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Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

news.northeastern.edu

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Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so they live every second of their lives in fear. Seems like an oversimplification to me, and we don't know that they live their whole live in fear. We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators. > I am not convinced that when animals are grown by humans in appropriate conditions [...] They lack any kind of self determination, take a milk farm for example. The cows are…

If you think we are raping cows when they are artificially inseminated, I hope you are equally horrified by natural animal sex. Everything from penis spines to traumatic insemination, to dolphin rape gangs, and worse exist in animal sex. And the there is oven nothing resembing consent asked or given. Its humans and bonaboo and thats pretty much it that who do it nicely most of the time.

If you intend to maintain the falsehood that cows’ sex is not completely denatured, you’re simply wrong. We have manufactured species that are easier to manipulate, that are incapable of surviving without us. We cause untold misery on them to give us food. We do that, because it’s cheap.

I don’t fool myself. Any industrial food industry is built on a foundation of manufactured pain.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't the idea that homo sapiens were more intelligent been debunked in favour of the idea that they were more social and that's what gave them superiority

I don't know, but I suspect you mean compared to other hominids, while GP had non-hominids like chimpanzees and gorillas in mind, so I just wanted to make sure that that potential confusion is cleared up first.

Remember, our predecessors did not pal around with apes. They paled around with the ancestors of apes.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#133
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most animals in the wild live very tough, short lives and have high likelihood that they be killed and eaten by predators, so they live every second of their lives in fear. I am not convinced that when animals are grown by humans in appropriate conditions (i.e. not overcrowded sausage factories), given all the food they need and able to "enjoy" (this is a human emotion, but perhaps they have an analogous "feeling" wh…

> so they live every second of their lives in fear. Seems like an oversimplification to me, and we don't know that they live their whole live in fear. We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators. > I am not convinced that when animals are grown by humans in appropriate conditions [...] They lack any kind of self determination, take a milk farm for example. The cows are…

I do agree that animal "factories" are wrong. I think we disagree only on a minor point: I think that it's not wrong for humans to domesticate and "grow" animals if they do it in a "humane" (I don't know a better word here) way where the animals do not suffer and have ways to enjoy their lives, whatever that may be, while I believe you're saying that's also wrong and only hunting wild animals is acceptable?

> We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators.

I don't know... you may see that in an environment heavily modified by humans, like National Parks or zoos... but in really wild environments, there would be a healthy population of predators that "control" the population of those animals they hunt, so it seems it's almost inevitable that if you're prey, in a real wild environment, you would need to be on your toes absolutely all the time. This is what I've observed from the little interactions I had with really wild environments.

> Do you think that two angry humans killing each other over a conflict is the same thing as industrial scale genocide with labor camps?

That's a weird questions to ask, I don't see any relation whatsoever with what is being discussed.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rage quitting or issues with rage WHEN quitting? I can imagine a game-addicted bird might get upset if you turn off the tablet or remove them from the gaming area. Similar to a toddler throwing a tantrum if you turn off a movie they are watching.

Birds totally experience rage at inanimate objects like humans. If an objects get in their way or doesn't behave the way they want for long enough, they'll start smacking it. Vicious and intelligent things.

I'm really enjoying the missing comma in the first sentence.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#135
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this the form of intellectual superiority that Homo sapiens flaunted when they were among “dumber” apes?

Hasn't the idea that homo sapiens were more intelligent been debunked in favour of the idea that they were more social and that's what gave them superiority

How is possible to debunk something we have no direct information about?

I mean a new "idea" is far from being able debunk anything, right?

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#136
post #5

Made me think of this video where a parrot is watching YouTube videos it likes, changing to different ones, and seeming angry when ads (or the owner lol) interrupt its video-watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4

Buy this parrot YouTube Premium! I don't know the exact species of parrot this is, but if it has a lifespan of 25 years, a 1 minute ad is like a 4 minute ad for them. Just imagine sitting through that!

Adblock would do the same without supporting these nefarious monetization techniques.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#137

> Last year, the team showed a group of parrots how to video call one another, finding that the birds both overwhelmingly enjoyed the activity and could make the calls themselves, when given the option. My heart! There's a separate article dedicated to it: https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/parrots-talking-vid...

And they had preferred friends! It's truly awesome because their owners could help improve their quality of life with just a cheap tablet and the service fee.

Basically enslaved in a prison but with a tablet.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their owners could improve their quality of life by simply not keeping them Parrots are too smart and too social to be kept in captivity

Yeah these comments feel so out of touch, kind of a metaphors for what we became with modern tech. We're creating tools and distractions to cope from how unbearable we made our daily lives, and apparently it's progress

I'm free to log off this website and the rest of the Internet at any time! Harrumph.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#140
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so they live every second of their lives in fear. Seems like an oversimplification to me, and we don't know that they live their whole live in fear. We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators. > I am not convinced that when animals are grown by humans in appropriate conditions [...] They lack any kind of self determination, take a milk farm for example. The cows are…

I do agree that animal "factories" are wrong. I think we disagree only on a minor point: I think that it's not wrong for humans to domesticate and "grow" animals if they do it in a "humane" (I don't know a better word here) way where the animals do not suffer and have ways to enjoy their lives, whatever that may be, while I believe you're saying that's also wrong and only hunting wild animals is acceptable? > We obse…

There is no version of animal farming that if you did the same with humans wouldn't constitute human rights violations. Why should we be special? "Hey, my slaves are well fed, happy and they are even allowed to sleep in the house, where's your problem man."

> That's a weird questions to ask, I don't see any relation whatsoever with what is being discussed.

I painted a false equivalence in a related field with the same tools you did. In both cases people are killed, but the details matter. And for our discussion, killing animals != killing animals.

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