And Bears, too:
> Even though it may appear that the bear attacked for no reason, there was a reason. "You can train them and use as many safety precautions as you can, but you're still taking a chance. It's still a wild animal"
Indeed. https://archive.is/BsriF
My cat still tries to hunt my foot when bored. If she were a tiger, I would have a very serious problem to deal with (it's hard to buy shoes individually)
But how about a lion?
Exactly how big a handful becomes much clearer when someone close to you spends long enough manic and without sleep, then goes psychotic.
When my sister went crazy in exactly the manner described, I learned that I was wrong. Totally wrong.
What I was really trying to say though was that I can barely control him now. I can’t imagine I would be able to when he’s 80kgs.
A manic adult is more coherent, but goes on for days. I mean that literally - mania keeps you from sleeping.
Bulls are domesticated animals, after all.
the history of our civilization proves that raging 80 kg human with a weapon is a much worse than any other animal. Even mammoths went down before us. This is why we took over that planet and are an apex predator and are a most dangerous animal around.
This is a story I want to hear.
My second encounter was actually inside. I lived on the first floor, not sure where he lived, but he was coming the opposite direction with the dog. It started dragging him, I hustled up the stairs (I was next to them, fortunately) while he regained control and got it outside.
The third encounter was the one I mentioned. I had returned from the gym (I walked there, it was a mile away) and was at the entrance when I heard the dog to my left. I looked and it was pulling on him, then it was free from him. Fortunately it had about 100' to cover before it would get to me and I got inside in a hurry (keypad entry, so at least there was no fumbling with keys and locks).
I really never wanted to be within 100' of that dog again, but they wouldn't evict him even after that incident. I moved a couple months later.
“Susie raised a pet squirrel from birth. It was very well-trained, calm, and seemed to think it was a dog. It would come when called, could do tricks, etc.”
There would be some scenario that would follow where the test-taker would be asked to decide whether this indubitably gentle creature was a “wild animal.” The answer is always yes... training, temperament, etc. has nothing to do with it.
(The issue comes up in legal cases — albeit, rarely — due to the different levels of responsibility one has towards others when one’s pet or livestock causes damage or injury. For a “domesticated animal”, the owner usually needs to be negligent in some way. But, for a “wild animal”, the owner is always strictly liable.
Which is odd in many ways... you may have less liability when your vicious pit bull attacks than when your pet sloth lashes out at someone tormenting it. For, the sloth is by definition “wild” and the dog is, by definition, “domesticated.”
I know how the pronoun was intended to be used, and I’m not attributing any ill-intent. It’s perfectly appropriate to use “we” when referring to humans in general; such as “back before we discovered nuclear power” or “back when we discovered antibiotics.”
But, for something as recent (and ongoing) as slavery, you may want to think twice before using such a sweeping pronoun. A good portion of the US, for instance, have great-grandparents who literally fought in a war to abolish slavery. More subtly, the use of “we” seems to impute blame or responsibility on those living for actions taken by a very small group of people. It’s neither accurate nor useful.
Saying that it was a very small number of people sounds a mite ridiculous to me. Multiple cultures throughout history have supported/accepted it.
It is also a reminder. These weren’t storybook monsters, they were humans, and we should be reminded of that lest we regress.
We’re certainly not to blame, but we are responsible for not going back there.
I guess given my origins you can also read it as either country or race, but that wasn’t the intent since it isn’t that exclusive. It’s been a fairly consistent theme throughout history somewhere.
>I'm not sure it's fair to call a gorilla a "wild animal" when they've been so socialized that they live in a human home
Though you could make a similar argument for domesticated animals like dogs. Especially larger dogs. Or humans! There are a lot of things that can be dangerous to humans, especially children, when they fly off the handle.
There is always a risk. Most animals function emotionally like humans, but have no good way of communicating emotions like frustration and anger except through aggression.
But locking up animals in cages - those who easily have the capacity to understand what you are doing to them - is cruel and immoral. So you either have to live with them or leave them be in their natural habitat.
You wouldn't lock up a human either for having the capacity to harm someone else.
So if you end up with an orphaned gorilla in your care, morally you are between a rock and a hard place.
Highly experienced trainers who understand very well their animals end up dead. I think it is quite a high grounded statement to call professional zoo-keepers and related professionals lazy.
The only understanding i can see is that having wild animals as pets should be banned as they normally are in most jurisdictions.
and I further retort that humans are animals, and that classifying humans into "something other than animals" is fundamentally flawed.
Why are so many humans wont on forgetting that we're an animals too?
> The only understanding i can see is that having wild animals as pets should be banned as they normally are in most jurisdictions.
I suppose owning humans as pets is already banned in all jurisdictions, so I think we agree on this.
Humans who understand other humans also get killed by humans - at rates other animals will never match.
In the ballpark of ~20,000 murders are committed every year in the US, yet even though there are 90 million dogs in that same country, only about 30 to 50 people are killed by dogs.
It would be pointless comparing the number of fatal bear attacks, because the numbers per year are usually 0-2, and usually by wild animals, not ones in captivity.
At the end of the day the most dangerous thing to a human is another human. No other animal comes remotely close.
That is true, but also not related to what your GP was talking about IMHO.
I understood their comment as coming from a perspective of either "you should fear what you can't understand/explain - and you can't really understand animals" or "it's their nature to be violent, it doesn't matter whether you understand them", either of which I think is flawed.
You made a much better point.
I just have a habit of picking at reasoning even if I agree with the conclusion. Sometimes you end up with a more concise and to the point argument at the end of that, and in this case it came from you!
The stronger argument is that animals aren't as aware as humans which actions will have consequences. Animals do have customs about what's okay and what's not, but they often don't align with human society's laws.
It's "ignorance of the law is no excuse" taken to an extreme.
For another argument, consider that if you went into the woods and were mauled by a bear, nobody who found your body would feel the need to confront the bear and hold it responsible. The bear would not need to be convicted in order to be acted against.
This is because we make the right decision to not live in close proximity to lions, tigers, bears, apes and all the other menagerie of dangerous creatures we share Earth with.
> "...only about 30 to 50 people are killed by dogs"
It's not a coincidence that this number is low. We keep domestic cats and dogs as pets precisely because their propensity and - in some cases - ability to kill us is low. If bears were as commonly kept as household pets as dogs you would see a completely different result.
I don't personally know what the solution is, but I'm sure there's a more elegant middle ground between "let it roam free among humans" and "cage and torture it until it dies."
I can play devil’s advocate and make the ethical argument that animal lives have more intrinsic value than human lives. For one, they are innately innocent due to their (as we currently understand) more limited capacity for reasoning. This limited reasoning dismisses blame when they do things we see as wrong (similar to the way we do for children) and also limits their capacity to cause significant harm to the planet.
I will always side with other animals over man. If I could only rescue one organism from a burning building and had to choose between a human or another animal, I’d choose the other animal. If I had to choose which species becomes extinct tomorrow, it would be humans. We are a plague to this planet and solar system.
Selfish humans, obsessed with self preservation, will easily disagree with this judgement.
Parity as regards rights should be based on interests. There is nothing special about life itself. A mouse’s interests are not on par with the interests of a child, and saving the child would generally result in the least amount of suffering.
I did my best to take the parent comment seriously, but I really need to stress how ridiculous it is. Please don’t assume that that is a common viewpoint amongst vegan or vegetarians. It ultimately commits the same error: devaluing the life of an individual because it happens to belong to the “wrong” species.
> A mouse’s interests are not on par with the interests of a child
For an anti-speciesist, this is a very anthropocentric and speciesist statement.
I would argue that saving the child would cause greater suffering[0], not only because the human condition unto itself is rife with suffering, but because we have the greatest capacity and demonstrated ability to cause grave harm to all species and to the planet, more so than any other living being.
The voluntary human extinction movement[1] is a very real movement, however ridiculous you find it to be.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering-focused_ethics#Argum...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...
I agree regarding the generally higher capacity of healthy humans to experience tremendous suffering, and also the human ability to cause tremendous suffering. I do see a tension between those facts and my contention that saving a human results in less suffering. In my mind, human experience falls on a 3D plane, with positive/negative on the y-axis, severity on the x-axis and complexity on the z-axis.
The human ability to experience complex emotions like inspiration, jealousy, etc. make our interests slightly unique and weigh more as compared to most animals. Add on top of that the social aspect of interests (eg a parent has an interest in the well being of their child), and suddenly the value of human life can take on exponential degrees.
With that in mind, I think an individual should have the choice to end their life if society finds that the net suffering of their continued existence is greater than if they ceased to exist. To that end, human extinction is antithetical to my understanding because it implies forcing individuals to end their lives involuntarily. It’s the same with a pig. I wouldn’t eat a pig unless he somehow gained healthy adult-level sentience and told me he wanted me to eat him and that that would fulfill some deep desire of his. I know that example sounds absurd, but consequently, because no animal has a level of sentience complex enough to consent to being murdered, I refrain from eating any animals at all.
If you still want to engage, I have a question. I’m curious why, if you feel that humans are such a huge cause of suffering to, as you put it, innocent animals, you aren’t vegan or vegetarian?
What a load of shit lol, it's a cage. They should call the process 'cage conditioning', the dog was fully aware he was locked in a cage and didn't like it.
Abandoned it very quickly, had a lot more success with just patience and positive reinforcement.
In that video they show how far they still are from domesticated foxes compared to modern dogs. Well, domesticated pretty much means, "desirable traits for human benefit" when you think about it, the same applies to humans, but we call that civilized or sociable. Theres a joke in the comments, something like the fox goes "I'm okay with you being a meter away from me... but let's keep it that way." The dog, "you cant ignore my love!"
But I fully disagree on the assessment that larger dogs are more wild. Smaller dogs tend to be complete violent assholes for little to no reason. Larger dogs tend to need more reason to become aggressive, unless they came from an abusive environment. I volunteered at an animal shelter for about a year (admittedly to pick up women originally). But I gladly hung out with pits and shepherds from abused pasts so they can be rehabilitated for new homes. I could never do the same with anything smaller than a border collie. Just never worked out. Large working breed dogs are crazy easy for me to calm down, and I am generally not a brave man. Dogs have been bred the last 40k some odd years to genetically want to be with humans. Then some assholes the past few thousand years decided to breed for looks and tiny sizes instead of companionship. That's what makes the larger working dogs great. Listen to and love humans, and have a job to do is their breeding line. Not just looks, which can breed out the friendly part.
Caveat though, there are some pit lines that are a bit whack. Sadly, originally they were bred for fighting other dogs, but super strong friendliness for humans, to avoid the owner getting bit. Which is why they're cuddle bugs with people and are dicks to other dogs. This breed attracted a bunch of dipshits that bred them for just pure aggression, then add on the abuse. So yea... those are the sad cases.
My bodeguero (spanish terrier) is the most cuddly animal I have ever met but he will 1v1 the sun if I let him.
Our neighbor has a "scraggly little white dog" as you describe.
It bit my (then three year old) daughter while she was riding her bike a year ago.
It certainly didn't do any favors for her trust of dogs.
Doesn't help that everyone and their mother seems to leave their dogs off leashes and then just say "oh don't worry, he's nice" as my kids are screaming their heads off while a creature roughly as big as they are sniffs and yips at them.
Honestly, the biggest problem I've had with large dogs is poor socialization in how to play with humans. A dog doing properly-social play by dog standards (play-bows, carefully light nipping, etc) can still be a really worrying experience for an adult if the dog is 100lbs.
I've been watching some SaveAFox videos on youtube, and their foxes display a whole range of social skills. Some like Finnegan love being handled, but others not as much.
Those specific breeds of foxes don't really make for indoor pets though, as they like to mark their territory.
The dog was extremely quiet, socialized and what not. When we brought our baby from the hospital, he was really curious. We left him sniff the baby and the dog apparently understood that the thing that was brought in was important and decided to protect it (he was sleeping in front of the baby's room and would not let any stranger approach.
I had a similar case when I was a baby - my parents left me with their dog sleeping next to my crib outside and it would just do a "woof" without even waking up if someone would approach.
And then, one day, I left the dog alone with my son. My son was in that sort of cage made of ropes he can wander in and the dog was outside. I came back to the room and I found
... the dog licking my son face pressed to the ropes (unexpected happy ending)
I was really scared because it could have been something different (my childhood friend was bit to his face by his own dog, a normal one, not pitbull style but Great Dane IIRC). Nothing ever happended but still, this was this one time where it could have had happen and it would have been MY fault, not the dog's one.
I now have a cat. Well, my family has it, we just live together. The cat does not interfere with me (except sleeping on my laptop when I am not around) and is extremely found of my younger son (14 yo). I am telling my son to never get his face that close to the cat because she will a day or another scratch him (they are running and jumping together, playing). She scratched my leg once (and would not left from under my son's bed for that day because she was probably scared of what she did) - but that could have had been my face.
Accidents happen and animals are animals. This is not something bad - just something one has to be aware of.
Ironically, I now love huskies. But would also never get one, because I live in Florida and would not subject such a dog to the weather here.
Dad tells me that when he yelled out my grandad calmly grabbed the dogs collar, walked it around the back of the barn out of the way.
My dad, recovered from the shock and not badly injured just a scratch was on his way to the barn to tell his dad that all was okay and not to be too hard on the dog when BOOM shotgun blast rang out from that direction.
Different times and a story that shocked dog loving me - but in general dogs have had that drastic selection pressure from many thousands of generations.
Gorillas not so much.
As you are saying, there is the evolution aspect, but also the fact that he cut short a possible string of serious problems.
This is also the reason I am for euthanasia of animals in shelters past a month (the time left for the owners to find a dog that escaped). Keeping them in cages is torture for the animals.
It is not that they realize they will die, if this is done correctly.
This is also why I am against zoos and circuses with animals.
I think we went into some kind of multiple personality spilt when it comes to animals : we eat them after they have suffered (I eat meat myself, but I would prefer to pay more for meat from animals that were slaughtered in a human way), we do not want to stop the suffering of caged animals, we keep large dogs in small apartments, we cry when we see a lion eating a gazela in the wild, etc.
Dogs, regardless of size are safe to coexist with humans provided they are treated appropriately from a sustenance and behavior/training perspective. That's the result of traits associated with being an animal living in a pack social structure, along with thousands of years of breeding. When dog behavior crosses a line, the dog is euthanized.
> You wouldn't lock up a human either for having the capacity to harm someone else.
We do. When humans demonstrate a lack of control that puts others at risk, we apply progressive discipline to discourage future misbehavior. Fines, probation in various flavors, jail, and finally prison. If you steal a phone from an unlocked car, it's usually misdemeanor theft, if you break down my door to steal a phone, it's a felony burglary.
> So if you end up with an orphaned gorilla in your care, morally you are between a rock and a hard place.
It is really a ranking of priorities. I'm not an ethicist, but generally speaking, the preservation of human life is usually a primary moral imperative.
You are arguing few steps further about a person who realized this capacity and what society does to them.
I don't read much more into that.
Debatable...
"In 1994, the most recent year for which published data are available, an estimated 4.7 million dog bites occurred in the United States, and approximately 799,700 persons required medical care (1). Of an estimated 333,700 patients treated for dog bites in emergency departments (EDs) in 1994 (2), approximately 6,000 (1.8%) were hospitalized (3)."
I agree completely. I'll go as far as to say the idea of pets must perish.
"Pet" can simply mean non-human family member.
If a toddler could rip your hands off, I wouldn't imagine it would be free to roam society as usual.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...
As a consequence of this, I became accustomed to immediately assessing the aggressiveness of the dogs by eye gazing upon approach, and found the vast majority gentle and sweet. So I get the frustration of their owners, esp ones who take them in as rescues as the local shelters are flooded with them. 9/10 of these animals will probably go through life showing no aggression and live life as wonderful family pets.
But all these excuses about how it’s the owners fault in how they raised them, that there is no official breed, etc, etc... is bs hand waving. These dogs can be dangerous like that pet chimp who ripped that woman’s hands and face off. There is something instinctual in them, and the physical ability, to do real harm.
As to other breeds that can be worrisome, generally bred for protection, such as dobies, rotts, and German Shepard’s, I never sensed the fear that one of those would instantly end the life of my dogs within seconds. Pits and mixes - easily a “holy shit that was close” encounter in the triple digits, probably once a month on average throughout their lifetimes. Far too many situations where an owner had trouble controlling their dog and they got dangerously close.
Dogs are like people in that childhood trauma never really goes away. If a dog was mistreated at any point in their life. Even before you owned the dog years ago, it could manifest in aggression.
We had a dog growing up, medium sized poodle mix, that we had adopted at one year and were told had been abused by the husband. Not typically an aggressive dog. However certain unfamiliar men, not all men, but some skinny, white men it seemed were liable to be met with aggression and family guarding behavior.
Every dog I have raised since puppyhood, including a 115 pound mixed breed and a 100 pound husky have had zero aggression issues. That is not to say one can be careless. There is always the chance, and you have to have the space and be able to handle any dog you own.
It's because you're looking at a biased slice of data. There's no national database of fatal dog attacks and people are scared of pit bulls so the media reports on them more.
How do you know this?
It is also likely that owners who desire a dog that was bred for fighting want their dog to be aggressive and so train them to be.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305270428_Character...
> Pit bull bites were implicated in half of all surgeries performed and over 2.5 times as likely to bite in multiple anatomic locations as compared to other breeds.
Pitbulls could be the sweetest breed in the world, the point is that "when" they attack, it ends up much much worse than your super aggressive chihuaha. And in some cases 1 to 1 a man can not win the fight.
There a few breeds like that (e.g. mastiffs) but pitbulls are one of the most popularly owned dogs in this category.
Just jumping in here to say that if your house cat bites you and draws blood you should absolutely go to a doctor ASAP because cat mouths are nasty and cat bites often get very seriously infected (like, "lose your hand" infected) very quickly.
Not that I am saying one shouldn't use applicable wound care but find it difficult to believe that you must visit a doctor right away or else you will get a bad infection and lose a limb.
"Appropriate early treatment of cat bites of the hand is the key to success. Treatment with antibiotics, surgical drainage, debridement and copious irrigation, and use of corticosteroids in some cases, proved to be effective. Hand elevation and intensive physiotherapy after a short period of immobilization is critical. We believe that prophylactic antibiotics should be given even in case of a minor infection following cat bites of the hand. Clear guidelines for clinical recognition of infection, hospital admission and management are provided in our study."
Furthermore, I already acknowledge that proper wound care should not be ignored.
One pack was formed of smaller dogs, mostly of the puntable size. The other more medium size, family friendly dogs.
Neither packs contained pit-bulls. It does not matter about the breeds in the pack, just the size and number. 5-10 Jack Russel terriers can mess you up just as easily as 3-4 Labradors.
I notice that the discussion of dangerous dogs now is focused on pit-bulls, I remember as a kid that the German Shepherd and Rottweiler always seemed scary.
So, 81% of fatality descriptions that identify a breed list "pit bull."
That's a much higher rate of pit bull involvement than I had heard of in the past.
Animals think and reason, just because we don't understand their process doesn't mean they don't have a process.
Conversely unless we completely explain all of 'civilized' societies rules to these animals and secure agreement that they will follow all these rules, their is little chance they will behave within those guidelines.
I spent time with outlaw motorcycle clubs, and I would consider many of those groups the same as a gorilla or bear, the only difference would be that the bikers usually know the laws of society, but they reject hem.
My immediate reaction is horror at the unspeakable cruelty of selling a person - a participant in society - into caged slavery in the circus. Imagine the feeling of confusion and betrayal he must have felt. Imagine the trauma from suddenly having personhood privileges withdrawn. I don't see any justification for that. The article rather lightly glosses over the gory details of that shameful episode.
The low point may have been the New York zoo displaying a black man in a cage with monkeys in the early 1900s. The black clergymen who protested were shut down by the city’s mayor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo
An angry chimpanzee can completely disfigure you in an instant. A gorilla is even more powerful than that.
People underestimate how strong apes are.