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

nytimes.com

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

#91

Post by wruza »

xp84 wrote: post #20
hombre_fatal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Life and predators are absolutely evil, because their mode of operation is not in any way related to ethics or doing what’s good. And what’s good is usually opposite to what’s convenient or naturally-obviously available to survive.

That said, you personally don’t add much to this global effing mess that the life is by eating some low mass meat per year. You also don’t subtract much by avoiding it. One predator out-eats you 20-50x easily on meat. And many humans can’t or barely can afford meat.

The ethical problem has systemic and economic roots and doesn’t relate to personal ideology. Being vegan but doing nothing systemic is pretty useless imo. The whole privilege of going vegan bases on living in a society that does all that to animals as a consequence and a requirement of its function.

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

#92

Post by wruza »

realce wrote: post #36
xp84 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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?

Do they? It’s city dwellers who never seen prey and feel guilt. Regular hunters just skin the carcass and think where to store it. Guilt is a social emotion that leaks into areas which are not clearly separated in an experiencing mind.

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

#93

Post by wruza »

mystified5016 wrote: post #41
hombre_fatal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Practicality. To put it bluntly, the majority of humans do not think it is immoral in principle to kill and eat an animal. After all, that's how biological life just is. At an individual level, you can choose to think it's wrong but you do have to simply accept the fact that not everyone agrees, and very likely there will always be someone who disagrees. To most people, killing an animal for food is not a problem con…

I think this less-more thing is synthetic and pointless. One person stops eating meat, it just reduces the demand and there’s one less cow that suffers, but not in a sense that it becomes happy now. It just stops existing (best case). Is that a win? Hard to tell, cause the question is highly philosophical. Is to not exist better than to exist and suffer? Is suffering of 10M worse than suffering of 100K? Is 100K actually less suffering? One can imagine being a farm cow and being told that there’s 90% less of them than a decade ago, so they must feel 90-ish% better. Complete nonsense. There’s no “total suffering” cause suffering instances are separate in this case and are unable to grasp the scale.

That said, most people would probably prefer if no animals were killed at all.

Yeah I guess that at least skips the murky philosophical waters and has some actual impact rather than patting everyone and everything involved on various parts of an upper body.

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

#94

Post by bmitc »

It's such a travesty what we've done to the Southern Resident Orca population. We decimated their numbers with captures and killings, cutoff their food supply, and poisoned them via their environment and food supply. These are effectively war crimes committed by humans against the orcas, but even for an animal that likely meets and possibly even exceeds our emotional intelligence, articles like this are about as good as they can hope for from us.

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

#95

Post by bmitc »

kibwen wrote: post #35
andy_ppp wrote: 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…

And in the context of orcas specifically, their emotional processing centers in their brain dwarf that of humans, even when taking the relative brain sizes into account. So by scientific accounting, it's likely their emotional intelligence is far more advanced than ours.

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

#99

Post by aziaziazi »

sbmthakur wrote: post #51
cowfriend wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Back in my ancestral village the practice was to let cow nurse her calf and get the remaining for the owner's family. This kinda ensured co-existence. The modern dairy industry has all evil practices baked into its operations. It is the thing that keeps me from going vegetarian. Even with going off meat, I would still harm the livestock by consuming dairy. A lot of vegetarians (at least those who virtue signal) do no…

One way to reduce that practice is to simply reduce one consumption of meat/milk, no need to be fully gandhi to improve some cow’s life. You anyway can’t save the world alone.

There’s a ton of mushrooms and fabaceae, very cheap nutritious and as much delicious if you learn to cook them well (like meat). My favorite is Tempeh which combine both! And quite cheap if you make it yourself.

http://tempeh.info/

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

#100

Post by throwaway290 »

sbmthakur wrote: post #51
cowfriend wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Back in my ancestral village the practice was to let cow nurse her calf and get the remaining for the owner's family. This kinda ensured co-existence. The modern dairy industry has all evil practices baked into its operations. It is the thing that keeps me from going vegetarian. Even with going off meat, I would still harm the livestock by consuming dairy. A lot of vegetarians (at least those who virtue signal) do no…

What if no one was strictly vegan or vegetarian but everyone refused to buy food created by inhumane suffering and tortured conditions. Can't make it illegal but can make it very unfashionable. Just need more people to see things people see on a farm, then you gotta be a psycho to not care. Just no one properly lived on a farm next to animals these days when most people move to megapolises...
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