If you were an elephant
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you were an elephant... be careful, though. You’re likely to end up dead because someone wants a couple of your teeth."
That was beautifully written.
That was ascribing human emotions and behaviors to animals without a lot of evidence.
It reminds me of this photo[1]. People thought the male was hugging the dying female in a fit of grief. So touching.
When they asked animal experts, it turns out the male was actually forcing the female to mate. In human terms we call that rape.
[1] http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/science/dying-kanga...
If animals have rape, it's a subset of human-on-human rape, and carries fewer of the nuanced consequences of rape among humans.
Psychological trauma is probably not even in the equation when it comes to rape among most animals below a certain level of intelligence, particularly when considering untamed animals.
Due to the minimal psychological aspects, which assuredly are a hallmark of human-on-human rape, and the bald fact that the very word "rape" itself carries loaded connotations when considered as a concept by humans, I wonder if it is appropriate to use the same word for variations of sexual intercourse and related behavior among wild animals.
It was humans have always applied our feel good emotions to animals and we do it incorrectly all the time. Here's one example.
To the grief, most humans might rape but most won't commit necrophilia. I think it's a pretty good argument against grief in animals. (There's a lot of additional evidence of necrophilia in animals)
The image is of a highly stressed male that is trying to get the attention of a dead female by nudging and lifting the head with his arm. It might look odd, but its no more strange than a peacock lifting his feathers over a cat. In human terms we call that confused behavior, as we don't generally say that peacocks are raping cats.
Mammals, like humans, do both good and bad things. They have similar brains. Those similar brains probably experience the world in similar ways.
You guys should consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights these poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[2], is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train the park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed. There is also the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[3][4] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans (most of them are orphans due to poaching). For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular animal and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor this little cutie [5][6].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander
[3] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust
[5] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp...
[6] https://www.instagram.com/p/BPoboF8j84H
You should also check out https://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs for your daily dose of pachyderm based content.
Done, thanks!
Word on the street is that FWS is rolling out/testing new tech that will make enforcement a lot easier.
Are those the most ridiculous sounds ever?
If there were a Canadian organization as effective I could make a donation go further. I usually stick to Canadian charities for this reason. However, this idea seems very good so perhaps I'll make an exception if none exist.
Done.
I'm incredibly interested in animal minds (I just started reading that book that was posted a while back, Other Minds, about octopuses and consciousness, and I'm really liking it.) And of course, I think that poaching should be illegal and that we should protect and conserve the environment.
But...
> … the world would be a brighter, smellier, noisier place – and you would be a better, wiser, kinder person
No, I wouldn't be a 'better ... person', I would be an elephant! Elephants have not created great works of art, literature, architecture, and poetry. Elephants have no written language, cannot build complex machines, and have not traveled to other worlds, or even explored their own. People have done incredible things with their bodies and minds in a way that animals simply cannot, period. This is (arguably) all a consequence of evolution being a competition, and humans being predators. People like to fight and win, to be better than something else. And while it would be great if human nature was just competitive enough to produce results, but not make humans physically violent, that would be fantastic! But I don't think evolution can exactly fine-tune something like that.
This happens every time that animal consciousness is discussed: somebody tries to claim that the animals in question have a completely different way of life than humans, and that their way of life is 'better', usually because they are peaceful, and that you are arrogant and ignorant if you don't agree. I think that's horseshit.
This would be almost tolerable if it didn't have the subtle feminist jabs hidden in there with the smug moral superiority - "As a boy, your function would be to inseminate, and that's all. Government would be the business of the females." As if being a walking pair of testes was somehow more noble than fighting, struggling, learning, winning, like human boys do. Stop all those pesky masculine behaviors, you "infantile phallocentric [nihilist]." Just be good and dumb and stay where you are.
Personally, what annoys me is the the current (soon to be completed) genocide against certain elephant species -- and the people who profit from it. Once we have the problem contained (and reversed), I can imagine someone having the time and adrenaline to be "really annoyed" by some less than precisely articulated philosophical musings they read in The Guardian.
Who are we to deem an elephant's mind inferior to our own? Its brain is three times as massive as ours! Perhaps elephants have long solved questions we aren't even considering, handing down knowledge from generation to generation. Maybe their memory is more reliable than ours and preserves knowledge perfectly. How can we know?
This human arrogance seems to stem from the fact that communication with other beings is difficult at best. We have no practical way into their minds, and they don't write, so they can't show us what they're pondering all day. That does not mean they sleep, eat and fuck waiting for the coffin like the rest of us. Make no mistake, humans are more physically sophisticated, but mentally? Bar the rare individuals that advance our civilization, we're a bunch of wildly destructive animals held together by a set of rules we can't actually agree on. We're the only species that destroys environment and life just for the heck of it.
I like humanity a lot. It has a great ability to transform its environment, and writing things down certainly helps in enabling its intellectual progress. As you rightly point out, we've only come this far through competition, but I think we have reached a point in our technological development that enables us to shed that character and refocus. We should turn inwards, because the outside is reaching the limits of what it can give us. Our minds are something we have no grasp of, and provide those who look with endless wonder and discovery. If we want to be truly more advanced than any other life form on this planet, we have to get our shit together regarding the mind, otherwise it's all for nothing (i.e. will physically be blown to pieces sooner or later).
I for one am filled with extreme pride when I look at the works of my human ancestors. We descended from the trees and will soon travel those distant points of light that filled us with wonder so long ago. Billions of us have died in that effort, your comment betrays their noble contribution.
Elephants are great. We should endeavor to protect them and show them kindness, but the reason we are able to do so is because we are vastly superior to them.
2) What distinguishes humans most of all is our lack of competitiveness, especially amongst ourselves[1]. The genetic underpinnings of that are still largely a mystery--nothing we understand about Darwinian genetic evolution, game theory, etc, explains how it arose nor how its sustained. But it clearly has something to do with our intrinsic ability to empathize. And some biologists would argue that our heightened empathy preceded our rationality.
Given the apparent overlap of empathic ability with other mammals, especially mammals like elephants, we would likely do well to focus on preservation. Because of the scientific value. And because showing compassion and empathy is perhaps the most important human quality of all. Fortunately, we have the brains to figure out how to do that without neglecting our own existential dilemmas. And it may turn out that maintaining and increasing intelligence in the zero-sum Darwinian evolutionary meat grinder is predicated on empathy.
[1] All the wars in all our history don't conflict with this fact. Humans can still be exceptionally violent, but in comparison to the degree in which non-familial members cooperate it's minimal. Our habitual willingness to cooperate in the first instance with random individuals is even more interesting given our capacity for violence. There's a reason that even after bootcamp most soldiers will still hesitate--if not downright refuse--to shoot an enemy without direct provocation. Or why a soldier would even go to war when his family isn't in immediate danger, or he could move his family to some other, non-belligerent country. And most violent people in our society suffer from recognized mental disorders which, among other things, cripple their ability to empathize.
What use are accomplishments if you let people starve or actively and violently punish them for being different than you? If you choose not to help those in need when you have the power to help them, how can you call yourself a better person because you have a higher IQ or wrought more complicated works?
I easily could, by defining greatness in terms of accomplishments and creations. (Not saying that I do that, but I could.) It all depends on your values.
I think there's a much deeper question here, which addresses the possibility of a total ordering of everything 'valuable'. Is life of an individual elephant valuable? Undoubtedly. However I think most people, in some twisted hypothetical scenario, would choose to protect the life of an individual human over the life of an individual elephant. Elephant communities are undoubtedly valuable. So are human communities. This question, of which one is 'more valuable', is for some reason, significantly more personal and subjective than the last question. Once you add objects or concepts into it then it gets even more subjective: a child's doodle is certainly not more valuable than the life of an elephant, but what about the entirety of the Sistine Chapel? What about the US Constitution? That's hairy.
I think much of the discussion in this thread is between people who don't think life can ever have a total ordering with regards to 'value' and people who think it does, and that the total ordering is quite clear. I won't give an explicit opinion because I don't think I can, and also because we're getting off-topic, but feel free to note that I did support conservationism in my original comment.
Neither do they slaughter one another in their millions, which is the precise point of the quote that apparently went over your head. And elephants do things with their bodies and minds that people do not do: numerous examples were provided.
And you exhibit little understanding of how evolution actually works. Kindly educate yourself about the role of mechanisms like cooperation and symbiosis in driving the "advancement" (sic) of species.
And your axe-grinding about feminism is just silly and semi-hysterical and basically tiresome. Please just take that somewhere else. Stuff like this really annoys the rest of us.
Elephant "ESP" can be explained by infra-sound, however: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/cyclotis/language/...
I'm trying to imagine some harder ones; animals that we can tell are highly intelligent but are more distantly related. If you were a crow. If you were an octopus.
Consider how our own bodies are capable of sensing so much from our surroundings with touch alone and how little we make use of it.
Fill up a glass by sound? yes, but except in rare cases, it's supplemental
Identify shirt by feel? Only if I didn't turn on the light - Yes, I can recognize the shirt I'm wearing by feel, or can tell what shirt I've grabbed out of the laundry basket while watching TV, but I definitely choose the shirt to wear by sight.
Recognize a person by smell? Almost always see them first.
> Recognize a person by smell? Almost always see them first.
Haha, of course. I was thinking more along the lines of “Somebody left a sweatshirt at my apartment after the party—whose is it?”
If only that were more typical. What I see in the western parts of the US are lots of beginner players who are afraid to tune their strident, high pitched, pingy drums. (Also some good players.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Being-Beast-Charles-Foster-ebook/dp/B...