Loss of animals’ shared knowledge threatens their survival | Hacker News Reader

Loss of animals’ shared knowledge threatens their survival

theguardian.com

218 pointsNotSwift50 comments

This article reminds me of another from 2006 about PTSD in elephants. In various parts of the world, culling events and poaching have killed elder elephants in elephant clans, and traumatized the mostly young survivors, who grow up without guidance in parenting among other crucial activities. This has resulted in a breakdown of the elephant family structure, so that these traumatized and directionless young and mostly male elephants roam the grasslands engaging in senseless acts of violence against other animals and humans (the latter being probably more justified).

One of the Ugandan researchers profiled draws parallels between what is happening to elephants and what has happened in the recent history of her country, with the civil war killing parents and grandparents, creating a generation of young traumatized and directionless men who similarly engage in senseless violence and bloodshed.

It's a really beautiful and really sad article

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html

I don't think I can handle the article seeing as merely your above comment was so strikingly beautiful and sad!

And business-as-usual will just keep churning along, everything is fine, everything is peachy. Profits profits profits. Exploitation, single use plastics, dead oceans, destruction.

The shocking truth is that, even if you exclude empathy (which is sadly quite common), this represents a total abrogation of humanities collective responsibility to protect ourselves. Earth and her biosphere is our space-ship and our life-support system, respectively, and we cannot seem to come to grips with this simple fact.

It doesn't anger me when people act in ignorance. What angers me are those who know better, and keep others in ignorance with their cynically spent PR money, and those who know better and repeat the lies to pander to ignorance and garner votes. It is not a message that can be addressed with reason, since it appeals to the basest instincts of men: don't worry, everything is fine, keep doing what you want, you're justified. The ability to doubt (let alone challenge) authority when authority is telling you what you want to hear is vanishingly rare.

Not that I disagree with anything you’ve said, but I feel it’s important to acknowledge the often ignored fact that the same process of industrialization and capitalism that has impacted the environment has also lifted billions of people out of poverty and brought about the the highest standards of living in human history.

We are only now seeing the structural changes that will stabilize the human population after generations of growth from the advent of industrial agriculture. Contraception has only been widely available in most parts of the world for ~30 years and there are still places without it.

It’s very different to deliver this moral lecture to a Starbucks sipping, SUV driving North American, than to someone who lives in a rural village in Mongolia.

Effective environmental altruism must recognize the human element as it forms a key piece of the ethical dilemma. You will never convince someone who lives in poverty or other forms of hardship to make sacrifices to preserve the environment, and it may not even be ethical to attempt to do so.

For me this is proves the urgency of alleviating poverty.

> This has resulted in a breakdown of the elephant family structure

Recovery from this kind of thing is actually quite quick in terms of generations, usually one or two. In this case, that's tough to observe, because one elephant generation is quite long in human terms.

(And of course, if the old ones keep getting poached, the problem will keep being refreshed rather than recovering.)

> Recovery from this kind of thing is actually quite quick in terms of generations, usually one or two. In this case, that's tough to observe, because one elephant generation is quite long in human terms.

Quite identical to human generations, rather than quite long. My mother's oldest brother was murdered 50 years ago, and the rest of my aunts and uncles aren't over it, and although it happened before I was born it's been something I and my cousins know the details of, and still comes up in conversation. My generation's children are barely aware or not aware. Of course, any knowledge that he had is gone, but we're really almost over it. It probably won't have taken more than 70-80 years in total.

Really well laid out anecdote, thanks for sharing.

Do you think the 70-80 year number you come up with has more to do with 3x generations (3*~25, the length of a generation) or 1x human lifetimes (~70 years)?

Quick for core stuff, perhaps.

Crows can vocalize ultrasonic sounds, like many other creatures can.

They have been known to use these sounds, especially during the rain, to find grubs underground. I have personally observed an elder crow, teaching a young crow, how to do this.

I wonder how many generations it took, for crows to learn this the first time?

I suspect many.

This is fascinating behavior. Do you have a link with more details. I had no idea that cows deliberately hunted grubs. I wonder if it is a regional herd "cultural" behavior or common to cows worldwide?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYl_d7dc-EY

If you watch, the older crow is making large vertical head movements, and if you really crank the volume, you can hear part of the sound it is making.

The rest isn't in a hearable frequency.

They noticed me watching, and the older crow didn't immediately believe the younger, more excitable crow when it called an alert, but you can see him walk over and react when he sees me.

More than anything, he seems mad. :P

I have a relationship with crows here, for a variety of reasons, suffice it to say, the older crow knows I am not a real threat.

Something to be wary of, but not a real threat.

But, would you tell a child, when seeing a tiger, not to be worried? Even if you knew that particular tiger wasn't a threat?

Anyhow, after I googled, and yup... ultrasonic hunting.

(And as buddy said, crows, not cows)

Yeah video quality sucks, I couldn't get closer, just grabbed my phone, did what I could to record it.

The video is set private-- too bad, I'd love to see it.

We spend a lot of time watching the deer here and they have a multitude of extremely complex social behaviors. It's very obvious that the adults teach the children foraging patterns.

Including things like the descendants of a particular line of does knows how to direct their fawns into our fenced off courtyard where the adults can't fit and there are plenty of delicious planets-- but other deer don't do that with their fawns, presumably due to not having had the experience themselves as fawns.

Thanks for mentioning this. It is an older video, so google set it to private.

(I recall a story here, where google did so for silly reasons...)

Anyhow, should be viewable now.

Crows, not cows.

It is highly unlikely that recovery will be so fast. Some things take a long time to learn for a population. For example learning which plants are poisonous is quite costly for a population. Elephants in Botswana travel through the Kalahari desert to get to the Okavango delta. On this 650 mile migration they travel from watering hole to watering hole. It will take a very long time to recover from the loss of memories about their locations, because they die if they cannot reach the next watering hole in time.

In Siege of Baghdad (1258) [0], "...Mongol soldiers looted and then destroyed mosques, palaces, libraries, and hospitals. Priceless books from Baghdad's thirty-six public libraries were torn apart, the looters using their leather covers as sandals. Grand buildings that had been the work of generations were burned to the ground. The House of Wisdom (the Grand Library of Baghdad), containing countless precious historical documents and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy, was destroyed."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

Reminds me on this as well: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150901-is...

Also I am not sure from newer history was it Khmer Rouge who order genocide of their own population over 40 years old, ideology was that they wanted to erase collective knowledge of elders.

"Pol Pot then began using intimidation efforts against the Chams that included the assassination of village elders but he ultimately ordered the full-scale mass killing of the Cham people."

It is a reminder that a civilization not only needs to flourish from within, but be able to protect itself from without.

The destruction of Bagdhad by the Mongols was one of the most destructive events in human history. It's hard to believe it today but Bagdhad was the cultural and learning centre of the world at the time. There's no telling what priceless works were lost, plus how many thousands of scholars were killed. Knowledge in medicine, astronomy, the classics (which were preserved by Muslim scholars), and god knows what else.

Almost as terrible as the senseless destruction of Alexandria’s Library in the hands of barbaric Muslims. Supposedly in that single event we lost 1/3 of all mankind books and many original works like Calculus invented by Archimedes had to be reinvented thousands of years later.

Migration paths were disturbed too. We need connected green corridors for animals to travel through that span the continent.

> At the peak of the whaling industry, in the late 1800s

Yeah, if you start your article with a falsehood that you could have easily fixed with a cursory read of any history of whaling, I can't trust you enough to know what you're talking about.

Peak whaling was 1965-1970, have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_whaling#/media/File...

To be fair that chart only starts in 1900, so you can't see 18th century here. And in the wikipedia page of this chart it says "By 1900, bowhead, gray, northern humpback and right whales were nearly extinct, and whaling had declined". But also in the original phrase "peak of the whaling industry" speaks not just about number of whales killed, but size of the industry as a whole, amount of people involved. Because with new tech I suppose those massive killings in 1960's required much fewer people.

Yeah, that makes me immediately doubt the article.

I have a theory that belief in authority (and conservative/authoritarian political ideologies that build on it) evolved because of this pressure, as a way to protect the culture and shared knowledge. In this view, hierarchies are a side effect of the belief in authority in large-scale societies. (I don't buy into the social and sexual dominance theories of hierarchies.)

Authority can also be used to corrupt culture and shared knowledge instead of protecting it. In fact, I argue that over a long enough span of time, it inherently will simply because selection mechanisms will be gamed by people who put their own needs over that of the society.

By decoupling power with culture and shared knowledge, you can more effectively transmit these things to a broader audience while maintaining its integrity. In this setup, a critical mass of people in the community act as the immune system that helps to refine and develop the shared knowledge over time. I think artists, public intellectuals and thinkers of all kinds play this role in our society without the corrupting influence of a hierarchy.

unless a profit can be made...

> conservation efforts should consider how culture affects reproduction, dispersal and survivorship.

Yes indeed.

> Understanding who holds cultural knowledge in a population can be key

Revolutionaries and conquerors understand this too.

> The [matriarch] female’s experience of [...] which other social units are friendly has a demonstrable knock-on effect

Certainly it's been important in my family.

> However, when a population has lost its cultural knowledge, there may be circumstances where it can be reignited.

We can only hope.

This is the most interesting headline I’ve read in a while

What I like in The Guardian is that we are always fucked. Everyday a new tragedy

Has it occurred to you that this might be because the status quo is actually a really bad situation, the more you look at it? Many civilizations have fallen, with the resulting societal complexity permanently reduced. Usually, this process is not sudden. I suspect each probably had their version of people speaking inconvenient truths, and being written off as pessimists.

We didn't start the fire

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

— Anaïs Nin

Thank you for the interesting rabbit hole :)

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/09/as-we-are/

The Guardian is just a distribution channel. Academics and the conservation groups that back them stand to benefit by sounding an alarm since that helps them raise funds and get grants. Not a judgement on the legitimacy of the concern but that's just the incentive behind these articles.

thanks. i was about to send a conservation group money but then i learned they might have the ulterior motive of making the world better

I read the parent comment as neutral or good. Conservationists need publicity to raise funds to do their work.

Yea meant to be a neutral comment. Sometimes raising the alarm is justified.

I don't get the snarky comment, looks like you didn't read what I wrote carefully enough

ok, I'll try a serious answer instead of a snarky one.

You point out the incentive behind these articles, and call out the Guardian as a distribution channel for academics and conservation groups.

Without a distribution channel, how should academics and conservation groups get their message out?

Which message is better for our society, one driven by the academics who have been warning us of the danger of radical climate change, of mass poisoning of our homes and environment, of total ecosystem collapse (birds- down 29% https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6461/120, fish, down over 70% https://www.geographyrealm.com/study-finds-staggering-declin..., amphibians, 40% of species on the edge of extinction in 2012 and things have only gotten worse since https://journals.openedition.org/sapiens/1406, insect populations, down 80% https://www.pnas.org/content/118/2/e2023989118, ... shall I continue? Do you know what total ecosystem collapse looks like?

or perhaps the message of Netflix or Disney? Or the message/distribution channel of fake news bent on destroying Western democracy? Or the message/distribution channel used to keep us calm while we commit mass suicide?

Sorry, I'm ranting. Yes, your charge is correct. The Guardian is an important distribution channel for the sources which are trying to get us to stop killing our planet, our home, our selves.

And perhaps it is good to have such a channel.

-- hey, sorry, just saw that you intended your comment to be neutral. Forgive me for letting my grief carry me away.

Facepalm

This is an interesting finding. Animals have culture. And it can disappear. So can human culture. That's good to know. It's part of the human culture that we know that culture can disappear unless we try to preserve it.

Or we can learn to get unfucked.

But that'll put The Guardian out of business!

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