Your definition of restraint seems based on that one example.
What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any animal takes through a farming process like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism?
What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any animal takes through a farming process like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism?
I made a pretty generalized argument, but the point is, what we observe as harmony in nature - the balance between predator and prey, the various species of animals and plants (and bacteria and viruses) living next to each other - is a dynamic process that involves lots of blood, death and starvation. The order in nature isn't negotiated - it's an aggregate of countless number of conflicts.
Related, recently on HN, "Trillions of Viruses Fall from the Sky Each Day": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636. The money quote from the article is mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575.
"One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily."
That's nature's harmony at work.
We had a cat once who, we found out, liked to sit in the berry bushes in the garden, wait for a bird to land, and then kill them. She didn't didn't eat them - she much preferred the cat food she got. She just murdered bird after bird and left them to rot.
Cats certainly are not the best examples of harmony.
(Apart from the scum that are some humans...)
Since it seems to me that "fun" or "malice" or other motivations cannot be measured that precisely in animal kingdom, i think it is fair to say that surplus killing covers your question.
Obviously not. All kinds of animals kill. Also it's not "for fun" in the way we're having fun. They don't plan on entertaining themselves that way, weighing and ignoring the moral impact, etc.
It's an instinct they have. It's training to hone their hunting skills -- which they need evolutionary to survive -- even if they we take there of them for the last 5-10.000 years (which is very little in evolutionary terms)
It's not, it's just their nature, which in other words is what they evolved to do.
If not, why you think it's okay to condemn another living creature to such a life sentence? After all, its well-being is just as important as yours, is it not so?
Cats seem pretty alright with "lifetime seclusion", anyways. As with other domesticated pets, the only reason they exist is because they are, on the whole, happy being domesticated; if they all hated their lives (in a way that we were aware of), we wouldn't breed them to begin with.
I'm no expert but I vaguely recall hearing from non-trivial sources that this is a common but inaccurate misrepresentation as regards their "intent". They are not "toying" with their hunting target so much as obeying a powerful instinct to be careful to kill it with the minimum risk of infection from getting even a small scratch in return from a target that is "playing dead" as a defense/evade tactic.
What about it? Other animals don't restrain, and even a cat can eat too many of its treats at once, and end up obese.
Here's some info on cats:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stone-cold...
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/it-s-official-cats-ar...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/kille...