These zoo live cams let you hang out with pandas, giraffes, and other animals | Hacker News Reader

These zoo live cams let you hang out with pandas, giraffes, and other animals

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54 pointshhs16 comments

if you are not enjoying your temporary confinement think of these poor animals who have to endure it for the rest of their lives.

Sad to see this comment being downvoted.

I can't believe people still do this to animals in most countries...

It's anthropomorphising. Animals in a properly sized and well-made habitat aren't in distress.

How do you know that? Descartes believed that animals couldn't feel pain. We're all shocked by that now, but he could have (in fact probably did) use an argument similar to "that's anthropomorphising".

There's a long history of humans making claims about what animals don't experience, in order to justify how we treat them, only to later discover evidence that overturns the claims. It seems to me that this has to be the default explanation for zoos as well.

How do you know plants don't feel pain?

Not sure why you are asking this, but there's evidence that plants do feel pain.

At least some can emit chemicals to signal to others of their species that they are infested with harmful insects so other plants can begin producing toxins to protect themselves from infestation. Some also emit a pulse when damaged, which one might think if as kind of like a scream, though it's not anything humans can perceive with our innate senses.

(At least, not most of us. There may be exceptions. Some humans are abnormally good at sensing magnetic north, etc.)

A stimulus reaction isn't the same thing as "feeling pain", which requires a certain level of consciousness. It's debatable if even lobsters for example have the necessary development.

Haha serotonin printer go brrr

that's valid, but it's a tradeoff too. living in the wild can be brutal. zoos bring empathy for animals to people who are otherwise shielded from the wild.

with that said, i'd be happy if zoos (and the pens within) were 10x-100x bigger.

... And what if we are enjoying it? Could that mean there are animals that do, in fact, enjoy living in a zoo? Many animals at my local zoo are rescues, so perhaps living in confinement beats dying to those animals?

There's also some live cameras from the Melbourne Zoo in Australia.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS9UBqaUtoIXUhX0J1BnxwQ

It doesn’t help now (at least not live, but you can watch highlights) but there are some webcams at Brooks Falls in Katmai, where bears famously congregate each summer to fish the salmon run. I watched quite a few good shots last June/July. Probably plenty of other webcams on that site I have yet to check out.

https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brooks-falls-brown-...

That Georgia Aquarium cam is awesome. I now need an AR layer that identifies whatever is swimming past.

Yup, just like going to the zoo in person. The first link I tried was the San Diego Zoo's Panda Cam, and all I saw was an image empty any pandas.

I heard that the zoo animals are super relaxed because they don't have to care about human visitors staring then down

Thanks for that. Will be much appreciated by the parents of a two-year-old in locked-down UK. :-)

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