Heroic rat retiring from detecting land mines
npr.org
npr.org
Now one might say: "This rat enjoys this work!". One cannot make that claim without: 1. The rat having informed consent about what this work entails (not possible, given a rat's limited ability to understand what land mines are) 2. In good faith, the rat having been given many alternatives as to what it wishes to do, without coercion
At its core, I see this as necessary work, whether it is automated by machines or performed by humans or non-human animals.
But let's at least be clear what's happening here and not sugar coat it: this is forced/coerced labor, there's nothing heroic about it given that the rat has no idea what might happen to them, and it's not a 'retirement' (this rat didn't wake up and say, I'm going to retire today!), it's that the rat's handlers have decided to no longer force/coerce this animal to work.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whb4unrhy44
Specific time stamp for section on language (Gorillas in the Congo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whb4unrhy44&t=1016s
The horror isn't the film makers, it is that this is the narrative that global society prefers to hear.
For even deeper horror still I suggest reading Francis Bacon, since from square zero modern science is founded on the rape of nature.
If I was given total control over your life and made you work for me, would you be ok with that so long as, according to me, I treated you well enough? I doubt it.
That isn’t the point though. This is not a debate about whether anyone thinks the rat is being treated well.
The rat did not consent to this (because it can’t), so this is, factually, forced labor. I am ok with it in this situation, but let’s call it what it is and express gratitude for what the rat did to clean up human messes.
Second, you can’t do something heroically if you either 1) don’t know what you are doing and what the risks are or 2) there are no risks. Take your pick, but either way it isn’t heroic. The rat did a great thing for us but hero is not the right word.
On the other hand, anyone who's owned an uncooperative dog will know that it's nigh-impossible to effectively train an animal who just doesn't feel like playing along.
By definition, if you treat me well "enough", I'm already satisfied. That's a silly proposition.
In this thought experiment, like the rat, you have no say in what constitutes being treated “well enough.”
The opposite of heroic is cowardly and it perfectly describes people that try to silence opposing opinions.
I'm not trying to shut down abstract debate or discussion on the issue of animal welfare/rights/liberation, but I do perceive a lack of context leading to condescending criticism of others living in tough circumstances where they literally can't trust the ground they stand on to not suddenly kill them.
From Webster, heroic: of a kind that is likely only to be undertaken to save a life.
This rat's work has saved lives. So, we can call it heroic. It is not even anthropomorphic strictly speaking.
If I was a rat, I would take that deal... considering that the alternative is, well, being an actual rat :)
Yeah, sure, we didn't ask for consent, but I'll confess my hamburger probably didn't consent either -- though I think we only have get consent if we serve cookies :)
(Bad jokes may be present)
Their relationship also has utility for them. They use us for problem solving. Civilization is scary and complex.
I also worry sometimes about what you’re trying to convey though.
You can totally enjoy something while being ignorant to aspects of the task
> 2. In good faith, the rat having been given many alternatives as to what it wishes to do, without coercion
You can enjoy doing a task, while still enjoying something else more.
Sounds to me like this rat had a pretty good time eating bananas.
Humans are driven by food and reproduction too, but that doesn't mean we don't also experience a wide range of complex emotions.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/rats-tick...
> Panksepp and Burgdorf showed that the animals remembered areas in their enclosures where they had been tickled before and routinely returned to those sites.
> And in the current study, rats were observed performing something called Freudensprünge, or “joy jumps,” after tickling.
They can also apparently feel regret:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rats-experience-f...
> Rats showed both a behavioral sign of regret (turning and looking at the missed high-value reward) and were then more willing to wait for a reward following regret-inducing instances, indicating that they learned from their mistake.
Spend a significant amount of time around animals and you will see a lot beyond the more base rutting instincts.
"Heroic" language is also deployed to distract from the exploitation of humans financially coerced into doing dangerous or stressful jobs. The clearest example I can think of is the public glorying, on certain types of public holiday, in the "heroic sacrifice" of all the soldiers who were marched pointlessly into machine gun fire in WW1.
This organization says that none of their rats have ever died as a result of their detection work. As I understand it the rats are too light to detonate the mines. Their role is just to detect them and they don't have to worry about accidental detonation.
That makes sense if you think about it. If these mines were the kind of thing that could be detonated by a curious rodent, they probably wouldn't have lasted so long in rural areas.
That's another reason not to call the rats heroic. There is no real hardship for them in this work. They explore and smell and get a reward when they find something. I'd bet it may be better than a wild life, though a moral ideal might be letting the rats choose to work or not. (I wouldn't suggest actually doing that, since I think the forced labor of rats is a small price to pay to save human lives, but ideally the rats would be employees rather than slaves)
The rats are admired for their outstanding achievements.
Ergo, they are heroic rats.
What's the point of being pedantic if you're not at least accurate?
A. Not a person.
B. Not courageous because they have no idea what they are doing.
C. Noble qualities aren't in evidence because all the rats know is that the sniff a field and get treats.
Doesn't that alone disqualify your rebuttal?
Especially when that remaining 1/3rd is just you taking an unsophisticated approach to the concept of anthropomorphization...
A technical debate on the semantics of heroic rats.
Plus it actually helped improve my English!
Cheers :-)
Although the synonyms section cracked me up cause it definitely took me a second
Synonyms “Cuban sandwich, grinder, hoagie (also hoagy), Italian sandwich, po’boy, …”
If there were some evidence of extreme devotion or admiration, for example maybe the locals celebrate this rat, know its name, call this one for especially challenging fields, erect statues to it, etc - then I'd agree that a specific rat could be heroic by this definition.
As is, the rats seem to be doing a not particularly challenging or dangerous job in exchange for payment. One rat is retiring after a successful career - which is laudable, but not so much so that it qualifies for extreme devotion or admiration.
In general, I like to push back on cheapening words like "hero" so that we can use them for better effect when they actually fit. I also don't think teachers, hospital workers, police, soldiers, etc are heroes though some people sometimes call them such. Individuals in those professions might be, but the general classes are not, nor are bomb defusing rats.
Anyways, it’s all good by me!
Your "argument" was torn down piece by piece.
You were wrong by not understanding the concept of an "or", and you were wrong by not understanding that in this context the rats are being anthropomorphized.
I think most of us have just been mocking the absurdity of this by replying succinctly enough to watch you flounder a bit more at this point, you would have been best served leaving it at heroic rats...
Let's look at it in a different way. Are these rats doctors? Well, definition 4 of "Doctor" from Merriam Webster's says ": a person who restores, repairs, or fine-tunes things." These rats are certainly restoring the fields by identifying the mines for removal. We can just anthropomorphize the rats to get by the "person" part of that definition and conclude that the rats are, in fact, doctors.
Are the rats lawyers? Again, from the same dictionary the first definition for "lawyer" says "one whose profession is to conduct lawsuits for clients or to advise as to legal rights and obligations in other matters". That definition is of the form "X or Y" and Y would be "profession to advise as to legal rights and obligations in other matters." The rats, of course, aren't removing the mines themselves. They simply locate the mines and inform their human employers who then defuse and remove the mines. We could say the rats are advising the humans. If the humans running this operation come to know about a mine they clearly have an obligation to remove or designate the mine for removal - knowingly leaving a land mine in a field is liability. So, these rats, in their professional capacity, are advising the humans with regards to their legal obligations. The rats are lawyers!
Are the rats scientists? Merriam-Webster tells us that scientists include "scientific investigators". The rats are clearly investigators. Are they scientific? The definition for "scientific" includes "practicing or using thorough or systematic methods". Well, the rats search an entire field. The article tells us that the rats scour fields so thoroughly that the human operators are willing to play soccer on the fields afterwards. That sounds pretty thorough to me, so we can call the rats scientific investigators, or scientists too.
I hope you get my point. Using this "sophisticated" conception of language, where you look at dictionary definitions and suggest that one interpretation of some clause of a definition could technically apply so therefore a word is apt to describe something leads to absurd conclusions. Not only are our rats heroic, they are heroic lawyer scientist doctor rats! And more!
The truth is that dictionary definitions are guides to help us understand language. An articulate person will strive to find words that fit well, not words that, by some torturous and philosophical contortion could technically, arguably, maybe not be entirely wrong if you ignore a couple words. "Hero" fits these rats the same way doctor, lawyer, scientist, engineer, and so on fits the rats - which is to say, not well.
By calling the rat a hero, it's implicitly being anthropomorphized.
"Rat doctors sniff out cancer!"
"Rat lawyer cracks a tough case after DNA links owner to scene of the crime"
This is why you're being accused of having an unsophisticated grasp of language.
You're not understanding the implicit meaning of a statement and confusing it with a lack of specificity or suitability of the explicit terms in said statement.
That's silly.
People volunteering to fill out sandbags in a flood can save a community with no real risk to themselves, but their still making a sacrifice for others.
I understood most don’t make the cut. I can’t imagine the dropouts have long and interesting lives.
Same language was used to describe heroic soldiers wanting to save lives with exactly the same disregard of what actual enlisted humans think and feel.
> Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their size – they are too light to trigger the mines. When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found.
For the workers these dumb things just make everyone's lives better, rat and humans alike.
The whole medal thing is laying it on a bit thick and sure the rat doesn't know wtf is going on, but I do think the word is warranted.
This rat found 71 land mines. That's 71 mines that are not stepped on by some kid playing soccer in a field.
Yes there are issues with forcing animals do thing, but that seems pretty worthy of grandiose terms.
You're probably very wrong here. It is very probable that the rat feels the fear and sense of danger being experienced by her handlers around/toward the minefield (dogs and cats definitely feel the fear of their human companions), and she has been the one who has been going into that danger zone for 5 years. What she definitely doesn't know is that that danger isn't applicable to her. So 'heroic' may be very well applicable here.
Humans have a long history of normalizing captivity and slavery of other life.
Also rats are awesome creatures, highly misunderstood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indochina_Wars
The Cambodian–Vietnamese War ended in 1989, so the mines are possibly not that old.
US Air Force bombers like this B-52, shown releasing its payload over Vietnam, helped make Cambodia one of the most heavily bombed countries in history — perhaps the most heavily bombed.
To put 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II. Cambodia may be the most heavily bombed country in history.
https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabomb...
That said, it seems the bigger problem in Cambodia is landmines, and AFAICT most of those were buried during Cambodia's internecine conflicts by various domestic factions and by the Vietnamese. See https://www.halotrust.org/where-we-work/south-asia/cambodia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_mines_in_Cambodia, and https://www.dw.com/en/clearing-cambodias-leftover-land-mines... According to that last article a large number of them were planted along Cambodia's western border by the Vietnamese to keep the Khmer Rouge at bay. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K5_Plan
It seems odd that the Vietnamese would expend much effort to keep the Khmer Rouge out of Thailand. Do you mean Vietnam's western border/Cambodia's eastern border?
For various reasons--human compassion, border control, protection of Vietnamese ethnic groups, geopolitical maneuvering, etc--Vietnam invaded Cambodia to put an end to the violent Khmer Rouge regime, installed a friendly government, and ended up in a protracted guerilla war w/ the Khmer Rouge, who would stage attacks from Thailand. In a way I guess it was sort of Vietnam's Vietnam.
It's been awhile since I read the political history, but IIRC Thailand tolerated the Khmer Rouge retreating into and camping along its border because Thailand and Vietnam were (and remain?) regional power rivals. They avoided direct conflict but were happy to poke a stick in the other's eye.
Yeah the loco Khmer Rouge repeatedly attacked Vietnam.
Vietnam was invading Cambodia, and trying to weed out the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge did what an inferior force does in this situation, and fought a guerilla war.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0003.107?view=text;...
I’m keeping rats of over 5 years now, and even the treatment options at one of the most experienced rat vets in the area feel just above medieval.
There are basically 5 medications that are tried (NSAIDs, antibiotics, bronchiodialators and diuretics, cortisol) based on the presumed diagnosis, and easily located tumors can be operated on (depending on the skill of the vet).
Our vet aptly described the state of the art in veterinary care for rats as knowing the LD50 dose of all medications for rats, but there being nearly no literature or experience on therapeutic doses. Through trial and error vets have developed therapeutic protocols for rats over the last decades, but the speed it’s been going at is slow and availability of medicine in the right dosages scarce (rats are tiny after all). Just now we’re going through treatment of a respiratory issue where the medicine of choice is no longer being produced, and our main option after the vet uses up her remaining 2 vials is to start experimenting with dosing for a yet unknown in rats (aside from LD50) replacement medicine.
For what it’s worth, the rats in this article are gambian pouched rats which have life expectancies of around 5-7 years, vs. 1.5 - 2.5 years for domestic fancy rats.
I don't even think that's necessary to reassure the local population. Often the area they're de-mining is being actively used by locals who have no other choice.
Still, as a rat dad this makes me feel happy. Another example as animals help to unfuck human errors
Walking around and exploring until finding food is not "forced labor", is what rodents do all the time in the wild. They are inquisitive mammals by nature. I'm 100% sure that the rat enjoy finding mines (= fruit) in the same way as we enjoy hitting bricks in supermario games. Not to mention being safe from predators at night, the veterinary healthcare services, being cleaned from nasty parasites, the food, water and the human company in an animal that is more or less social by nature. It seems a very good deal for the animal.
Trying to claim "animal cruelty!" here is a total nonsense.
This sounded like a great gift so I did that for a friend but, sadly, passed the "thank you for adopting your rat, here are some information about him", he received no more information.
However, there is a way to do this right. I donate to the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an elephant conservation region in Kenya. You can sponsor an orphan baby elephant, and they send you monthly updates on the elephant's growth, role in the herd (Bull, matriarch, mini-matriarch, etc), and you can follow their progress as they are rehabilitated and released into the wild.
If you just take the money and run, that sours people on giving monthly.
However, donors can still see the impact of their gift if the digital team is diligent about providing updates for the particular animal being cared for. Sheldrick Trust does this by being highly active on social media with daily videos showing feeding times for the ophans, while the caretakers talk about individual elephants and how they're health and social skills are developing inside the herd.
They are smaller in scope but they are also way more involved with keeping people in touch with what is happening - it's good because she can see where the money is been used pretty clearly.
They also do a thing where they run a raffle where the winner gets to name the new foal/a puppy - which is a neat idea.
Less intelligent birds are best, because smarter birds like crows would only scratch at some of the mines to attract people intending to dispose of them, only to watch them trigger buried ones in their path. It's something a cat would do as well.
In good faith, the rat having been given many alternatives as to what it wishes to do, without coercion
Enjoy doing a task, while still enjoying something else more.
Sounds to me like this rat had a pretty good time eating bananas.