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Comment by bzb5 | Hacker News Reader

In your first paragraph, you might be humanising the beasts quite too much.

Orcas are known to be highly intelligent and are also known to be able to operate on a pretty decent level of thinking. Seeing boats take your food while you starve is not a difficult conclusion to draw that the boats are total assholes who need to be taught a lesson.

I remember learning Humpbacks work to deny Orcas meals sometimes. I can totally imagine Orcas connecting the dots to attack smaller boats. If anything it could just be stress + source of noise == bad.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-wha...

Here's another interesting piece:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/male-orca-and-its-...

A young male orca and its mother kills a orca baby by drowning it during four hours, with the baby orca's mother nearby.

The researchers are guessing they did it so that the other mother orca that had just had its baby killed could be impregnated by the young male orca, thereby making sure that its genetics would be spread.

Why are humans that catch the food they need to survive total assholes, but the oracs who need to catch the food they need to survive are not total assholes?

if orcas were successfully depriving us of food rather than the other way around, we would view them as assholes

I used to have two dogs. They would check if they were given equal amounts of food and would protest otherwise. Seems logical that Orcas, a much more intelligent animal, would understand that the boats are eating their food.

Would the dog that was given more food protest?

Mine do the next day when I correct the imbalance.

Would an employee that is given higher salary then rest of the team protest?

As someone who regularly prods Juniors to see what they're making in case they get taken for rides like I did, I hope I'm not in the minority of saying yes; that's getting a bit beyond the issue at matter though as I'm pretty sure that the Orca were not consulted as to how they thought it would be most fair to divide up the spoils of the natural world.

No. If there is a big piece of meat, he'll take it and run away.

Why is it so hard for humans to accept that other animals might have feelings?

Especially as emotions are really physical states. The "I feel sad/happy/disgusted" is a verbal layer on top of the physical response.

Animals in general, whether Humans or Orcas, don't grant members of other species special understanding or consideration and are usually very ruthless. It's the biological norm, and not unique to humanity. Humans are unique in that we do hesitate before killing and eating another species' babies, and we prefer not to play with our prey before the kill.

That exceptionalism only really applies to in-person encounters. If it's out of sight, out of mind, then we're as indifferent as any other.

> Humans are unique in that we do hesitate before killing and eating another species' babies, and we prefer not to play with our prey before the kill.

It's only in places where you have the luxury. Humans still eat veal. Male baby chick are still being shredded alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

The meat industry hasn't been completely taken over by robots yet. Humans are still doing the killing, especially with calves. Tribes that heavily rely on hunt won't hesitate much either.

Regarding playing with our prey, we elevated it to sport and culture (Fox hunting for example). Not even for sustenance, just entertainment.

> Animals in general, whether Humans or Orcas, don't grant members of other species special understanding or consideration and are usually very ruthless.

Since this is a thread about Orcas, Orcas are extremely friendly to humans and there are no reported human deaths from wild orcas. There's countless videos you can observe yourself of them playing with kayakers, boats, or even kids scratching the orca's tongue. Hardly would consider that "very ruthless."

That they have feelings is easy, of course they do. Whether they coincide exactly, or even mostly, with that of the human experience, is very non-obvious.

And you might be bestialising the orcas quite too much.

Someone once described the sound small boats make underwater as "snakes" or "parsel tongue" to me after being underwater when a boat happened to pass by.

My first reaction was, "Wow, fish must hate us."

Propellers are pretty noisy, even when they're not singing (a common flaw - look it up). As divers, we appreciate the warning, but also known how far this noise carries even to our human ears, which are poorly attuned to the environment.

Unfortunately, this is a sample size of 1, so it's hard to know what's different about this pod versus all the other pods that have interacted frequently with boats without attacking them. But we do know that this population is much more stressed by human behavior than most orca populations.

Beasts? Perhaps you are demonizing them too much.

Why do you think that? What part of the paragraph?

What aspect is over-humanized?

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