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Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

nytimes.com

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Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#241

Post by howlin »

Amezarak wrote: post #239
mitchtbaum wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see eating those as more akin to part of its sexual reproduction and continuation of life, like a bee taking nectar from a flower. As far as I understand it, Natural order works where a "food" matures, falls, and an "animal" eats it and passes its seeds through its digestive system. This process deposits the seeds in a fertilized position to grow its next generation. In a more poetic form, you can hear this in the…

That's true for fruits (in the botanical sense), not roots (carrots), fungi (mushrooms), or cabbage and lettuce. You're killing or injuring the organism and not helping perpetuate it in any way.

Mushrooms are the fruiting body of a much larger fungal complex. Many fungi use the fact that animals carry the mushrooms (and their spores) off to eat as a reproductive strategy.

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#242

Post by hackbinary »

vadym909 wrote: post #153
hackbinary wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? I think people in the west generally care more about animal welfare than in the far east. The UK has the highest animal welfare standards in the world. Sure there are people, farmers and pet keepers that do not obey the law, but in the main animals are very well taken care of.

A large majority of Indians are vegetarians and the rest only eat fish, chicken or goat. Cows are holy and worshiped!

Euthanasing animals in India, or at least some parts, is illegal because they believe they can not kill animals, therefore many, if not most animals in India die terrible deaths in old age. I am not confident that chickens, goats, nor many other animals in India are well treated and have good quality of lives.

It certainly is not that case that just because you do not consume animals means you keep them in humane conditions.

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#243

Post by goldbrick »

thedaemon wrote: post #129
nxzero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolves are extremely opportunistic carnivores, and will, given the opportunity, eat another wolf. That aside, unclear how wolves relate to the topic. Generally speaking, most life on Earth doesn't even eat other living organisms, but the naturally left remains of living organisms.

If by generally speaking you mean micro-organisms, then sure. I cannot think of any animals (mammals, fish, etc) that do not eat living organisms.

Try most of them?

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#244

Post by Amezarak »

mitchtbaum wrote: post #240
Amezarak wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true for fruits (in the botanical sense), not roots (carrots), fungi (mushrooms), or cabbage and lettuce. You're killing or injuring the organism and not helping perpetuate it in any way.

When a human harvests those organisms and replants their seeds among compost, it seems awfully similar to me. (Yes, I understand they each have some level of awareness similar to a mammal and bird. Here, we seem to focus on the meaning of killing. Perhaps our frame of reference which would call one yes and one no limits our ability to understand what happens in these processes.) Tangent hidden in Mahamrityunjaya: If…

None of those foods have seeds. You're not going to get anything out of the compost except rot. You're not helping them reproduce. The only maybe exception is mushrooms, since when they get plucked up you might spread spores.

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#245

Post by tluyben2 »

asciimo wrote: post #188
tluyben2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a cut off point as most people here would not eat humans (come on, how are human babies intelligent?) dolpins or dogs. Eating pigs just makes people hypocrites; people just ignore it and stuff it away as you need bacon and it is too annoying to face all this pesky stuff. And 'would not want to live in a world without'? That is a strange remark on many levels; if pigs are deamed sentient tomorrow and hence of…

Pigs and almost every other animal humans eat are already deemed sentient. Bacon tho.

Are they? That makes people even weirder for doing what they do. Like said I am not against eating meat; if I known the animal was not tortured then I would eat it, completely by the way (brain and organs included). But buying some bacon in plastic from a factory where torture is the norm makes you rather a sick puppy if you know these animals are sentient. But I know people just don't want to think about it. Especially here it is strange: the HN reader is rich so can actually go to a farm and pay something more for well treated eggs and bacon. And yet...

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#246

Post by SpaceX_Tech »

foobarbecue wrote: post #227
SpaceX_Tech wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in most, if not all, species of octopus the male dies after mating and the female dies shortly after the eggs in her care hatch. Also depending on the species, anywhere from 20,000-200,000 eggs will hatch and I've read that only around 1% will make it to adulthood. In captivity octopuses are considered relatively difficult to keep due to their sensitivity to water quality. They have a fairly narrow band of…

> I’m unsure what the potential is for large scale changes in oceanic chemistry We are down from pre-industrial 8.25 pH to 8.08, and no sign of slowing. Major changes are certain. I don't know if this means the water will dissolve more metals like Cu, but it seems possible. Source: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/file/Hawaii+Carbon+Dioxide+Time...

Thanks for the info, very interesting and troubling.

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#247

Post by nxzero »

Falling3 wrote: post #70
nxzero wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sentience is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, and thus is held to confer certain rights. That said, in my opinion, as it relates to optimal ecosystems, sentience at best might be a consideration. Impact, contribution, etc. to an ecosystem would be a more natural measure.

Does that actually matter in and of itself beyond how it affects sentient individuals?

Yes, a health ecosystem requires non-sentient live for a number of reasons including that non-sentient is the source of genetically different sentient live. Diversity is critical for ecosystems.

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#248

Post by _yosefk »

chris_wot wrote: post #229
_yosefk wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that people are not animals (and that computers are not people), both may be controversial beliefs for some but are rather widely shared. In particular, nothing constitutes an ethical problem for animals, computers, plants, and other non-human entities, while some things are unethical for people.

So people are inherently more moral and far superior than animals then. What is your ethical basis for not eating them? Genuinely curious.

Firstly, it doesn't even need to have anything to do with "ethics", it's just ridiculous to argue that "lions eat their prey alive, hence I find it fine to do so." Lions will lick their balls in the presence of, well, pretty much any other organism. Do you suggest that we do the same?

I'm not saying that people are "inherently more moral" than animals, or "far superior", I'm saying that they're inherently people while animals inherently aren't people. A lion will never compare its own behavior to the behavior of a toad or an elephant or a human in order to judge its propriety, but you do this sort of thing, and you doing so is inherently human. A lion doesn't argue that it's superior to its prey and hence it's OK to eat it alive, but you do make this argument (or a different argument, the point is you're arguing about this on the Internet) and this is inherently a human thing.

You being a human makes it possible for me to ask you, why would you want to eat an animal alive, why not kill it first? What's in it for you? It's obviously painful for the animal and the vast majority of humans derive a certain degree of displeasure from observing the suffering of living organisms that they don't have a particular reason to harm. Perhaps the desire for philosophical consistency is the inherently human trait causing you to argue in favor of eating animals alive ("since most of us would kill an animal to save a human's life, it must also be OK to cause animals suffering for a near-zero gain or even just to derive pleasure from it, otherwise it's a slippery slope at the end of which we grant animals voting rights")?

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#249

Post by Falling3 »

alanwatts wrote: post #232
Falling3 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sentience is where we draw the line. You're not replying to anyone who said "killing" is wrong. We're talking specifically about the slaughter of animals. Reducing it all down to just "life" is fallacious.

Define sentience? The word originates from the Latin verb sentire, "to feel". Plants feel their environment. The Venus Fly Trap feels when an insect is on it, for example. >Plants are sessile, highly sensitive organisms that actively compete for environmental resources both above and below the ground. They assess their surroundings, estimate how much energy they need for particular goals, and then realise the optimum…

Plants don't feel their environment. They react to stimuli as all life does.

Sentience is defined as the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Since we have very little understanding of how consciousness works and how to test discern whether an entity is conscious or not, I realize this is a sticking point for a lot of people. But I think you'll agree that there's a very real difference between killing a plant and killing a member of your family. And that distinction applies to many animals as well.

Re: Inky the octopus breaks out of New Zealand aquarium

#250

Post by thedaemon »

goldbrick wrote: post #243
thedaemon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by generally speaking you mean micro-organisms, then sure. I cannot think of any animals (mammals, fish, etc) that do not eat living organisms.

Try most of them?

Name just one. If you think it's most of them, name a few. I will explain it to you then.
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