I keep getting surprised at the inability (refusal) of humans that we are not the only intelligent (and emotional) life form on this planet. It is extremely annoying.
You're assuming it (edit: non-emotional intelligence) is one single unified thing. I'd say there are many kinds of intelligence, and many things that feed into intelligence that, if modified, could affect it (very simple example, anxious people may freeze up during exams which makes them look less good).
I'm more intelligent than someone with Downs Syndrome, but that doesn't mean their life is less valuable does it? Let me guess: they get a pass because they are human. That's what it comes down to really: things that are like me deserve rights and respect and things that aren't don't. That all humans happen to fit into the "like me" category is a relatively recent concept.
They get a pass because it makes our rules simpler and they are so few. You'd see us quickly value their lives less if there were billions of people with Downs Syndrome, but currently they aren't a problem so it is fine.
Valuable in what sense? People talk about value like there is some absolute objective value. There's not. Things hold different values to different people and even the same people in different circumstances.
> I'm more intelligent than someone with Downs Syndrome, but that doesn't mean their life is less valuable does it?
Doesn’t it? It’s something we don’t say, because it’s horrendously impolite, and I wouldn’t say it myself outside the context of this conversation, but yes, the life of an intelligent person is worth less than that of a person with Down’s syndrome.
Don’t take my word for it though, look at revealed preferences. How many parents abort their unborn Down’s Syndrome babies?
>It’s something we don’t say, because it’s horrendously impolite, and I wouldn’t say it myself outside the context of this conversation, but yes, the life of an intelligent person is worth less than that of a person with Down’s syndrome.
That is controversial but probably not in the way that you originally meant.
You've really got to define "intelligence" here. I imagine one may point to all the technology we have developed and say "Look how intelligent humans are". At the same time, that very technology is causing a climate crisis that threatens our species. So, how smart are we really?
You want to look at smart, look at house cats. They've got it figured out.
I think it's a subconscious act of self-preservation. Truly accepting the sentience of animals would be conferring upon them a much more expansive (and expensive) set of rights, which in turn would make the our society seem all the more immoral through how we treat other species. Too much cognitive dissonance.
We have been able to teach them to do trivial tricks on demand, but we can't teach them to be productive members of society. We haven't even been able to teach a single other species to do factory work, which is the simplest work imaginable for humans.
Dogsledding? Horse riding? People routinely being carried by their horse to help after being incapacitated. Dogs herding all sorts of livestock. I read recently of tool use outside of the apes. I’ve seen blue jays bury and hide things and later recollect. The list goes on and with better examples. Service dogs definitely add value to society.
Animals works well as tools, but they don't work independently. In all of the situations you described there are humans present to direct the work and life of the animal, something you don't need with humans. I'm not sure why we can't get them to work independently, I guess they lack the attention span or the ability to associate the work with the rewards.
I suppose the one sort of exception to this would be barn cats who sort of self domesticated themselves and became valued members of households by keeping rodents at bay.
It wasn't clear but did the Baboon ever do the work without James being there? I agree it is impressive, but if the monkey couldn't man the position on its own, like doing the work and only getting the beer and pay once a week and no other rewards, then I don't think it counts.
I'm not sure it matters if whether James was there or not so long as the Baboon was capable of performing the tasks without instruction from James which multiple sources appear to imply.
I seriously disagree that being able to take part in the human production chain or being a member of human society is the only way to determine if a creature is smart.
Sorry for taking your time as a moderator, but given that quite a few top level comments and the parent one for mine imply plays around morale by basically any person eating meat, I felt that point of view was underrepresented.
By no means this was also a personal attack against anyone having enought intelligence to read it.
We have a tendency to measure intelligence as the ability to communicate well with humans. Our pets are "smart" because they have been practicing for millennia. Our children are smart when they show empathy and strong verbal skills. I'm not sure that we are equipped to measure intelligence in other animals, and I doubt we would even recognize intelligent alien life.
Wouldn't surprise me if this comment gets shadow-banned (i.e. grayed out or whatever its called) or lots of downvotes given how contentious this topic can be, but I think this is actually an important, non-negligible social factor in human decision making for a large portion of the globe. A central tenant of many organized religions is that humans were somehow "created" differently from animals - e.g. in the "image of god" or similar. It helps eschew that cognitive bias and assure the practitioners that they're in the right, given their (clearly limited) understanding of the situation.
It isn't that we don't believe animals are intelligent. It is that that doesn't define our behavior in the way you apparently to expect it to.
Humans (on the whole) aren't even particularly good to other humans, yet some people seem to have the expectation that humans be particularly good to animals.
When I worked in Central Illinois recently, the home my wife and I rented bordered a field where young cows were raised. The small cows seemed to play some sort of game, running around each other like run after the leader. We thought they were playing. Later my wife found stuff on the web about cows being given beach balls to play with and with each other. Uncomfortable truth for people who selfishly help environmentally destroy our planet with their meat addictions? I would say yes.
My small Meyers Parrot similarly plays games, remembers things for months but does eventually seem to forget things he has learned. His neocortex is probably only one square inch.
My personal belief is that in life in the universe (with about 400 billion galaxies times about 100 billion stars per galaxy) is wide spread, if rare. I think there is also some pressure for life to develop different types of intelligence based on their biology and environment.
Anyway, I am in strong agreement with the people here saying that it is difficult to recognize non-human intelligence as intelligence.
> Later my wife found stuff on the web about cows being given beach balls to play with and with each other. Uncomfortable truth for people who selfishly help environmentally destroy our planet with their meat addictions?
I see it like this: Every time I pay for beef I create demand for more cows, thus I help fund little calves playing in the fields. Their lives might be a little shorter than usual, but I don't see why a short life wouldn't be worth living.
That reasoning works just as well for human labor, we could always spend more to help the poor but we don't. At some point idealism hits reality and you have to make a trade-off. And at least I think it is better to give them 1x than 0x. And if some laws comes in saying that meat needs to cost 2x to give them decent conditions then I'd still buy meat. We even already have many such laws, so I'm not sure why people say that we don't care.
I'm not talking about being nice out of naive altruism, I'm talking about the selfish desire for karmic serenity. Sure, we could always act like assholes, but for many of us it doesn't feel good. That was Adam Smith's first book, "theory of moral sentiments", if you are into that sort of thing.
My primary issue for paying premium for "the more ethical product" is that transparency is lacking, so I can't know whether I'd be only paying more to make myself feel better
Not GP, just answering for myself: I definitely would.
But I don't.
Because without making it a full time hobby, it's impossible for me to know that the money will actually be spent on the animals' lifestyle and not on the lifestyle of their owners. Or even more likely, that of some intermediary. Also I don't really know if 2x would even be enough to offset the extra cost given the high efficiency of factory farming. The only practical way is improving minimum standards through regulation. Sorry free market, you are too opaque.
You also pay for calves being torn from their mothers while the mother weeps for days. You pay for the calf to be slaughtered in the cheapest legal way, and often not even that. You pay for the times the cow doesn't die immediately, but sits in agony haven't done nothing to deserve this.
By the way, the agriculture industry loves that you believe those farms on the side of the road are where your meat comes from. Instead of the factories that actually produce the overwhelming majority of the meat in this country. You pay for them to be cramped up, tormented, and murdered.
Yea, the factory farms are definitely pretty awful.
I’m lucky enough to both cook at home, live in a big city with lots of good butchers, and have the resources to be able to afford to buy organic, pasture raised, and grass fed meats as much as possible.
It’s not always possible to avoid factory farmed meat products, I assume anything I eat out unless the restaurant is very upscale is going to be cheaper cuts, and my parents aren’t rich and don’t buy like that although I’ll try sometimes to grab a turkey for Thanksgiving for instance.
Interestingly, my girlfriend is from India and vegetarian as many Indian people I’ve met seem to be, she didn’t like the Impossible Burger at all, because it was too meat like, which is a bit funny to me.
Lab grown meats are showing promise for the future which is neat.
But yea, life is bloody, violent, and miserable a lot of times. We should be thankful to live in such relatively peaceful times. Seems like there were just millenia’s of near constant region conflicts, famines, plagues, epidemics, religious wars.
It hasn’t all gone away, but maybe we’re closer than we’ve ever been?
Do you get upset when a pack of wolves murders an elk? The elk seems to be suffering quite a bit of torment, and the killing process sometimes takes quite a while.
The wolf has little choice. You do but choose pain for others for hedonistic reasons. The agriculture industry is outrageously more cruel than a pack of wolves killing an elk. My expectation is for people to choose the path of least suffering to the extent they have the ability.
And to answer your question, I do get upset when I watch a pack of wolves kill an elk. Just because it happens doesn't mean I don't recognize and empathize with things in pain.
Yeah, the main poster doesn't get that the end result of veganism is the relegation of food species to very expensive, very impractical pets that many people won't see outside of youtube or in protected areas.
Well, they probably do understand that but reject that on the same grounds they reject raising humans just to harvest their organs when they're 10 years old no matter how great of a life they had up until they were lead into the operating room. And organs actually save lives.
It seems obviously unethical to me to raise a sentient organism (human or cow or cat) just to kill it prematurely for what's purely a luxury good for most people. Giving it a beach ball to play with seems completely ethically inconsequential.
I wonder how many people who assert how great of a life this must be, only to be killed at someone else's pleasure, would accept this life for themselves or their children or even their pets. And they certainly buy their meat from the supermarket where their meat never got to play with a beach ball, anyways. It's closer to ethics-at-a-distance fantasy and utopian thought experiments instead of anything grounded in the horrors of reality.
None of the logic in that argument would change if I replaced “beef” with “long pork”.
Personally, I don’t claim to know how much “personhood”[0] a cow has. It’s possible they don’t count and we shouldn’t care. But it’s only consistent to say “the meat industry is good for cows“ if you also say “the cannibalism industry is good for humans”.
Not that I’m doing a great job of being a morally consistent person myself, as I’m only vegetarian, and dairy is also really bad for bovine welfare, what with the forced pregnancies and slaughtered newborn calves.
[0] for lack of a better term — I know some people regard “person” as a synonym for “human”, but “self aware” and “sentient” are just as bad.
> people who selfishly help environmentally destroy our planet with their meat addictions? I would say yes.
You know you're not the only dog owner to say stuff like this, which I've always found odd. I think it's a kind of American exceptionalism writ large into vegetarian(?) thinking, where people see themselves as separate from the circle of life, instead of as someone in a relationship with nature. (Where they consider their pets "separate" and "part of nature" so its OK when they consume meat.)
Pretty much everyone in farming communities knows that animals are intelligent, its the people who are extremely separated that find the odd epiphany. I recommend talking to the farmers next time you're in Central Illinois.
I grew up around hunting and farms and also don't find it surprising that animals are fairly intelligent.
While your statement about pasturing being good for the environment is partially true in that there are some forms that do some good, by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.[1] A lot of this land would actually be used more efficiently for production of non-animal proteins like legumes, especially considering the land that is used to supplement pasturing through production of animal feed in most modern agriculture.
I just clicked his blog and searched "dog" to see if he had a dog.
> by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.
Your link puts it at 14.5% for the entire life-cycle, which makes it one of the... smallest causes for GHG emissions. It's the smallest versus any other sector in the graphs I can find[1] (vs Commercial and residential, Transportation, Industry, Electricity are all larger slices of pie). Why say its one of the largest?
It really depends on the land and the crops. Lots of land cannot support anything but pasture, and lots of places would be ecologically improved with more pasture. Killing (say) a cow is worse than the killing all animals + ecosystem of the field that row crops require (obviously complete habitat destruction for any field critters at harvest time, but also pesticides and herbicides and such side effects).
If you are worried about GHG issues, why not talk about food footprint or animal deaths per calories? Should you really be trucking in lettuce from Mexico and California if you live in New Hampshire, where I live? Should you be buying avocados if what grows here are animals? Should lettuce be grown at all?
It seems very... speculative that so many are confident that the calculus tips in favor of "not the cow" here. If you eat pastured cow, you are supporting the ecosystem of cow (for its life or partial life if it EOLs in a feedlot) but also possums, raccoons, ducks, field mice, butterflies, snakes, birds, bees, and thousands of other insects that populate the fields of pasture. Ideally, for your entire meat consumption for the entire year, you eat a grand total of 1/2 cow. If you eat only row crops you support the destruction of these creatures, necessarily, unless at the same time you are carving out land for them elsewhere. But if there is reduced insect biomass in the world, or colony collapse disorder among pollinators, then I say this is blood on the hands of the vegetarians. Row crops (corn/soy/etc) have other destructive effects in the nature of their planting and harvesting, and good pasturing (which isn't all of it) builds soil and restores land. (If you want better pasturing everywhere, you're making an economic argument for something else, just like people who wish row crops didn't require mass pesticide/herbicide dousing.)
It gets even more nuanced and weird if you look into the ecological destruction required to keep other crops going. And it gets further nuanced still if you get into what GHG emissions for livestock are. In the 1800's Americans destroyed an absolutely massive biomass of bison, to near extinction[2], and replaced them with an almost equivalent biomass of cows, unintentionally making the methane impact... pretty neutral, on the lifetime scale of things. But maybe if the bison still roamed free today, environmentalists would advocate for destroying them, I don't know.
The neocortex is only 2-4mm thick, so it kinda is 2D — I’ve seen it suggested that our brains have so many bumps in them just to provide more surface area.
(Technically birds don’t have a neocortex, but apparently they have something that allows them to do many of the things that our neocortexes do).
> some pressure for life to develop different types of intelligence based on their biology and environment.
I always wonder what was the pressure for humans to develop recursive language, and the cultural explosion about 70,000 years ago.
And in the millions of years before that, the pressure to rapidly dwvelop larger brains. Other animals didn't seem to do that (though, we probanly haven't tracked the development of other animals brain-sizes over such time spans as assiduously as our own).
Unfortunately for parrots, they cannot evolve larger brains without giving up flying. I suspect that birds in general have very optimized brains because of the weight constraints.
My grandmother (she died 5 years ago and I still miss her, she died at the venerable age 99) used to train calves to peform and win medals in festivals when she was a young girl. According to her they are one of the most intelligent mammals. Yet when they aged and fatten she participated in the butchery and preparation of the meat and everyone in tbe family still eat beef. I forgot was was my point, I apologize and miss my grandmom.
> Uncomfortable truth for people who selfishly help environmentally destroy our planet with their meat addictions? I would say yes.
The best diet for the environment is the hunter gatherer diet. The second best diet for the environment is the omnivore diet. The worst diet for the environment is the vegan diet.
People like you need to go learn what farming is. An inuit in alaska can eat a environmentally friendly hunter gather diet ( mostly meat ). An inuit cannot have an environmentally friendly vegan diet. Nowhere on earth can you have a environmentally friendly vegan diet. A vegan diet requires globalism.
I swear veganism is the new anti-vaxx movement and it needs to be countered before it harms more people.
Any farm kid can tell you that animals are smart, especially if they've gotten into a battle of wits with a goat.
As Mark Twain said (and I am paraphrasing), "the only distinction between man and the lesser animals is that the lesser animals don't sit around and talk about what makes them different from us."
> the lesser animals is that the lesser animals don't sit around and talk about what makes them different from us.
Yes, they do. I won't let my cat near the computer, as she'll use it to log onto catnet and plot the cataclysm with the other cats. I've also caught her leafing through my electronics parts catalogs. I'm not sure how worried I should be.
Teaching about language in a university setting, we often talk about various forms of evidence for language-like communication among animals.
As I tell students, I would bet that within our lifetimes, as research continues and our instrumentation becomes better at detecting non-human communication means, we'll finally be able to detect and decode 'language' in a non-human animal which is sophisticated and rich enough as to be impossible to handwave away.
But what I keep to myself is that this kind of discovery, and the cross-species conversations it would prompt, has the potential to change the course of the dialogue on animal rights and what it means to be 'human'. But I suspect it will wind up being largely buried outside of certain academic and spiritual communities, mostly because I don't think parts of our society could handle learning the bovine words for 'slaughterhouse' or 'mourning'.
Christina Hunger has the ability to ask her dog questions and it goes to press a button that represents the idea it wants to reply with. That button plays an English word through a speaker for Christina. She's a speech pathologist on Instagram and has a website for it. The dog learns word association in the same way babies do.
Those videos are on Instagram, not buried. I'm fairly sure any breakthroughs will make it to a Planet Earth documentary and we'll feel sad about it for a while then go buy beef from the shops anyway.
that's neat. i talk to my dog all the time. she (a rescue) came to me already knowing "do you wanna go out?" but had a really hard time teaching me when she had anxiety diarrhea and needed to go out. i really needed a button for that (she's mostly over it now though).
There is still some evolutionary chauvinism when it comes to assumptions of animal intelligence as "distance from humanity" as other counterexamples prove them wrong already.
Reptilian brain crap which seems based on superficial shape when we really should know better now given evidence sitting in front of us.
It doesn't really hold. Sheep are infamously too dumb to live unassisted perhaps owing to overbreeding for docility.
Meanwhile cephalopods are capable of opening jars and get up to mischief like getting out of their tank and shorting out light fixtures when bored and I have observed hermit crabs transmitting behavior socially ("punching" instead of pinching with their larger claw) and figuring out how to rotate an improperly secured lid on its axis.
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[ 30.5 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadEmotional... well that's something else.
That depends on who you ask, actually.
Oh you mean like many of those who are homeless, who also happen to have mental health issues, yet we don't provide shelter, health care or food for?
Doesn’t it? It’s something we don’t say, because it’s horrendously impolite, and I wouldn’t say it myself outside the context of this conversation, but yes, the life of an intelligent person is worth less than that of a person with Down’s syndrome.
Don’t take my word for it though, look at revealed preferences. How many parents abort their unborn Down’s Syndrome babies?
That is controversial but probably not in the way that you originally meant.
You want to look at smart, look at house cats. They've got it figured out.
Cats also seem pretty intelligent to me.
Nobody should expect another species to share our concept of a capitalistic market, for that matter.
The Baboon That Controlled a Railway for 9 Years - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpoLkMcQh24
Although not factory work this Baboon was a productive member of society being paid in alcohol and a small wage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(baboon)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160125001616/http://www.earthf...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_animal
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
By no means this was also a personal attack against anyone having enought intelligence to read it.
Humans (on the whole) aren't even particularly good to other humans, yet some people seem to have the expectation that humans be particularly good to animals.
My small Meyers Parrot similarly plays games, remembers things for months but does eventually seem to forget things he has learned. His neocortex is probably only one square inch.
My personal belief is that in life in the universe (with about 400 billion galaxies times about 100 billion stars per galaxy) is wide spread, if rare. I think there is also some pressure for life to develop different types of intelligence based on their biology and environment.
Anyway, I am in strong agreement with the people here saying that it is difficult to recognize non-human intelligence as intelligence.
Eg tickling is learning to protect vulnerable spots on the body
I see it like this: Every time I pay for beef I create demand for more cows, thus I help fund little calves playing in the fields. Their lives might be a little shorter than usual, but I don't see why a short life wouldn't be worth living.
But I don't.
Because without making it a full time hobby, it's impossible for me to know that the money will actually be spent on the animals' lifestyle and not on the lifestyle of their owners. Or even more likely, that of some intermediary. Also I don't really know if 2x would even be enough to offset the extra cost given the high efficiency of factory farming. The only practical way is improving minimum standards through regulation. Sorry free market, you are too opaque.
https://beterleven.dierenbescherming.nl/
By the way, the agriculture industry loves that you believe those farms on the side of the road are where your meat comes from. Instead of the factories that actually produce the overwhelming majority of the meat in this country. You pay for them to be cramped up, tormented, and murdered.
I’m lucky enough to both cook at home, live in a big city with lots of good butchers, and have the resources to be able to afford to buy organic, pasture raised, and grass fed meats as much as possible.
It’s not always possible to avoid factory farmed meat products, I assume anything I eat out unless the restaurant is very upscale is going to be cheaper cuts, and my parents aren’t rich and don’t buy like that although I’ll try sometimes to grab a turkey for Thanksgiving for instance.
Interestingly, my girlfriend is from India and vegetarian as many Indian people I’ve met seem to be, she didn’t like the Impossible Burger at all, because it was too meat like, which is a bit funny to me.
Lab grown meats are showing promise for the future which is neat.
But yea, life is bloody, violent, and miserable a lot of times. We should be thankful to live in such relatively peaceful times. Seems like there were just millenia’s of near constant region conflicts, famines, plagues, epidemics, religious wars.
It hasn’t all gone away, but maybe we’re closer than we’ve ever been?
And to answer your question, I do get upset when I watch a pack of wolves kill an elk. Just because it happens doesn't mean I don't recognize and empathize with things in pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox
It seems obviously unethical to me to raise a sentient organism (human or cow or cat) just to kill it prematurely for what's purely a luxury good for most people. Giving it a beach ball to play with seems completely ethically inconsequential.
I wonder how many people who assert how great of a life this must be, only to be killed at someone else's pleasure, would accept this life for themselves or their children or even their pets. And they certainly buy their meat from the supermarket where their meat never got to play with a beach ball, anyways. It's closer to ethics-at-a-distance fantasy and utopian thought experiments instead of anything grounded in the horrors of reality.
Personally, I don’t claim to know how much “personhood”[0] a cow has. It’s possible they don’t count and we shouldn’t care. But it’s only consistent to say “the meat industry is good for cows“ if you also say “the cannibalism industry is good for humans”.
Not that I’m doing a great job of being a morally consistent person myself, as I’m only vegetarian, and dairy is also really bad for bovine welfare, what with the forced pregnancies and slaughtered newborn calves.
[0] for lack of a better term — I know some people regard “person” as a synonym for “human”, but “self aware” and “sentient” are just as bad.
You know you're not the only dog owner to say stuff like this, which I've always found odd. I think it's a kind of American exceptionalism writ large into vegetarian(?) thinking, where people see themselves as separate from the circle of life, instead of as someone in a relationship with nature. (Where they consider their pets "separate" and "part of nature" so its OK when they consume meat.)
Pretty much everyone in farming communities knows that animals are intelligent, its the people who are extremely separated that find the odd epiphany. I recommend talking to the farmers next time you're in Central Illinois.
By the way, pasture is good for the environment.
I grew up around hunting and farms and also don't find it surprising that animals are fairly intelligent.
While your statement about pasturing being good for the environment is partially true in that there are some forms that do some good, by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.[1] A lot of this land would actually be used more efficiently for production of non-animal proteins like legumes, especially considering the land that is used to supplement pasturing through production of animal feed in most modern agriculture.
http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
> by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.
Your link puts it at 14.5% for the entire life-cycle, which makes it one of the... smallest causes for GHG emissions. It's the smallest versus any other sector in the graphs I can find[1] (vs Commercial and residential, Transportation, Industry, Electricity are all larger slices of pie). Why say its one of the largest?
It really depends on the land and the crops. Lots of land cannot support anything but pasture, and lots of places would be ecologically improved with more pasture. Killing (say) a cow is worse than the killing all animals + ecosystem of the field that row crops require (obviously complete habitat destruction for any field critters at harvest time, but also pesticides and herbicides and such side effects).
If you are worried about GHG issues, why not talk about food footprint or animal deaths per calories? Should you really be trucking in lettuce from Mexico and California if you live in New Hampshire, where I live? Should you be buying avocados if what grows here are animals? Should lettuce be grown at all?
It seems very... speculative that so many are confident that the calculus tips in favor of "not the cow" here. If you eat pastured cow, you are supporting the ecosystem of cow (for its life or partial life if it EOLs in a feedlot) but also possums, raccoons, ducks, field mice, butterflies, snakes, birds, bees, and thousands of other insects that populate the fields of pasture. Ideally, for your entire meat consumption for the entire year, you eat a grand total of 1/2 cow. If you eat only row crops you support the destruction of these creatures, necessarily, unless at the same time you are carving out land for them elsewhere. But if there is reduced insect biomass in the world, or colony collapse disorder among pollinators, then I say this is blood on the hands of the vegetarians. Row crops (corn/soy/etc) have other destructive effects in the nature of their planting and harvesting, and good pasturing (which isn't all of it) builds soil and restores land. (If you want better pasturing everywhere, you're making an economic argument for something else, just like people who wish row crops didn't require mass pesticide/herbicide dousing.)
It gets even more nuanced and weird if you look into the ecological destruction required to keep other crops going. And it gets further nuanced still if you get into what GHG emissions for livestock are. In the 1800's Americans destroyed an absolutely massive biomass of bison, to near extinction[2], and replaced them with an almost equivalent biomass of cows, unintentionally making the methane impact... pretty neutral, on the lifetime scale of things. But maybe if the bison still roamed free today, environmentalists would advocate for destroying them, I don't know.
[1] for example: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#/media/File:Biso...
(Technically birds don’t have a neocortex, but apparently they have something that allows them to do many of the things that our neocortexes do).
I always wonder what was the pressure for humans to develop recursive language, and the cultural explosion about 70,000 years ago.
And in the millions of years before that, the pressure to rapidly dwvelop larger brains. Other animals didn't seem to do that (though, we probanly haven't tracked the development of other animals brain-sizes over such time spans as assiduously as our own).
We know we ate mamoths to extinction. We ate a lot of whales.
It stands to reason we ate other animals of karger physical bodyband brain size. We ate some ostrich species.
Shame
The best diet for the environment is the hunter gatherer diet. The second best diet for the environment is the omnivore diet. The worst diet for the environment is the vegan diet.
People like you need to go learn what farming is. An inuit in alaska can eat a environmentally friendly hunter gather diet ( mostly meat ). An inuit cannot have an environmentally friendly vegan diet. Nowhere on earth can you have a environmentally friendly vegan diet. A vegan diet requires globalism.
I swear veganism is the new anti-vaxx movement and it needs to be countered before it harms more people.
As Mark Twain said (and I am paraphrasing), "the only distinction between man and the lesser animals is that the lesser animals don't sit around and talk about what makes them different from us."
Yes, they do. I won't let my cat near the computer, as she'll use it to log onto catnet and plot the cataclysm with the other cats. I've also caught her leafing through my electronics parts catalogs. I'm not sure how worried I should be.
(PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats.)
Most reptile training is pretty basic, and this experiment fits into those expectations:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NnwIlM6SmiQ
If you're comparing them to dogs, which are pack animals where those skills are critical, it's not fair. They project their feelings.
Introverted animals have a lot in common with reptiles.
Humans really need to get over themselves as the only species that possesses intelligence.
As I tell students, I would bet that within our lifetimes, as research continues and our instrumentation becomes better at detecting non-human communication means, we'll finally be able to detect and decode 'language' in a non-human animal which is sophisticated and rich enough as to be impossible to handwave away.
But what I keep to myself is that this kind of discovery, and the cross-species conversations it would prompt, has the potential to change the course of the dialogue on animal rights and what it means to be 'human'. But I suspect it will wind up being largely buried outside of certain academic and spiritual communities, mostly because I don't think parts of our society could handle learning the bovine words for 'slaughterhouse' or 'mourning'.
Those videos are on Instagram, not buried. I'm fairly sure any breakthroughs will make it to a Planet Earth documentary and we'll feel sad about it for a while then go buy beef from the shops anyway.
Reptilian brain crap which seems based on superficial shape when we really should know better now given evidence sitting in front of us.
It doesn't really hold. Sheep are infamously too dumb to live unassisted perhaps owing to overbreeding for docility.
Meanwhile cephalopods are capable of opening jars and get up to mischief like getting out of their tank and shorting out light fixtures when bored and I have observed hermit crabs transmitting behavior socially ("punching" instead of pinching with their larger claw) and figuring out how to rotate an improperly secured lid on its axis.