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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

The story about dolphins makes me wonder why domestic horses are viewed as normal. When I compare them to dolphins the same boxes pops up. Horses have evolved to run great distances and live in larger social groups. The area which horses are kept is comparable very small compared to their wild counterpart. Horses are usually kept with only one or a few other horses, but the law do allow them to be isolated. There isn't much strict law dictating how much space they must have.

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Comments like your's makes me wonder why humans have been turned into zombies sitting in front of a desk most of their lives. Humans also did not evolve for the environment that they have created for themselves with their technology. They evolved as hunter gatherers that often traveled large distances chasing their food source. What they created for themselves in their sedentary lifestyles in no way resembles that.

Humans have a choice. Captive animals don't.

Captive have no choice but most humans don’t really have one either.

Perhaps we don’t anymore? Not for most of us anyway. In a sense we too are domesticated and brought up in captivity.

Even if we knew how to survive. Between private property, most wildlife being eradicated, the rest being protected, loss of natural ecosystems to farmland (private property) and ranch land (private property), commercial fishing reducing the abundance of fish available, other areas being protected from fishing, rivers being dammed up or polluted, water tables dropping due to the pumping of ground water, and our sheer numbers. Perhaps Living like hunter gatherers is no longer a choice available to us. It is either live as we do now, or perish. I know that is how it would be for me.

It's a sobering thought.

We don't and we haven't for thousands of years since farming and the states, empires, and concept of ownership which sprung up as a result of that. It's almost impossible to be a hunter gatherer anymore... and those who still choose to practice this sort of life style are far an between and often prey to other actors who exploit the fact that they have little representation in modern society.

I think both your comment and your parent poster’s comments make sense.

Perhaps because we are endurance hunters, we are programmed from birth to seek comfort & idleness. The way I see it, we were "designed" to live in tension between wanting to be idle (to save energy), but having to be active to survive.

Once we became runaway successful, that tension between a need to be active & a desire to be idle started to disappear.

Yes. Excessive working hours and too little exercise are huge problems pretty nearly everywhere in the world. The problem of cruelty to one species is in no way diminished by observing the problem of cruelty to another species. Were you suggesting otherwise?

IMO the answer is pretty simple; they were vital to building modern society, and as a result we're culturally accustomed to their use.

It probably helps that many (though by no stretch all) horses are very well taken care of and have a job to do. Show animals on the other hand (horse or dolphin) have a long track record of abuse, exploitation, neglect, and boredom.

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