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Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

nytimes.com

31–40 of 261 posts

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#31
post #20

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Do you and a lion possess the same degree of executive function?

Plant based diets are:

- more affordable

- better for the environment

- healthier

- avoid/reduce cruelty (livestock and human)

If you want to eat meat, fine, but the comment you replied to is innocuous and not "guilt-tripping" anyone.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#32
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked on farms i can verify that such things happen. I personally witnessed sheep behaving exactly as decided in The Silence of the Lambs. Our sheep were famously noisy and certainly were used to being moved around in lorries but when the abattoir lorry turned up you could almost smell their fear. I also witnessed a cow storm through four fences in order to be reunited with her calf. The irony: Th…

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Humans aren't always rational and that's okay, we're all human after all :)

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#33
post #20

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There’s no such thing as “going against evolution.” Vegetarianism is as much a valid part of evolution as any other behavior any animal exhibits.

I think if lions regularly bred into existence billions of antelope, confined and tortured them for the entirety of their existence, and then ate them, yes, a lot of people would view that as pretty evil, even while acknowledging such a creature is probably incapable of the moral calculus that (some) humans are.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#34
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked on farms i can verify that such things happen. I personally witnessed sheep behaving exactly as decided in The Silence of the Lambs. Our sheep were famously noisy and certainly were used to being moved around in lorries but when the abattoir lorry turned up you could almost smell their fear. I also witnessed a cow storm through four fences in order to be reunited with her calf. The irony: Th…

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Most vegetarians decide to choose that diet after contemplating the suffering of the animals involved. Or had you never thought to ask why someone would be vegetarian?

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#35
post #4

Yes, it made me think about animals panicking so much before slaughter that they often have heart attacks. And dairy cows who have their babies slaughtered who cry for weeks. Maybe these are apocryphal stories, but we are very much trained to believe we shouldn’t anthropomorphise animals. I hope that we are able to grow meat in a way without suffering as soon as possible.

> we are very much trained to believe we shouldn’t anthropomorphise animals

We shouldn't anthropomorphize animals. Instead, the point here is that emotions are not anthropic; humans do not have a monopoly on emotions.

Which is to say, we should be sure not to think that "grief" means the same thing for an orca that it means to a human; yet naturally animals do grieve in their own ways. (Heck, "grief" doesn't even mean the same thing for all humans!)

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#36
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> going against every bit of our human evolution, without guilt-tripping the rest of us for doing what nature designed us to do

If nature designed for this, then why do people feel any guilt at all?

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#37

https://freefromharm.org/animal-farmer-turned-vegan/jackie-s...

I believe this is nice, but how do regular people actually find the time to care about this stuff? If you have kids, bills, a job, listen to crap from politicians all day, where do you find the time to be this empathetic. My kids school gives them milk as part of lunch, my kid likes milk now. You have to live in a very special world to get around this. I was a vegetarian for a while, I was mostly starving hungry and…

The western idea of making things better for animals often involves abstinence. Which is unpalatable if you are a meat eater.

The messaging should be to reduce your meat consumption. By reported national averages, I eat 25% of the meat eaten by the average Australian. And I don’t feel that I’m missing out.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#38

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Why are the cows taken away from the calves, especially dairy cows? Just curious.

Because you want to get the milk.

Almost this. The better answer is because we want to get ALL the milk.

So instead of letting the mother cow nurse her calf for the first few months and then start taking her milk for our use, the more "modern" practice is to separate the calf immediately.

Which means if you are drinking milk, you are drinking it from seriously depressed cows.

I wonder how this contributes to our culture's growing mood of depression?

see i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/mums-ask...

or just google dairy cows separate from calves

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#39
post #35
post #4

Yes, it made me think about animals panicking so much before slaughter that they often have heart attacks. And dairy cows who have their babies slaughtered who cry for weeks. Maybe these are apocryphal stories, but we are very much trained to believe we shouldn’t anthropomorphise animals. I hope that we are able to grow meat in a way without suffering as soon as possible.

> we are very much trained to believe we shouldn’t anthropomorphise animals We shouldn't anthropomorphize animals. Instead, the point here is that emotions are not anthropic; humans do not have a monopoly on emotions. Which is to say, we should be sure not to think that "grief" means the same thing for an orca that it means to a human; yet naturally animals do grieve in their own ways. (Heck, "grief" doesn't even mea…

yeah, the funny thing about the anthropomorphism debate is that supposedly the thing that makes humans different from (other) animals is our "advanced" brain, i.e. language, civilization, etc.

in other words, all the ways we have to manage emotions, and all of our "non-emotional" functioning.

So we have somehow evolved to be able to better manage emotions.

Ok, so if we grant all of that, then haven't we just said that emotions are common to animals? So then how is it anthropomorphising to say that animals have the traits which we've just said define animals, whereas what makes humans special is that we have 'risen above' mere emotion?

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#40
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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For a long time humans did not breed animals for the sake of eating them, they used to hunt (just like a lion). No one was guilt-tripping anyone in those days (I hope), as we had to survive (not thrive).

The situation has changed completely in the modern world. We have created meat factories, forcefully torturing millions of animals daily, and have somehow agreed upon what animals to kill and not to kill.

A lion will kill anything that moves (as long as it is not poisonous), are you willing to kill (and eat) any animal under the sky?

What about pets? Do you think they suffer any kind of pain and suffering ? If yes, that's the same way any other animal you eat (regardless of intelligence) feels when being slaughtered.

One more question to think about: A young child (in a modern urban world) will be more comfortable plucking and eating fruits from a tree ? OR killing a pig -> draining blood -> cutting it into pieces -> cooking it to eat it ?

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