Can confirm. Lived on farm. Used to get bees in the mail.
Mailable Live Animals
121–130 of 167 posts
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Newly hatched chickens can survive without food for more than 24 hours. They only want to sleep and can travel perfectly at this age, so is the usual way for amateurs to buy fancy chicken breeds or small chicken of known sex. So, most probably those chicken would end having a happy life destroying carefully the backyard of somebody, one scratch at a time. There is also a special kind of fishes that lay eggs that can…
I don't see how anyone could possibly know what the subjective experience of being a day-old chick stuffed in a box would be like. But I can imagine what it would be like to be a human stuffed in a box, and that doesn't seem very pleasant. I don't see how the idea that it might be better for birds (who are pretty clearly sentient creatures) could be based on anything other than rationalization and wishful thinking.
I think a more apt comparison is to imagine a human being shipped in a padded shipping container with a dozen of her friends to keep her warm and help her feel safe.
I've had chicks shipped to me this way and it didn't appear to be traumatic at all for them. They grew into happy, healthy birds.
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their spam mail and abuse of customers is malice.
Who is they? ... abuse of customers ?
Digging up my residential address or sharing it with other businesses for any purpose other than to render services (e.g. to send a package that I ordered, you might need to share it with FedEx) is harrassment IMO.
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Newly hatched chickens can survive without food for more than 24 hours. They only want to sleep and can travel perfectly at this age, so is the usual way for amateurs to buy fancy chicken breeds or small chicken of known sex. So, most probably those chicken would end having a happy life destroying carefully the backyard of somebody, one scratch at a time. There is also a special kind of fishes that lay eggs that can…
I don't see how anyone could possibly know what the subjective experience of being a day-old chick stuffed in a box would be like. But I can imagine what it would be like to be a human stuffed in a box, and that doesn't seem very pleasant. I don't see how the idea that it might be better for birds (who are pretty clearly sentient creatures) could be based on anything other than rationalization and wishful thinking.
> I don't see how anyone could possibly know what the subjective experience of being a day-old chick stuffed in a box would be like.
But then you go on to pretend to do exactly that.
You’re projecting a negative human experience onto birds.
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They call it mental illness for a reason. Even if we accept your premise that having a mental illness precludes one from taking responsibility for their actions, you still have to deal with the fact that they are a serious danger to society. One of the uses of prison is to take people who would otherwise murder and eat people and remove them from society, so that they can't do that.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-16.htm...
I am making a moral argument, not a legal one.
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#126One important restriction on mailing is that you CANNOT mail fertile ants through USPS. Which means that all of those ant farms you see being sold to kids? You pay money, and get some sterile workers who are guaranteed to die pretty fast, leaving an unhappy kid. If you want a real ant farm, you need to either collect ants locally, or buy ants in person from someone who did themselves. And you'd better known the rules…
Yep, my son did buy his first colony from a local college kid, through the GAN Project: https://www.antscanada.com/queen-ants-for-sale/. Since he was away, his mom brought the colony to us, we met discreetly at a library, felt a bit like a spy transaction :-)
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#127No one has mentioned butterflies yet. Not an advertisement: we ordered butterfly caterpillars from insectlore.com and it was pretty awesome to watch them go through their life cycle. Our kids were squealing with wonder when the butterflies finally broke out of their chrysalises. Then after a day or two, we took them to a nice wooded area and released them.
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell your teenager the world needs more people like him if we’re going to save the worlds insects. We need more entomologist.
I don’t know, insects have been doing pretty well for a long time, and only one large group of insects that we know of has ever gone extinct, even during the absolutely horrific Permian-Triassic extinction event. I know as humans our impulse is to “do something about it”, but I think insects are gonna be fine.
Sure insects in general will be "fine", but ecosystems will have to be rebuilt over time with the different dynamics.
Take bees/pollinators. Another species could evolve or otherwise step in to fill the gap, but it could well result in many other plant and animal species also going extinct in the process.
Similar scenario with climate change. The earth will continue to exist and there will continue to be weather. But that weather could be a lot more inhospitable to our very narrow definition of habitable.
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#129Vaguely related and humourous:
> Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.
> I replied: “What’s really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to.”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_...
Re: Mailable Live Animals
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
My kid has been aware of AntsCanada for a long time, and has purchased lots of supplies from them. Yes, most ants are similar to bees in that way. In fact ants and bees are very closely related. But a few kinds of ants (for example the invasive Argentine ants), can have multiple queens in a colony that cooperate with each other. The reason for this rule is the ease with which ants become invasive species, and how muc…
Does your kid know about SimAnt?
He's at school so I can't just ask him.
But if it comes to ants, I'm willing to bet money that he knows it.
I remember being at a bug fair with him a few years back. There was a grad student with a display including some fossilized ants. My son came over, looked, identified the genus, began pointing out the identifying characteristics and named multiple related current species. The grad student's jaw dropped open. The only things that the grad student knew which my son didn't was how old the fossil was and where it was found.
And here is some fun trivia. If you look, between the thorax (where the legs grow) and the gaster (the bulb at the end), there is a very, very skinny petiole. The only food that can pass through that and keep the ant alive is high energy fluid. So a major problem for every species of ant is how to turn the world around into such a fluid so that they can eat it.