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Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

theguardian.com

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Re: Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

#71

Post by dTal »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #22
blondie9x wrote: post #12

Whales are intelligent. They should not be killed by humans who mask the activities as scientific research. Japan is a great country and a leader on many levels. I speak Japanese. I enjoy Japanese food and culture. The people are very kind and considerate. There are some who are concerned if you stop killing whales you must stop killing fish and other forms of sustenance. This is not the case. The difference is whale…

>The difference is whales are not sustenance and are not something most Japanese would eat or enjoy to eat. Wow this is presumptuous, whale meat has a long history in Japan and whales have been used for sustenance for a long time. That they should not be sustenance is your opinion. Pigs are intelligent too. Unfortunately eating animals in general is fraught with moral quandary. Please stop making blanket statements a…

I'm not sure why you reacted so strongly to what is a statement of hard truth. Whale meat was used for sustenance for a few decades following WW2, because that's all there was. With the availability of other meat, demand has fallen radically. It's not a hugely integral part of their culture, nobody is surviving off of it anymore, and it is in fact the case that most people, including Japanese, don't find it especially palatable.

Re: Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

#73

Post by ccozan »

coldtea wrote: post #59
tormeh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every being with a consciousness must have feelings. Otherwise the consciousness wouldn't know what to do.

Senses are not the same as what we call feelings. And consciousness can be very basic -- merely responding to sensory input.

Consciousness is on a higher level: it observes what we observe ( = sensory input, either intern/vegetative or extern).

Means, body feels pain, the consciousness can tell "I fell pain" - not necessarily in words but on a similar "language".

Re: Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

#74

Post by labster »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #19
sethbannon wrote: post #17

Listening to these remarkable recordings, I can't help but think that as time goes on, more and more of the artificial mental barriers we've built between us and non-human animals will fall. I hope with more research humanity stops seeing non-human animals as resources to be exploited but rather as sentient beings to be respected.

Humans presumably are seen as sentient yet [the majority of us?] are being exploited in one way or another: Capitalism has no inbuilt concept of respect. If you meant not exploited for food, that is obviously different. I'm not aware of any humans that do that anymore. Now tell me how you judge sentience?

Ugh not this Marxist BS again. This is completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Let's talk about improving animal welfare in this thread and not go into yet another tangent about human political systems.

Re: Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

#75

Post by freeflight »

aspaceman wrote: post #70
meaniehusker wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

everyone calm down...nature is ruthless. here spend some time on https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/

Naturalism is a fallacy for a reason - there's no intrinsic advantage to being more like nature. Instead let's reason about it just as we would anything else. There's also no need to tell people to calm down. The discussion in this thread appears quite calm to me.

> there's no intrinsic advantage to being more like nature

It all depends on how you define "advantage":

Being integrated into the ecosystem, instead of acting outside of it like it doesn't exist or matter at all to our survival, and thus being able to survive long-term is a rather big advantage. Otherwise, we might become victims of our own "success" [0].

Now, if you define advantage very narrowly, as in "What's in it for ME?" then you might have a point, tho it's a very shortsighted and egoistical point which leads back to [0].

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

Re: Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

#76

Post by ccozan »

hackbinary wrote: post #49
exclusiv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses are huge animals and often have to be put down for injuries to their legs. It's a shame to let meat go to waste. I don't know about killing horses in their prime though if that's what they do.

Animals that have to be euthenised for one reason or another cannot, and nor should they enter the food chain for humans, cats, dog, or otherwise. Firstly, there are the drugs they use to humanely put down the patient which would be toxic to down stream consumers of the meat products, and secondly there maybe concerns about zoonosis.

If they choose to put down a horse and decide to used for human consumption, then they will certainly use a different method ( shot, hammer, etc ).

Re: Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

#77

Post by logfromblammo »

dorchadas wrote: post #30
irrational wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way about horses. They serve horse steaks in Iceland (and probably other places) which I find equally as barbaric.

The difference for me is that horses can be (and are) domesticated and raised for their meat. Nor are they necessarily endangered. If you find horsemeat barbaric, what about beef or chicken or pork? What about deer?

Americans have a cultural attachment to horses that is probably related to them being used the modal means of transportation for hundreds of years in a country that is very sparsely developed, where most points of interest are separated by a great deal of distance.

Horses are like cars that can be happy to take you somewhere. And you don't disrespect an American's automobile. We'd eat sausages made from horses that died normally, but slaughtering one for meat is like burning a car just to get warm on a chilly evening.

There's also the potential problem of former racehorses, pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs, contaminating the food supply with their pharmaceutically tainted meat.

It definitely isn't because horses are smart. It may be because some of them are movie and television stars, a few are star athletes, some are considered pets or companion animals, and many are considered tools or co-workers. They don't have great brains, but they do have personality, even if much of that has been supplied by popular culture rather than actual contact with the animals.

Americans don't eat their dogs and cats, either. Some of them are dumber than a sackful of hammers, but you just don't eat family.

Beef? Cows won't fit in the house. Bulls are dangerous.

Pork? Most pigs turn into big fat jerks when they hit maturity, then they grow heavy enough to be dangerous. Also, they dig up everything they can smell, and are not overly averse to offal and excrement.

Chicken? Chickens are non-mammals, so it's harder to project our mammalian attachment behaviors onto them.

Deer? If they wanted mercy from me, they would have stayed out of all the gardens I have ever planted. But I also know people who won't eat venison because of Bambi.

We just won't eat foods that have the wrong narrative. Horses have Mr. Ed, Trigger, Silver, Satan II, Secretariat, Flicka, that one you rode at summer camp that one time, Epona, mounted police horses, the Budweiser Clydesdales, etc., etc., etc. There's even a literary trope where the named horse character has more "common sense" than its rider.

Re: Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

#78

Post by freeflight »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #19
sethbannon wrote: post #17

Listening to these remarkable recordings, I can't help but think that as time goes on, more and more of the artificial mental barriers we've built between us and non-human animals will fall. I hope with more research humanity stops seeing non-human animals as resources to be exploited but rather as sentient beings to be respected.

Humans presumably are seen as sentient yet [the majority of us?] are being exploited in one way or another: Capitalism has no inbuilt concept of respect. If you meant not exploited for food, that is obviously different. I'm not aware of any humans that do that anymore. Now tell me how you judge sentience?

It's really sad how any kind of critique of capitalism, no matter how minor, instantly triggers, the very same and very predictable, knee-jerk responses along the lines of "Communism killed billions!".

Like the wonders of capitalism don't kill anybody or like there are only those two choices between capitalism and some Soviet-style centrally planned communism.

Which begs the question: Do these people really think we've reached the end of the line in terms of economic systems? I'm asking this question in all seriousness because I'm utterly confused by this lack of imagination/curiosity behind such a mindset.

Re: Orcas can imitate human speech, research reveals

#79

Post by eivarv »

freeflight wrote: post #75
aspaceman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naturalism is a fallacy for a reason - there's no intrinsic advantage to being more like nature. Instead let's reason about it just as we would anything else. There's also no need to tell people to calm down. The discussion in this thread appears quite calm to me.

> there's no intrinsic advantage to being more like nature It all depends on how you define "advantage": Being integrated into the ecosystem, instead of acting outside of it like it doesn't exist or matter at all to our survival, and thus being able to survive long-term is a rather big advantage. Otherwise, we might become victims of our own "success" [0]. Now, if you define advantage very narrowly, as in "What's in…

I think they're referring to the "appeal to nature" [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

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