61–70 of 84 posts
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Define: dumb.
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.
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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.
> 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 pref…
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 environment…
> 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…
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."
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…
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 t…
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> 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 con…
Where did the OP say that they have a dog? 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 ef…
> 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...
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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. Cats also seem pretty intelligent to me.
Nobody should expect another species to share our concept of a capitalistic market, for that matter.
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 environment…
> 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…
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 environment…
i think you mean 1 cubic inch unless your parrot is only 2 dimensional
(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).
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> 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 wh…
Would you pay 2x so you could know they had fields and beach balls? Or 1x for industrial cow-cubicles? Be honest now..
