Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this horrible?
I think he felt bad about the caterpillars being mashed up.
It helps that the "caterpillars" in question look like dirty tequila maggots instead of friendly, bumbling, inchworms.
Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
171–180 of 329 posts
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#172Looks like this has been know for years...
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es504038a http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/plastic-loving-bact... http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-worms-digest-plastics-09...
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#173There's already a much better solution to deal with plastic pollution, a naturally degradable material made from corn.
We heavily subsidize both wind power and solar. We even still subsidize gasohol even though it doesn't produce the environmental benefits we first thought that it did.
But we don't subsidize degradable plastic made from corn which isn't used widely because it costs a few cents more than plastic made from oil. That has never made any sense to me.
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science. Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would ra…
Hey whatup cl-async guy! I'd liked to add that there are aspects of mutualism underlying how much we value dogs. We used to hunt alongside dogs, there exists a special bond between man and dog that does not exist between any other species, to my knowledge. They know our emotions, our smells, our noises, our physiological needs, they are even aware of fragility of our bodies compared to other animals. Dogs are pretty…
I agree, I love dogs. You wouldn't know it from my comments, but I actually like them more than flies ;).
I think you're right, dogs' historical utility along with their near human-like qualities have brought them much further along on the scale of "things that are not ok to kill" (towards humans). So perhaps there's a point when an animal becomes similar enough to us that we start viewing it as "one of us." This isn't just cultural, as you point out, but a sort of shared viewpoint of the world.
I'm also curious if size in general has something to do with it. Small animals have less value because we're perceiving killing "less of" something. Most people wouldn't think twice about killing a fly (myself included if it's a deer/horse fly) but would feel bad if they killed a bear that was attacking them, or even stepped on a lizard by accident.
So maybe dogs are a bad example (granted, I inherited the argument from a post up the tree from me), but I still think there's a cultural worth put on various animals.
Funny enough, I was in a catholic school when I was in third grade (9 years old?). I'm not catholic, and wasn't then, so I was always a bit suspicious. One of the teachers was talking about how there's a hierarchy to life. Rocks are at the bottom, then come plants, then animals, then humans, and angels/god on top. I remember, even then, thinking "without rocks, none of this would exist. without plants, no animals/humans could live, and without animals humans would die out." In other words, although we put ourselves at the top of the pyramid (of physical beings), the rest of the world would be just fine if humans disappeared tomorrow. Our existence has no meaning beyond our ability to evolve into better life forms. The point being, we have these odd social ratings for the value of other animals' lives, yet in many respects, our lives are almost worthless with respect the rest of the life on the planet. Our lives have value to us, but in essence we live in a bit of a bubble of self-importance.
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you eat animal products? I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets. At least there are principled reasons to care less about insects (much less complex nervous system), I can find no principled reason to care more for dogs than pigs.
The principled reason to care more for dogs from my understanding is mutualism. Dogs are dogs because of humans. Same for cats.
AFAIK the prevailing theory is that humans did not domesticate cats, and instead cats just learned to coexist with us because we attracted lots of tasty pests.
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants. It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. Ever killed a dog because it annoyed you? That said, doing it for science at least has a justification.
Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science. Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would ra…
Going further: if a few dead dogs were the price of some significant increase in human welfare (something more than bag recycling, I guess), I think most people would be OK with that. This is exactly the trade we make in the pharmaceutical industry every day (not with so many dogs per se, but with organisms at least as complex, cute and fuzzy).
I don't see much evidence for a "shaky belief system". Or maybe you're making a specific point about dogs, given that they were bred specifically to "feel like people" to us? Meh. I'm a cat guy.
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants. It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. Ever killed a dog because it annoyed you? That said, doing it for science at least has a justification.
Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science. Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would ra…
Do you have a fully-coherent, logical system for deciding which lives to care about, and how much? I'd be interested to hear.
'Animals' is not a natural kind. There's no logical reason to care about all animals just because they are animals.
I care about dogs, pigs, other people, etc. not because they're 'animals', but because I think they are plausibly conscious (to varying degrees) and they can experience joy and suffering. Insects, not so much.
I'm unwilling to care any nonzero amount about insects. Here is why.
There are something like a billion billion insects in the world. Given their short lifetimes, it means dozens of billions of billions are born and die each year. Wild insect lives are mostly short and brutal. If you care at all about an insect's life, that tiny amount multiplied by dozens of billion billions means your moral concern for insects should pretty much swamp out any other concern.
You'd have to select how much you care about each insect life with suspicious precision for the sum total to be significantly different from zero, but less than how much you care about human and dog lives.
So to be coherent, you have to either not care at all about insects, or your first priority in life should be to help insects. I, uh, choose not to care.
(Some people seriously care though. See: http://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffe...)
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants. It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. Ever killed a dog because it annoyed you? That said, doing it for science at least has a justification.
Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science. Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would ra…
[deleted]
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
My problem with landfills is that it's so inefficient. Particularly for things like wood waste or construction demolition, it makes a lot more sense to grind it, burn it, and make power from it, then bury the much smaller amount of ash that is left over.
It's better for the environment to bury wood unburnt. Burning it will release carbon back into the atmosphere. Burying the tree will re-sequester the carbon. As for grinding it, that's a question of whether the space saved by grinding up the wood is worth it versus just digging/finding a bigger hole.
It's probably better to turn it into charcoal first otherwise gasses like methane will eventually seep out. If you use these gases to fuel the carbonisation, then it will be CO2 neutral.
Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants. It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. Ever killed a dog because it annoyed you? That said, doing it for science at least has a justification.
It's because insects have such a primitive nervous system that we don't see them as being aware in the same way that a dog is. You draw the line somewhere , right? Drawing the line at a certain complexity of the nervous system is more sensible than drawing it at "animals" in general, IMO.
>You draw the line somewhere, right
Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". Perhaps my consciousness is so dim relative to theirs that it would be analogous to me squashing a bug. I hope that their methods are advanced enough that they don't need to.