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Comment by tmh88j | Hacker News Reader

>It's not quite what you're looking for, but animals have at least been shown to exhibit preference of what species animals they will eat.

Occam's razor says that most wild animals exhibit preference of what species they'll eat based on taste and availability of food, not because of ethics. I said most because I'm not a wildlife biologist and there always seems to be strange outliers, but I have a hard time believing an omnivore/carnivore, such as a bear, would willingly choose vegetation 100% of the time because of ethics when there's plenty of game of its preference to eat.

>Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.

Most domesticated dogs that were raised alongside cats won't eat them because they've learned that they're not allowed to. The ones that do attack children and other pets are frequently euthanized.

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Dogs raised alongside cats never even try to eat them to begin with. You don't need to teach them it's not allowed. There must be another explanation.

>Dogs raised alongside cats never even try to eat them to begin with. You don't need to teach them it's not allowed.

That's an absurd statement. While tempers of dogs vary from one to the next just like humans, I vehemently disagree to the extent that I'm hesitant to believe you've ever raised a puppy, or even have been exposed to many dogs for that matter. Plenty of pet dogs behave more like their wolf ancestors than others.

I've raised dozens of dogs, and like humans, some need some coaching about good behavior and some get along just fine without ever needing discipline.

That's a separate issue from the one I raised, namely that animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

>animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

If there is any species-oriented preferences outside of taste and availability, it's purely out of a symbiotic relationship that they benefit from. Wolves aren't going to stop hunting deer unless the deer somehow provide additional sources of food that the wolves realize only exists because of the deer's help.

I've read about wolves that they eat only the meat they are taught to eat (and different pack of wolves in different places hunt different animals.) So a wolf may literally starve to death while sitting near a corpse of some animal if it doesn't know it can eat it. May happen to pups if their pack dies or to wolves who were brought up in captivity.

The source is in Russian from a zoologist who studied wolves: https://sovet.blocknote.info/articles/443/serdtse-volka-semy...

Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).

>Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).

You agree with me.

Cannibal cults disintegrate whatever wishy-washy point you were trying to make here.

In many cases, I have observed that an emotional connection with another animal is enough to prevent hunting of either just the animal itself or in some cases the entire species. In a more extreme example I've known chickens to run amok and play with dogs like they were one of their own.

And not just dogs. I have trained cats to become friendly to individual rats (I think instinct is too strong), and I have seen some species express either preference or disdain for other species. My personal analysis is that this has more to do with social and emotional conditioning, a true recognition of another animal as "friendly" despite not offering a symbiotic relationship, rather than directly as a result of behavioral conditioning with positive/negative stimulus.

I think a better indicator of the difference between us and pets is that we keep pets, and further, that we sometimes keep pets purely for emotional benefits. Incidences of non-humans keeping other animals as pets is extremely rare and seemingly limited to primates. [0] I think that says a lot about our psychology. But it's a little pointless to debate about whether other mammals experience meaningful emotions. They do. Meaningful emotions are actionable. That's why our emotions seem meaningful.

[0] https://bioone.org/journals/Neotropical-Primates/volume-13/i...

> If there is any species-oriented preferences outside of taste and availability, it's purely out of a symbiotic relationship that they benefit from.

Isn’t that how humans operate as well? People keep pets that they get satisfaction from but we don’t eat our pets.

Then you have the debate of whether true altruism exists or whether people do even our most selfless acts because of the endorphin rush we get from helping others.

Erst kommt das fressen dann kommt die Moral

Hypocrisyis when your lifestyle is a full blown war on whole ecosystems and kills a dozen animals per year and you pretend to deeply care- for one animal, chosen by traits that could best be described as missguided antromorphism.

Your pet would eat you, if you had a stroke in your flat- lying helpless on the floor. All the nice moments, are just a function of the surpulus, that is provided by humanity via ecocide.

My daughter killed a small rabbit when she was 4 year old. I was not there but the story is that mom tried to take it away from her and she got overly violent trying to snatch it back out of mom's hands. Clearly she did not have the bunny's welfare in mind in this moment or she would have been more gentle. I don't see a difference between her actions/motivations and that of an overly rambunctious puppy. In general, my daughter is a very kind, compassionate, caring person.

It's absurd you think puppies raised with cats would try to eat them without human intervention. That's far from the norm.

Clearly you have not lived in a city with a large stray population. Even deer eat birds and squirrels. Hunger is hunger. Avoidance is totally learned.

I would eat any living organism except for another human and close pets whom mean a whole lot to me emotionally and whom carry transitional memories that my brain wishes to keep.

Not eating another human has nothing to do with the fact that we share a species and everything to do with the conscious psychological decision to have respect for the life of all highly cognitive beings which can live complex lives, and not arrogantly place my own need for survival higher than theirs...

But nuances aside, fundamentally I don't differ from the deer, birds, or squirrels in that I'm wired to do almost anything necessary to satisfy my hunger impulse. So I'm not sure how what you're saying makes any difference.

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