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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

#151

Post by pavel_lishin »

renewiltord wrote: post #84
pavel_lishin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you never go through a life event that makes you regret this comment.

It’s a freaking fish, man. Of course we should all hope that humans don’t go through the same thing. It’s like looking at salmon and being “I hope you, guy eating the salmon, never experiences being filleted and then cooked into a delicious dish in an oven, with some sliced lemons on top of you and some asparagus on the side”. No shit! Humans are different! This is just one of those pity parties that people throw pos…

I also hope you never experience being filleted and cooked.

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

#153

Post by AnonHP »

jvanderbot wrote: post #145
cloverich wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always have mixed feelings about this. It's sad. But how is her pod supporting her exactly? Are they bringing her food? If so is that food the dead offspring of other animals? I feel these kinds of stories often have a kind of selective empathy for the focused animal. Ultimately nature is extraordinarily cruel absent humans; imo humans are the only hope for something better, if such a thing even makes sense.

I've recently taken up hunting, mostly because my rural family prioritizes it. The natural world is full of unimaginable cruelty. Wolves will take down young deer and eat them alive while parents watch. Bears will pin down whatever they can catch and who cares if it is alive. On and on, the amount of bloodshed required to support an omnivore/carnivore is simply bananas. Killer whales are hyper-intelligent aquatic nig…

> But there is _no_ version of a carnivore or meat-eating omnivore that does not involve killing and savagery

Absolute statements are not useful in this context. Vultures are obligate scavengers who eat the flesh of already dead animals as a practice. The dead animal could be due to death from natural causes (diseases, old age, injury, poisoning, starvation) or hunting by other animals. So there are some versions.

Also, as a couple of examples, the animal world is not one that has consent to sexual intercourse or empathy in killing an offspring who’s not their own. So your (or our) morals cannot be absolute for one purpose (killing an animal to eat the flesh) while being considerate for other aspects. In other words, we don’t gain much by pointing to the non-human world as a justification or excuse for our actions.

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

#155

Post by AnonHP »

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…

> It is the thing that keeps me from going vegetarian. Even with going off meat, I would still harm the livestock by consuming dairy.

You could go vegan.

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

#156

Post by addicted »

Daub wrote: post #14
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.

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…

It’s ironic how accepted vegetarians, who have a dietary preference, are in society, and how hated vegans, who have an ethical argument against unnecessary killing of sentient animals, are in society.

I only turned vegan a couple of years ago as something clicked and I was able to make the connection between the food I was eating and the animals who were being killed, almost certainly unnecessarily, for that food. But before then I disliked vegans a lot, and was completely fine with vegetarians. I’m honestly unable to reconcile my thinking.

It’s kind of like how I don’t understand how I strongly believed in god before I lost faith. Now the idea that I ever could, or ever did, believe in a personal god seems unbelievable to me.

Human psychology is ridiculously interesting.

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

#157

Post by addicted »

bamboozled wrote: post #19
Daub wrote: 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…

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

Why would the calves be kept near the cows?

They’re not gonna feed the milk that their mothers are producing for them, because that would mean less milk to sell and less milk for people to consume.

And so why keep the calves in the milking side of the facility when you can move them to the fattening side for meat/leather or to get them to age so you can forcibly impregnate them every year for their milk, depending on their gender.

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

#158

Post by j_bum »

AnonHP wrote: post #153
jvanderbot wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently taken up hunting, mostly because my rural family prioritizes it. The natural world is full of unimaginable cruelty. Wolves will take down young deer and eat them alive while parents watch. Bears will pin down whatever they can catch and who cares if it is alive. On and on, the amount of bloodshed required to support an omnivore/carnivore is simply bananas. Killer whales are hyper-intelligent aquatic nig…

> But there is _no_ version of a carnivore or meat-eating omnivore that does not involve killing and savagery Absolute statements are not useful in this context. Vultures are obligate scavengers who eat the flesh of already dead animals as a practice. The dead animal could be due to death from natural causes (diseases, old age, injury, poisoning, starvation) or hunting by other animals. So there are some versions. Al…

Great counterpoint, re: vultures.

But, life on earth evolved with predators in the mix. I’d be curious to know what life would look like without the presence of predators during evolution. Or, which set of life would be more evolutionarily successful: creatures from evolution w/ predators vs. creatures evolution w/o predators. Sounds like a great topic for Primer [0].

Last, to push back, I don’t think the parent comment was using the brutality of nature as an excuse for their actions. They said it helped them understand/come to terms with their hunting behavior, of which is totally natural.

[0] https://youtube.com/@primerblobs?si=-bsFlBllNDvEfY-g

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

#159

Post by throwaway3287 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #140

Anthropomorphism? In my science?! Yes please!

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#160

Post by hellojesus »

addicted wrote: post #156
Daub wrote: 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…

It’s ironic how accepted vegetarians, who have a dietary preference, are in society, and how hated vegans, who have an ethical argument against unnecessary killing of sentient animals, are in society. I only turned vegan a couple of years ago as something clicked and I was able to make the connection between the food I was eating and the animals who were being killed, almost certainly unnecessarily, for that food. Bu…

My assumption is that the weight of including vegans socially is too much to bear for some. On the extreme end, you can't use store pasta because it was made in a facility that processes eggs and dairy. But even on the lighter end, social eating modification is pretty extreme: don't use butter when cooking, or eggs, or honey, etc. It's a lot easier to accommodate vegetarians than vegans.

Though I do have a vegan friend that always brings her own food to gatherings, and it does make things far easier.

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