71–80 of 258 posts
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Dogs are natural hunters and carnivores, too. I don't see how they are different from cats.
Because household dogs don’t retain that behavior in the same way cats do.
He's good at attacking the food bowl, and that's about it.
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It's long been thought that a large percentage of studies on mice can not be replicated in humans because we are such different species but we use mice because it is cheap. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t... Some larger animals might be somewhat closer but a.) much more expensive b.) more ethically challenging to kill/drug something more intelligent at the scale at which we do mice An acq…
I bought some live lobsters to kill (humanely, with a knife to the brain) and steam. I only had him in my custody for a couple hours, but I got attached. I had a bad experience thinking about taking a life, and it kinda fucked me up. I don't think I'll be doing it again. If I had to kill everything I ate, I'd be vegetarian. But I have no problem buying it at the store.
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yes it is, and in this case I think we're probably still figuring out the actual cause But one assumes that in this case the cause might be that the pheromones that people all hopped up on testosterone give off is different those given off by people who aren't .... those people would likely be cis-males, trans-males who've transitioned, trans-females who haven't transitioned, and some trans people who are currently t…
if that is true, then being a different gender is something that is 'teachable', and not at least part 'innate', i.e. biological preposition for trait and behaviors that are predetermined in early pre-birth, and/or early childhood, and not imprinted by society/media/etc... aka, by now, we'd have the "gay cure"...... if you believe that there is a predisposition of some individuals to act to have gender specific behav…
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Hardly new. Feynman was criticizing psych research for this sort of thing - inadequate controls - half a century ago in his talk on Cargo Cult Science. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
Inadequate controls = attempting to measure fine effects (gender normalized animal behavior) using crude methods (rat study).
It's interesting to think about what this could mean for people. We use these mice because they often are convenient models for humans. Are our moods are just as affected by combinations of lots of little things like these - smells, hormones, chemicals in the cleaners, hair products etc. On the scary side imagine being able to use this for evil. Spray something like this on your product to manipulate people's hormona…
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Is that intellectually honest, to hide from the truth you know about your food?
Probably not any more dishonest than someone who knows that a lot of "organic" food is grown with manure, but would prefer not to see (or worse, smell) the animals actually defecating, with the feces then being applied to something they're going to eat.
The manure is also applied before seeding, months before harvest. Together with rinsing, and sometimes peeling or boiling, there's really no need for the scaremongering.
If you want to be afraid of faeces, manure is the least of your problems. Foxes and other wild animals shit on every field, and they often carry parasites.
Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...
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I bought some live lobsters to kill (humanely, with a knife to the brain) and steam. I only had him in my custody for a couple hours, but I got attached. I had a bad experience thinking about taking a life, and it kinda fucked me up. I don't think I'll be doing it again. If I had to kill everything I ate, I'd be vegetarian. But I have no problem buying it at the store.
One of the experiences which led to me becoming a vegetarian was ordering a whole lobster and being forced to pick it apart bit by bit. It's easy to forget/dismiss that the "stuff" inside your lobster roll was ever a living, breathing, thinking being. However, when you're handed the whole animal, told to crack it open and stuff it into your mouth, it's a very different story.
Good on you for sticking to your morals though. I don't mind vegetarians or vegans or whatever, but the one group that really annoys me is people who eat meat, but get upset seeing animals get butchered.
This reminds me of Feynman's story of the researcher who eliminated possible variables in rat experiments one by one, to find a surprising result (EDIT: To find that rats didn't need smell, spatial relationships, taste, or vision to find the cheese - the sound of the floor was enough) https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experi...
I suppose humans tend to underuse, or undertrain, their senses, so we fail to consider the possibility that other animals might be taking advantage of their senses in different ways. In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like…
Similarly, I will often turn off all the lights and navigate around my house/room by pure touch and sound, which is surprisingly easy given how much credence we give to sight as the paramount sense.