laws don't extend torwards farm animals - I'm sure that time will also come - more and more people are waking up and agree that the way we treat farm animals is just perverted and sick (see Earthlings https://vimeo.com/209647801).
And if we find evidence in the future that there are other ways to be sentient like you hinted at, we will also expand our circle of protection (compassion) to those life-forms.
Because in many cases it is necessary for the survival of that very species, and in most cases for the health of the ecosystems they inhabit? We have fundamentally altered nature to suit ourselves, there are consequences for that.
Food shortage. Cull the older and least fit individuals, and the younger ones can stay healthy through the shortage and then reproduce more readily after it is over.
Overpopulation. If the species is too successful, it may overgraze its environment and cause its food species to crash, leading to mass starvation of both the subject species and any other species that eat the same things, or anything the subject species begins to eat because its preferred food is scarce. This is the usual reason why deer herd management issues extra doe tags for a hunting season.
Basically every animal domesticated for food is a separate species from it's wild counterpart. In some cases (aurochs) the wild predecessor is deceased. These species survival 'strategy' is to be useful to humans as food, as much as it is a lions to hunt things. If we suddenly stopped breeding these animals then they would probably die out.
I don’t think animals care about dying out. The auroch does not care about cows and pigs.
Focus instead on how they live. When we put pigs cages and separate them from their families are we doing it to preserve the species? What is the point of a life of suffering?
It's better to have as wide a diversity of animals and plants as possible. It doesn't matter what the animals care about, which is probably food a sex, though I think if they had the capacity they would prefer to not die out.
When a species dies out the world loses something. We should focus on keeping as many as possible. "What is the point of a life of suffering?" All life has suffering, I think that animals in captivity have a great deal less suffering than many wild animals do. Old animals don't have the luxury of a quick relatively painless death, but get old and starve or killed [1].
No we're not keeping animals (except in good zoos) for the sake of keeping a species going. But it is a side effect that has kept some species going.
> I think that animals in captivity have a great deal less suffering than many wild animals do
Do you have any sources that back up this claim?
So do you really think that pigs in factory farms (not 'happy' farms you see in childrens books) for example have a better life than their free wild counter parts?
Please read the description below of what that factory farm life is [0]. Pigs are very smart and they literally go insane in factory farms.
How does us breeding these various farm animals in the millions with mutuation (bigger muscles for more meat etc) which couldn't survive in the wild add to a diversity of animals?
Furthermore factory farming is destroying our environment based on a study by the UN [1].
There is no good reason to breed and kill Billions of farm animals anymore for food, when we have better alternatives that are less destructive on so many levels (environment, human and animal).
[0] Pigs used for pork
The majority of breeding sows spend nearly the entirety of each pregnancy confined to a gestation crate, which is only slightly larger than their body, making it impossible for them to lie down comfortably or even turn around.
Gestation crate floors are usually made of slats, which allow manure to fall through, meaning that sows live directly above their own waste. This design exposes sows to high levels of ammonia, and respiratory disease is common in confined sows.
Standing on the hard, unnatural slatted flooring of a gestation crate takes a toll on pigs’ feet, causing excessive foot injuries, damage to joints, and even lameness.
The intense boredom and frustration pigs suffer in gestation crates have been blamed by researchers for abnormal, neurotic behaviors confined pigs sometimes exhibit, like repetitively biting at the bars of the gestation crate or chewing with an empty mouth. These behaviors can lead to additional suffering by causing sores and mouth damage.
I was thinking about the actual death of the animal. I think a quick slit of the throat and bleed out is probably better than starving to death or being literally ripped to pieces.
" (not 'happy' farms you see in childrens books) "
I would also like to point out that these don't just exist in children's books, but are the common way of rearing animals in many parts of the world (I grew up in a agricultural area with cows, deer and sheep, in the UK and aside for in winter they had a large area of grassy fields to live in. So I can't speak about pig farms, but I'm fairly sure that the conditions you describe are illegal here and in the rest of Europe) Horrific conditions do not have to be a norm.
Respect to you if you are raising your own animals and treat them well and give them a quick death. It's not easy, but I think that is what it should take when someone wants to eat meat vs going to the store and buying a pack of meat, which is completely disassociated from the animal itself. Or if you make an effort to buy from local farmers where you know the animals had a good life.
And yes I know the happy farms do exist, i.e. farms where the farmer truly cares about the animals and where the animal has to only suffer at the end. But those farms are rare and meat from those farms are expensive and we can't feed the world with this.
The reality is when you need to breed Billions of animals a year - you just don't have time for animal welfare for most of those animals.
I think in the UK alone 8Billion animals are killed each year - according to Viva [0]. I can't even comprehend that number.
There are factory farms in the EU too - and compassionate world farming is trying to campaign for better treatment for these animals [1]
Ah, what you say makes sense, (although the survival strategy metaphor is somewhat grotesque) I was mainly puzzled by the context, which seemed to be
Q. Why kill other sentient beings at all
A. Because in many cases it is necessary for the survival of the species.
i.e. offering "help them survive" as a reason to kill them.
ps Some of the other descendant comments are very troubling, and remind me of what I heard a young female environmentalist say at a political meeting once, that "individual animals don't matter, only species matter." (i.e. the loss/death/killing of 1 animal meant nothing, but the extinction of a species meant a lot) Which was one of the most horrific things I'd ever heard, maybe because coming from an environmentalist, who are supposed to be the good guys. I guess it was the "animals only have value as things exploitable by humans" element to what she said, of which she seemed unaware. As if humans are the only life form with any value! Human, all too human.
I largely agree with her. An individual animal doesn't matter to me (not from a "hey, lets go kill things and make them suffer" perspective, but "hey, life has a bunch of bad bits, things are gonna die and suffer, thats just life" see that lion thing I posted a bit further down).
You can absolutely be an environmentalist and not think that the lives of individual animals matters. I'm reminded of nature documentaries that will sit and watch an animal starve, because that's the natural thing and they are not there the interfere. I don't think this viewpoint is horrific.
"maybe because coming from an environmentalist, who are supposed to be the good guys" I think you should look at why you think these people are the "good guys". By the sounds of it, sorry if i'm wrong, but your thoughts on environmentalism comes from a place of empathy. You look at individual animals and empathise with there suffering. And by the sounds of it, you expect everyone else who considers themselves an environmentalist (which I also would say I was), to also come from this place of empathy. However not everyone does, and this isn't horrific, people just have different priorities.
I don't know about what else she said, but "animals only have value as things exploitable by humans" doesn't necessarily follow from: 'species matter individual animals don't'. Personally I think animals have a value completely apart from people and are even more valuable when they have no interaction with humans at all.
I've read, but not verified, claims that many farm animals would be extinct or close to extinction if we didn't actively maintain their population (for purpose of slaughter), as we've taken over their natural habitats.
Bison's probably the best example I can think of regarding an animal, whose population recovery has hugely been driven by that purpose.
There are small select herds of wild bison in protected areas, and I imagine that would be the case even without ranching. But these bison herds are often carefully managed, as else wise the herd population would start to conflict with ranchers and farmers surrounding the protected areas. (This is the case with the Yellowstone bison herd for instance -- https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-science-behind-yellowstones... )
The bison population has grown from near extinction in the early 20th century to roughly half a million today. About 96% of these half a million bison are bred for consumption by humans. ( http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-great-a... )
... taken over their natural habitats, and then bred them into distorted shapes that would not survive in the wild. Chickens, for example, have been cross-bred so that their breasts are freakishly huge compared to their ancestors ... some chickens have a harder time walking upright due to this. We couldn't send these animals back into the wild because their current genes didn't evolve / adapt in the wild in the first place.
Point taken. However, I'm unaware of anything other than "brain size vs body size" measurements having ever been used even pseudo-scientifically to come up with a comparison here.
So, while the intuition line was a poor choice of embellishment, I still don't buy the assertion, and would love to see it backed up.
> Why isn't it morally equivalent to kill 10 pigs who could have collectively lived to be 200 years old for bacon and killing one whale who could have lived to be 200?
Sorry, but I don't see how the expected lifespan of a single individual is a determining factor in the moral calculus of what humans should or shouldn't kill.
I never said we should kill pigs rather than whales.
From Wild Kratts (apologies for quoting kids programs but it's what comes to mind):
> there's no bad guys just predators and prey.
My rather simplistic logic is that humans are predators and I have nothing particularly against that. For 100,000+ years we were hunter-gatherers and very good at it. Humans would kill animals because they wanted the food. Lions kill whatever they can for food, so did we.
From Jared Diamond's book "Collapse", the inuit survived because they would kill whales and seals and keep the blubber for months until it was in a putrid but still edible state and managed to outlast other humans.
However I have two issues:
1. We now have very good farming methods that allow us to avoid eating meat
2. We completely abstract the killing of animals to factories and trawlers and wrap it up in economics and talk about 'efficiency' of killing and wanting our meat as cheap as possible
In some ways I mind less about the killing of whales because it's really hard to kill whales and they live a free life until they are killed. Factory farming of pigs, lambs, chickens and cows seems much more cruel.
So where as I understand the rather animalistic nature of humans, I wish we would use our intellect to stop the cruelty.
> Where do we get this sense of superiority?
There was a recent article on HN [1] about the history of vegetarianism [0], there it talks about that Plato and Aristotle reasoned that humans were the only creatures with immortal souls (Pythagoras had argued earlier that animals did have souls) and the universe was for human use to do as they please. Further they argued that there was a hierarchy of beings with plants and animals at the bottom, and they didn't deserve justice because they couldn't reason.
Edit: the words of Plato and Aristotle remind me of George Orwell's pigs in Animal Farm, where as Pythagoras had argued that all animals had souls and so were to some extent equal, Plato and Aristotle came back saying that humans have immortal souls or equivalently "some are more equal than others".
What does age have to do with anything? By that logic we should only hunt animals with short life spans.
Hunting is a scared act, and killing an animal should never be taken lightly. However, the average life span of on animal shouldn't have any bearing on the matter.
Or in the case of whaling and industrial scale fishing, a floating factory that can kill and process dozens of whales (using exploding harpoons) and/or tens of thousands of fish over the span of a few months.
> How can any human come up with the idea of hunting creatures that are 200 years old?
What does age have to do with anything? If people are hungry, they will hunt. If there are resources that we need, we'll use it.
Trees grow for thousands of years, but I bet you have a home and furniture made of wood. Lobsters can live up to 100 years. People love lobster.
> Where do we get this sense of superiority?
Our intelligence and the fact that we are at the top of the food chain? Killer whales hunt and kill whales. Where do killer whales get their sense of superiority?
In the modern day though, there's better sources of food than whales. IIRC only Japan still does it, and they do it for either specialist food or medicinal use. China and their unscientific medicine practices are one reason why there's still a lot of poaching going on.
> In the modern day though, there's better sources of food than whales.
That's why there is far less whaling today.
> IIRC only Japan still does it
Nope. We do it in the US ( it's now mostly our inuits). Norway, Iceland. Greenland. Russia. But considering how invested you seem on this issue, you probably knew that already.
most of the replies to this comment are terrifying. the gist amounts to, "who cares"? we're talking about respect for life, respect for ancient life. do you think these old creatures have nothing to teach us? who cares if they are all gone? what do you people care about then? oh yeah, getting rich making apps
It seems that whale longevity is only a recent discovery. The whale itself was a valuable resource of meat and oil.
The sperm whale's oil was used for lighting, and then used for automatic transmissions through the 1960s. Until the 1970s, there was no good synthetic replacement for whale oil.
Sometimes I am amazed that a single pineapple takes 2 years or more to grow, yet it is so inexpensive, and it is eaten with hardly a care that years have gone into its making.
You can add sturgeon (source of caviar, among other things) to that list. Living fossils, been around 130+M years. Lake Sturgeon[1] reach sexual maturity at ~25 yrs, only reproduce once every 4-6 yrs, and can live 150+ yrs.
They're also a popular game fish, and traditional spearfishing target of Native Americans.
The book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies" (phew, long name!) is a fascinating read about how the lifespan of whales, humans and shrews are connected and all mammals are basically the same type of system only scaled to various degrees. Example: the number of heartbeats during the full lifespan of a whale and a shrew is more or less the same. Bigger body => longer lifespan.
It then goes on to analyse how cities and companies grow using the same system thinking. Why do cities survive for centuries while companies typically go under after a few decades?
There's a pretty cool exception to this. A lot of bats tend to have long lifespans. Many microbats can live 25-30 years on average but, as the name implies, are fairly tiny. The species I worked with all weighed under 20 grams.
The leading theory is that because of their hibernation, their heart rate slows down and their lifespan is longer but the number of heart beats still seems to average out when compared to other species with faster or slower heart rates.
> The leading theory is that because of their hibernation
So, are they an exception because other hibernating species don't seem to show this? I would expect if it's hibernation, we should see it pretty easily in species that hibernate for winter regularly, like some bears. Or maybe chipmunks or squirrels, if those are easier, but I'm not sure the hibernation is quite the same, and whether that might affect it.
I'm not sure entirely the details, but bat hibernation is different than bear hibernation. They don't store fat. The only mechanism they have to survive while hibernating is lowering body temperature and heart rate. It's actually not a true hibernation, they go into extended torpor, they still wake occasionally to drink and mate with sleeping bats. Bats also go into a daily torpor and another one in the latest part of the night.
Many bats are actually crepuscular and not nocturnal, meaning they're active from dusk until early night and late night until dawn. The rest of the time bats spend in that lowered heart rate and body temperature torpor state. This is why white nose syndrome is so destructive. It causes bats to wake up early from hibernation and they end up starving because they can't get food and they can't hibernate properly.
It was about 6 years ago I last worked with bats. That was the leading theory at the time. It may have changed, there's been an increase in bat research since then, but knowledge about bats is fairly scarce compared to other species. There just hasn't been a lot of work done in north america on then and there's a fair amount we really don't know. In Europe and especially England, there's been more research done but, the knowledge doesn't necessarily apply to species elsewhere. Bats are really cool they're distinct than most other small mammals. They're in an order all by themselves and microbats are a huge sub-order with thousands of species all over the world.
105 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadBut to have two centuries of children and companions ... well that's just amazing.
(On the other hand the whales are probably thinking something like "you harpoon wielding ape bastards, wait till our spaceship returns we'll have you then")
Which is the best kind of correct...
No, it doesn't, at least not as hydrogen. Some hydrogen atoms are produced by neutron decay.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark
I don't understand what we humans do sometimes. We aren't the greatest.
"The authors further concluded that the species reaches sexual maturity at about 150 years of age"
I woke up this morning with my every thought invaded by those horrific parasites the vast majority of Greenland sharks have hanging from both eyes like macabre baggage tags that feed on the surface of their eyes, blinding them..
"Yes, whale meat. We had it during the war and you didn't know if you were eating meaty fish or fishy meat."
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/vintage-photos-of-lumb...
Clearly many people believe they are superior to all other species, which may or may not be a good thing depending on how human centric you are.
Faced with the choice while driving to swerve to kill a squirrel or not swerve and kill a child, there is only one permissible answer, or else we're endorsing sociopathy.
I don't see how the expected lifespan of a single individual is a determining factor in the moral calculus of what humans should or shouldn't kill.
Why isn't it morally equivalent to kill 10 pigs who could have collectively lived to be 200 years old for bacon and killing one whale who could have lived to be 200?
There are subtle differences between pigs' and whales' situations: most pigs that are slaughtered are bred as farm animals, not wild ones. So getting another pig of similar characteristics is trivial in effort (time, money, work). You are also not really endangering the species.
All whales that are hunted are wild. Getting another individual with the same characteristics as the one you just killed takes a prohibitive amount of anything so nobody is doing it. Their numbers are also dwindling.
Yes, we tend to assign greater value to older things. Which is why it's slightly more out of reach to chop down Sequoioideae compared to say your average bamboo trees. Both being plants to which we assign no intelligence or actual affection. It's purely down to replaceability in terms of the most costly resource, in this case time.
Does that mean that if we breed humans for slavery this would be OK?
So no.
Do you eat any plants or animals? Do you have sexual relations with other humans? You probably don't eat humans or sleep with animals so I assume it's clear that extrapolation doesn't always work.
With the advent of modern human rights all humans ended up being officially considered above animals. They are treated according to a different set of rules. Some of these rules may extend to animals to a lesser degree (the humane treatment, not to be confused with human treatment).
If people consider themselves above animals they should say so honestly and not make up an argument that doesn't make sense.
1) If you raise a pig for slaughter then human society considers it's acceptable to kill it. If it wasn't you wouldn't raise it at all would you? If you raise it as a pet then it's likely unacceptable to slaughter it.
2) People do consider themselves above animals and they are very open and vocal about this. This is a shock to you? You could have ended up being someone's pet otherwise.
3) The argument doesn't make sense because you didn't bother processing it. Or possibly even reading it. Or because you think your personal preferences should be laws of society or nature.
Do I need to go on? Your moral issues with slaughtering pigs apply to you. Refuting my argument based on your personal choices is a bit presumptuous. Society as a whole tends to lean the other way.
I do understand what you're saying. I just disagreed providing arguments that are valid for society as a whole while you only provided your personal preference. That's not an argument. I am willing to revisit it when this is no longer the case and society or law no longer consider this acceptable.
I personally consider sacrificing animals that are bred for this purpose as acceptable. I also consider hunting wild animals as acceptable as long as it's sustainable and the individuals can be easily replaced by "equivalent" ones maintaining a natural-like balance. I might have objections to the way animals are raised or killed but this is a different topic. So where exactly is your argument?
If I considered the name "max" insulting to me and immoral would you change yours? Or would you say "society accepts it and it's legal so I'll keep it"?
That's all. I made no judgement on killing animals.
The reasoning that breeding something for slaughter makes it more OK to kill it opens a path to arguing that breeding humans for slavery is different from enslaving "wild" humans. That's actually line a lot of slaveholders used. They argued that their slaves are too dumb to live on their own and have to be kept in slavery in order to survive.
Perfectly correct. So are human rights and all our laws. Does the fact they are arbitrary discredit them? Does it make my argument wrong?
> They are the same ethically in my view
You're getting close. In someone else's view not eating meat is dumb. Does that make his argument correct?
> opens a path to arguing that breeding humans
No it doesn't. It opens the path to exaggerating. Cutting a tree in your yard opens the path to arguing that you should be allowed to cut the Amazon rain forest?
> That's actually line a lot of slaveholders used
And it was wrong. By today's standards. Judging people with the power of hindsight is a grave mistake. Whatever you do today will be incompatible with values of generations to come and you will be judged. Should people start judging you now according to some possible rules of tomorrow? Let things come when they may.
What I said is not intrinsically correct and it will never be. It's correct only in the context of today's society and laws. When they change the value of my argument changes. Society considers breeding pigs for slaughter acceptable today. Hunting whales not so much. Move to Japan and you might get a different answer.
And regardless, it does not change the fact that there is a difference between uncontrolled killing of wild animals and controlled killing of farmed animals. Regardless of how you feel about this, there is a difference. Which was the crux of the argument.
Why kill other sentient beings at all when it's not necessary anymore for our survival?
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piHkfmeU7Wo
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHRbnNwIg1g
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...
What if survival depends on suffering to some degree?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer...
I should have phrased the question slightly differently.
It's more around whether animals (e.g. vertebrates) can suffer and experience pain like we do.
The answer is yes - that's why we use animals in pain research and that's why a pig or cow screams when it's cut with a knife for example.
Even fish feel pain [0].
Plants react to stimuli - but plants don't have a nervous system, they don't have nociceptors (neurons responding to life threatening signals) to experience and feel pain, they don't have any means to 'escape pain', e.g. running away from danger.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fish-feel-pain...
For instance, you make a point of specifying you're considering whether things can suffer and experience pain like we do.
Why is that the delineating factor here? We don't really understand intelligence of consciousness and we've been basing our measures of both on the only instance where we're relatively confident exists. We think, therefore we are.
But what if we're wrong. What if our way isn't the only way to be intelligent, to be sentient. Why must they experience pain the way we do in order to be afforded protection? If we're just privileging our type of sentience over others, we're just drawing a different line. And always when someone draws a line, I ask, why there?
From there on it's a tough one though...
These are hard questions, I don't expect anyone to have the answers.
Everything kills everything else. Living things are merely temporary storage for genetic information. The genetic information that increase's its number of redundant backups faster then the number of instance failures wins.
However, if you're of the opinion that is unethical to cause more suffering and that killing other beings just to ensure your own survival then plants having sentience is a pickle.
Something has to give. You have to give in to the circle of life and acknowledge that your survival will bring in some measure of suffering to other beings. Or sacrifice yourself since there is no way to eat ethically by your standards.
Obviously, the vast majority of people will choose survival. But now they have to draw a line. What's friend and what's food? And once you draw that line, you have to defend that choice. You can't just say "because it's X", you have to explain why it is so.
I mean, learning all of this has just made me more of a "speciesist". I don't believe there is any way to resolve the conflict.
But I think we need to go on what we know so far, i.e. look at evidence from the scientific community and use our own observations.
You probably thought I put too much emphasis on 'experience pain like we do'.
What I meant was that - I'm borrowing words from C. Sagan - "They (animals) are too much like us". I didn't mean that they exactly experience pain like we do - maybe they do, maybe they don't. But I'm certain animals trapped in the large scale meat industry do suffer.
There have been numerous studies that show that animals feel pain, they think & feel.
And then there are our own observations - if you were growing up with pets - you'll know that animals have their own personality and do whimper and scream out when they are hurt and they do avoid any sources of pain if they can. Same for farm animals.
I think your questions already contains an answer. The line you're talking about or the circle of protection is growing.
There was a time were we exploited and caused enormous suffering towards other human beings on a large scale. We don't do that anymore and have laws that protect against that. We also think that cruetly towards animals is bad and have laws against that. Just those laws don't extend torwards farm animals - I'm sure that time will also come - more and more people are waking up and agree that the way we treat farm animals is just perverted and sick (see Earthlings https://vimeo.com/209647801).
And if we find evidence in the future that there are other ways to be sentient like you hinted at, we will also expand our circle of protection (compassion) to those life-forms.
Edit: typos
Such as?
Overpopulation. If the species is too successful, it may overgraze its environment and cause its food species to crash, leading to mass starvation of both the subject species and any other species that eat the same things, or anything the subject species begins to eat because its preferred food is scarce. This is the usual reason why deer herd management issues extra doe tags for a hunting season.
Basically every animal domesticated for food is a separate species from it's wild counterpart. In some cases (aurochs) the wild predecessor is deceased. These species survival 'strategy' is to be useful to humans as food, as much as it is a lions to hunt things. If we suddenly stopped breeding these animals then they would probably die out.
Focus instead on how they live. When we put pigs cages and separate them from their families are we doing it to preserve the species? What is the point of a life of suffering?
When a species dies out the world loses something. We should focus on keeping as many as possible. "What is the point of a life of suffering?" All life has suffering, I think that animals in captivity have a great deal less suffering than many wild animals do. Old animals don't have the luxury of a quick relatively painless death, but get old and starve or killed [1].
No we're not keeping animals (except in good zoos) for the sake of keeping a species going. But it is a side effect that has kept some species going.
[1] This is a great story of a pride of lions that lived very brutal lives. https://steemit.com/writing/@ollie7/band-of-brothers-the-leg...
Do you have any sources that back up this claim?
So do you really think that pigs in factory farms (not 'happy' farms you see in childrens books) for example have a better life than their free wild counter parts?
Please read the description below of what that factory farm life is [0]. Pigs are very smart and they literally go insane in factory farms.
How does us breeding these various farm animals in the millions with mutuation (bigger muscles for more meat etc) which couldn't survive in the wild add to a diversity of animals?
Furthermore factory farming is destroying our environment based on a study by the UN [1].
There is no good reason to breed and kill Billions of farm animals anymore for food, when we have better alternatives that are less destructive on so many levels (environment, human and animal).
[0] Pigs used for pork
The majority of breeding sows spend nearly the entirety of each pregnancy confined to a gestation crate, which is only slightly larger than their body, making it impossible for them to lie down comfortably or even turn around.
Gestation crate floors are usually made of slats, which allow manure to fall through, meaning that sows live directly above their own waste. This design exposes sows to high levels of ammonia, and respiratory disease is common in confined sows.
Standing on the hard, unnatural slatted flooring of a gestation crate takes a toll on pigs’ feet, causing excessive foot injuries, damage to joints, and even lameness.
The intense boredom and frustration pigs suffer in gestation crates have been blamed by researchers for abnormal, neurotic behaviors confined pigs sometimes exhibit, like repetitively biting at the bars of the gestation crate or chewing with an empty mouth. These behaviors can lead to additional suffering by causing sores and mouth damage.
Source: https://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/pigs-use...
[1] http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/dtix1262xpa-prior...
I was thinking about the actual death of the animal. I think a quick slit of the throat and bleed out is probably better than starving to death or being literally ripped to pieces.
" (not 'happy' farms you see in childrens books) " I would also like to point out that these don't just exist in children's books, but are the common way of rearing animals in many parts of the world (I grew up in a agricultural area with cows, deer and sheep, in the UK and aside for in winter they had a large area of grassy fields to live in. So I can't speak about pig farms, but I'm fairly sure that the conditions you describe are illegal here and in the rest of Europe) Horrific conditions do not have to be a norm.
And yes I know the happy farms do exist, i.e. farms where the farmer truly cares about the animals and where the animal has to only suffer at the end. But those farms are rare and meat from those farms are expensive and we can't feed the world with this.
The reality is when you need to breed Billions of animals a year - you just don't have time for animal welfare for most of those animals.
I think in the UK alone 8Billion animals are killed each year - according to Viva [0]. I can't even comprehend that number.
There are factory farms in the EU too - and compassionate world farming is trying to campaign for better treatment for these animals [1]
Baby steps...
[0]https://www.viva.org.uk/what-we-do/slaughter/slaughter-farme.... [1]https://www.ciwf.org.uk/
Edit: typos
Q. Why kill other sentient beings at all A. Because in many cases it is necessary for the survival of the species.
i.e. offering "help them survive" as a reason to kill them.
ps Some of the other descendant comments are very troubling, and remind me of what I heard a young female environmentalist say at a political meeting once, that "individual animals don't matter, only species matter." (i.e. the loss/death/killing of 1 animal meant nothing, but the extinction of a species meant a lot) Which was one of the most horrific things I'd ever heard, maybe because coming from an environmentalist, who are supposed to be the good guys. I guess it was the "animals only have value as things exploitable by humans" element to what she said, of which she seemed unaware. As if humans are the only life form with any value! Human, all too human.
You can absolutely be an environmentalist and not think that the lives of individual animals matters. I'm reminded of nature documentaries that will sit and watch an animal starve, because that's the natural thing and they are not there the interfere. I don't think this viewpoint is horrific.
"maybe because coming from an environmentalist, who are supposed to be the good guys" I think you should look at why you think these people are the "good guys". By the sounds of it, sorry if i'm wrong, but your thoughts on environmentalism comes from a place of empathy. You look at individual animals and empathise with there suffering. And by the sounds of it, you expect everyone else who considers themselves an environmentalist (which I also would say I was), to also come from this place of empathy. However not everyone does, and this isn't horrific, people just have different priorities.
I don't know about what else she said, but "animals only have value as things exploitable by humans" doesn't necessarily follow from: 'species matter individual animals don't'. Personally I think animals have a value completely apart from people and are even more valuable when they have no interaction with humans at all.
There are small select herds of wild bison in protected areas, and I imagine that would be the case even without ranching. But these bison herds are often carefully managed, as else wise the herd population would start to conflict with ranchers and farmers surrounding the protected areas. (This is the case with the Yellowstone bison herd for instance -- https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-science-behind-yellowstones... )
The bison population has grown from near extinction in the early 20th century to roughly half a million today. About 96% of these half a million bison are bred for consumption by humans. ( http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-great-a... )
Any accounts in particular?
Intuition aside, I find it hard to imagine anybody has a reliable measure of the intelligence of whales.
So, while the intuition line was a poor choice of embellishment, I still don't buy the assertion, and would love to see it backed up.
Sorry, but I don't see how the expected lifespan of a single individual is a determining factor in the moral calculus of what humans should or shouldn't kill.
I never said we should kill pigs rather than whales.
> there's no bad guys just predators and prey.
My rather simplistic logic is that humans are predators and I have nothing particularly against that. For 100,000+ years we were hunter-gatherers and very good at it. Humans would kill animals because they wanted the food. Lions kill whatever they can for food, so did we.
From Jared Diamond's book "Collapse", the inuit survived because they would kill whales and seals and keep the blubber for months until it was in a putrid but still edible state and managed to outlast other humans.
However I have two issues:
1. We now have very good farming methods that allow us to avoid eating meat
2. We completely abstract the killing of animals to factories and trawlers and wrap it up in economics and talk about 'efficiency' of killing and wanting our meat as cheap as possible
In some ways I mind less about the killing of whales because it's really hard to kill whales and they live a free life until they are killed. Factory farming of pigs, lambs, chickens and cows seems much more cruel.
So where as I understand the rather animalistic nature of humans, I wish we would use our intellect to stop the cruelty.
> Where do we get this sense of superiority?
There was a recent article on HN [1] about the history of vegetarianism [0], there it talks about that Plato and Aristotle reasoned that humans were the only creatures with immortal souls (Pythagoras had argued earlier that animals did have souls) and the universe was for human use to do as they please. Further they argued that there was a hierarchy of beings with plants and animals at the bottom, and they didn't deserve justice because they couldn't reason.
Edit: the words of Plato and Aristotle remind me of George Orwell's pigs in Animal Farm, where as Pythagoras had argued that all animals had souls and so were to some extent equal, Plato and Aristotle came back saying that humans have immortal souls or equivalently "some are more equal than others".
[0]: http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2010/08/the-hid...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807278
Hunting is a scared act, and killing an animal should never be taken lightly. However, the average life span of on animal shouldn't have any bearing on the matter.
pfft In practice its a bunch of drunk fat guys sitting in a blind shooting deer at the deer feeder with a gun.
True. Otherwise we’d all be eating veal, and I don’t see that happening ... ever!
What does age have to do with anything? If people are hungry, they will hunt. If there are resources that we need, we'll use it.
Trees grow for thousands of years, but I bet you have a home and furniture made of wood. Lobsters can live up to 100 years. People love lobster.
> Where do we get this sense of superiority?
Our intelligence and the fact that we are at the top of the food chain? Killer whales hunt and kill whales. Where do killer whales get their sense of superiority?
That's why there is far less whaling today.
> IIRC only Japan still does it
Nope. We do it in the US ( it's now mostly our inuits). Norway, Iceland. Greenland. Russia. But considering how invested you seem on this issue, you probably knew that already.
The sperm whale's oil was used for lighting, and then used for automatic transmissions through the 1960s. Until the 1970s, there was no good synthetic replacement for whale oil.
They're also a popular game fish, and traditional spearfishing target of Native Americans.
[1] https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/fishing/sturgeon/lakeSturgeonLifeCy...
It then goes on to analyse how cities and companies grow using the same system thinking. Why do cities survive for centuries while companies typically go under after a few decades?
Highly recommended.
The leading theory is that because of their hibernation, their heart rate slows down and their lifespan is longer but the number of heart beats still seems to average out when compared to other species with faster or slower heart rates.
So, are they an exception because other hibernating species don't seem to show this? I would expect if it's hibernation, we should see it pretty easily in species that hibernate for winter regularly, like some bears. Or maybe chipmunks or squirrels, if those are easier, but I'm not sure the hibernation is quite the same, and whether that might affect it.
Many bats are actually crepuscular and not nocturnal, meaning they're active from dusk until early night and late night until dawn. The rest of the time bats spend in that lowered heart rate and body temperature torpor state. This is why white nose syndrome is so destructive. It causes bats to wake up early from hibernation and they end up starving because they can't get food and they can't hibernate properly.
It was about 6 years ago I last worked with bats. That was the leading theory at the time. It may have changed, there's been an increase in bat research since then, but knowledge about bats is fairly scarce compared to other species. There just hasn't been a lot of work done in north america on then and there's a fair amount we really don't know. In Europe and especially England, there's been more research done but, the knowledge doesn't necessarily apply to species elsewhere. Bats are really cool they're distinct than most other small mammals. They're in an order all by themselves and microbats are a huge sub-order with thousands of species all over the world.
Key word: "mammals".