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Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#131

Post by jhanschoo »

ornornor wrote: post #112
balls187 wrote: post #73

Many years ago I stopped by a zoo in France, with my 7mo son. I was pushing him in the stroller while he was napping, and at the orangutan exhibit, one came up to the window and gestured towards the stroller. I turned the stroller to face the window, and removed the hood. The orangutan blew my son a kiss, waved then went back to the otherside of its enclosure. Made me rethink what I knew about animal intelligence.

The way we treat animals is terrifying as they’re likely much much more sentient than we make ourselves believe (mostly for our own convenience)

Many animals are known to be very sentient (have feelings), you are thinking of sapience.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#132

Post by greenish_shores »

sevagh wrote: post #126
gwbas1c wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a casual message board; there's no requirement to put that kind of effort into a post here. You can also do the legwork yourself.

>You can also do the legwork yourself. The person who makes the claim must justify it, not the readers.

Was the claim I was responding to justified anyhow, though?

It's literally one query to https://scholar.google.com or any other search engine of choice, should I link to search results? Okay, so append ?q=[substance name] at the end of the URL. I don't mean to come off as rude, though. But it's really simple to do so, and it won't really serve any purpose to link to particular studies, either, as this could in turn add a potentially huge selection bias.

By the way, for more "obscure" in terms of scientific interest compounds see: beberine, theanine (aka l-theanine), vinpocetine. Particularly the last one. Same. These ones don't even have any synthetic counterparts which will share same or similar mechanism of action (there are other synthetic compounds targeting the same receptors, but they still represent very unique combinations of targets and also often have unique pharmacodynamics in relation to these targets).

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#133

Post by makerdiety »

xvector wrote: post #117
vbezhenar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? We eat meat. We need to eat meat. So we need to kill animals for that. Zoos absolutely not required for humans to survive.

> We eat meat. Purely for taste. > We need to eat meat. False. 10-20% of the world population does not and we're just fine. > So we need to kill animals for that. No, you want to kill animals because you want tasty food. Not because you "need" meat. No one living in an industrialized country does. It's trivial to create a plant-based balanced diet (and a tasty one at that.) > Zoos absolutely not required for humans t…

Taste is an indicator of goodness. Therefore, good taste means high goodness.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#134

Post by ornornor »

jhanschoo wrote: post #131
ornornor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way we treat animals is terrifying as they’re likely much much more sentient than we make ourselves believe (mostly for our own convenience)

Many animals are known to be very sentient (have feelings), you are thinking of sapience.

Either way, we treat most of animals as if they weren’t either.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#135

Post by smusamashah »

swores wrote: post #129
MailleQuiMaille wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying that it might have learn by trial and error to use appropriate social signs directed to the appropriate social settings…? And that differs from us how exactly ?

Obviously it would be interesting if that's what happened, but no, what they were saying is that it could well be that it had only been exposed to visitors doing nice gestures and was repeating them back with no understanding of nice vs nasty. Not that the anecdote proves their guess is more right than yours, but afaik there is more evidence of animals mirroring unthinkingly than understanding.

Mirroring and copying unthinkingly is how we humans learn. If what we mirrored gives us the desired results we keep doing it. Questioning and understanding those actions comes lot later.

I have learned this from my toddler son who picked up some 2 3 word sentences from the cartoons that he watches. He ofcourse has no clue what those words mean, but he does know when to use them and what response he gets from them.

English isn't the language we speak at home but he picked up "wake up" when I am sleeping and try to wake me up, "careful" when doing something where he or one of us could fall. All by seeing and hearing things said repeatedly on similar actions in cartoons.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#136

Post by swores »

smusamashah wrote: post #135
swores wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously it would be interesting if that's what happened, but no, what they were saying is that it could well be that it had only been exposed to visitors doing nice gestures and was repeating them back with no understanding of nice vs nasty. Not that the anecdote proves their guess is more right than yours, but afaik there is more evidence of animals mirroring unthinkingly than understanding.

Mirroring and copying unthinkingly is how we humans learn. If what we mirrored gives us the desired results we keep doing it. Questioning and understanding those actions comes lot later. I have learned this from my toddler son who picked up some 2 3 word sentences from the cartoons that he watches. He ofcourse has no clue what those words mean, but he does know when to use them and what response he gets from them. En…

Sure, we learn by copying things. But there isn't, that I'm aware of, any evidence that an orangutan has done the learning part rather than just the copying part.

It wouldn't shock me if we did learn they can learn that way, but it also wouldn't shock me if it was just blindly copying human gestures without learning anything from what happens when they do.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#137

Post by rramadass »

shmageggy wrote: post #110
rramadass wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is he just repeating what he's seen humans do This is most probably the main reason. However there is some debate on whether these learned behaviours can be passed across generations. Here is David Attenborough showing Orangutans washing clothes/using soap/tools/etc. mimicking what they have seen Humans in their environment do - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFACrIx5SZ0

This is an animal living in the wild who did not have contact with humans. The article mentions that he may have learned it from other orangutans, but says nothing about humans.

Yeah, i read that but i don't think it tells the whole story. In Borneo they live in close quarters with Humans and often observe people (i.e. curiosity) from the forest's edge and may have picked up something via this way. They are very clever primates and hence could have picked up this behaviour in any number of ways.

PS: Also checkout the Orangutan Jungle School video i link here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244125

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#139

Post by mc32 »

MailleQuiMaille wrote: post #128
penguin_booze wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do mimic, but I was saying the animal wasn't exactly (probably) expressing its affection/adoration for a human baby with a flying kiss gesture. Had the animal picked up a vulgar gesture from a human visitor, it might as well have chosen that gesture at the baby instead, without necessarily knowing its inappropriate. A human parent, understandably, will not be very pleased with such an incident.

So you are saying that it might have learn by trial and error to use appropriate social signs directed to the appropriate social settings…? And that differs from us how exactly ?

It’s akin to cargo culting, or rain dancing, etc.

A dog asking for beggin strips…

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#140

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Voultapher wrote: post #101
gonzo41 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animal prison.

There is also the grim reality that most pets would run away and not come back if you were to open the "prison doors". Think of birds, reptiles, dogs etc. Our interaction with other life on this planet is very human centric, some call this human supremacism. A line is drawn between us and other animals, and the justification is quite arbitrary in my opinion. A line that is used to justify a vast number of atrocities…

> most pets would run away and not come back if you were to open the "prison doors"

This is not true of any pet I’ve had. The dog was always gunning for an open door. And the cat enjoys unsupervised time outdoors when weather permits. They both always came home.

Also, cats aren’t truly domesticated. If there is a creature that “chooses” to live with us, it’s cats.

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