21–30 of 141 posts
Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs. > He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts". > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa End to life worthy of being envied.
How does one rat mentor another?
Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs. > He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts". > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa End to life worthy of being envied.
How does one rat mentor another?
I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for bet…
Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?
These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.
Those mice have a sculpture as well[0]. Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...
So the hierarchy is
- our kids
- "third-world orphans"
- other species
For what it's worth, I'm not denying the benefit we obtain by testing on animals, nor am I suggesting that we live surrounded by rodents that we know to be vectors for multiple diseases that would affect us.
The comment above was merely an observation on the value of life and how little attention we pay to it.
We subject sentient beings to untold amounts of horror every day, and we are completely destroying the balance of life on earth with a system that is entirely devoted to serving humans--individual humans, not humanity.
The statue is not the point. The point is what this little creature did and how we might learn to show mercy and respect to our fellow sentient beings.
> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs. > He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts". > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa End to life worthy of being envied.
I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death. A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535 ), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
I agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death. A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535 ), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Just missing the "controversies" and "personal life" sections!