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Victorian hunters in Africa were pretty brutal. But to be fair to Akeley, he actually had a change of heart near the end of his life after he moved further north to hunt gorillas, and was instrumental to creating Africa's first national park, in the DRC, to preserve and protect the gorillas.

It wasnt just Victorian hunters, the whole country was pretty brutal, sayings existed like "children should be seen and not heard", "stiff upper lip" that sort of thing, and you dont get to run an empire by being nice. That mentality still exists in large parts of the british establishment even today.

This is a lion being reunited with the guy who bought it from Harrods as a cub. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLHdp_dL5Uk

Its surprising how hormone profiles alter one's perspective on life as aging occurs.

Can you explain what about "that sort of thing" is so repulsive to you, perchance?

And for what it's worth, apparently he was in fact a scientist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Akeley

Everyone in that era including scientists killed too many animals imo. Glad he helped get a park going though!

Yes, there were basically cults of people, who made a sport of mass killing. The more and bigger the better. Not to eat, but to hang their heads on the wall.

What Akeley did, was more the scientific way.

The sentient leopard wouldn't have such pity for you, you're just a meal.

While I don't condone free kills either, let's not idealize animals.

I wish I could find the article that dispelled myths about animals (where you among other things learn that dolphins and sea otters have rapists amongst their ranks).

> The sentient leopard wouldn't have such pity for you, you're just a meal.

Sorry, but no. Leopards are not mindless eating machines that can be treated like evil robots with one intent. They have complex lives think about things, and feel pity, if limited. They are scrappy fighters getting pushed to the brink by human encroachment. They have shard minds and are shrewd when necessary. When they're gone, the world will have lost something seriously majestic--majestic in terms of millions of years of evolution and another branch of the tree of life sawed off. There will be only one reason that leopards go extinct, and that's us. They are consummate hunters, and they'll eat anything because they have to.

> dispelled myths about animals (where you among other things learn that dolphins and sea otters have rapists amongst their ranks).

If anything, the myth is that animals are simple, don't have issues, and don't live complex lives. Squirrel #57 is not the same as squirrel #43. That should make us want to stamp out their existence even less.

Leopards feel pity ? That is absolute nonsense.

It's not implausible. Domesticated cats are widely known to attempt to comfort their distressed humans.

There's a few thousand years of domestication difference between the 2 species though.

In fact the most recent common ancestor of the domestic cat and the leopard lived on the order of 10 million years ago. But in any case, I was not endeavouring to prove that leopards feel pity, only to show that it was not so implausible as to merit such a dismissive response.

It does not feel pity or remorse of fear and cannot be stopped unless killed.

However maybe they could be domesticated over long time.

Sure, but as the species that claims greater intelligence, surely the onus is on the humans to not put themselves into a situation where they become a meal. Blindly shooting at an unknown target doesn't exactly suggest taking this responsibility seriously. I'd have been a-ok with the leopard making a meal of him for his foolishness.

If we take it as a given that animals have no morality, or at least different morality than our own, surely it's incumbent upon us to act accordingly among them.

Incidentally: while backpacking on Isle Royale, which has a robust wolf/moose ecosystem I asked a ranger why the wolves didn't just eat the plentiful, slow, weak humans instead of the moose. The ranger said humans aren't tasty to wolves.

> Sure, but as the species that claims greater intelligence, surely the onus is on the humans to not put themselves into a situation where they become a meal.

If you look at human history, they have mostly done that by eliminating predatory megafauna. There used to be lions in the Middle East and Europe.

I mostly agree with you, but don't forget that this story happened about a hundred years ago. People had different mentalities back then, less empathy.

> The ranger said humans aren't tasty to wolves.

I'm pretty sure it's BS. I'd bet more on wolves being afraid of humans (which is a good survival trait! Here in western Europe they have been hunted to extinction).

I saw a YT video where a woman is recording a wolf that didn't see her. When it realize she's there, the wolf is startled and runs away.

Having volunteered at a wolf sanctuary and interacted with a few of the human-friendly ones, they are as skittish as startled deer.

Toss a deer leg in the pen and they run for the back fence.

Not all though. Some of the “lower ranked” ones realized what was happening and took the opportunity to grab food they usually would have to wait for.

> you're just a meal

Some animals attack out of defense as well, as in this case.

> let's not idealize animals

Acknowledging that most animals have consciousness, emotions, language, etc. isn't idealizing them, it's just an accurate observation. This is opposed to treating animals like trophies or non-sentient creatures.

> where you among other things learn that dolphins and sea otters have rapists amongst their ranks

As do humans.

No one said animals are better or more virtuous than humans. OP's point is that it's not OK to go into nature and randomly shoot at animals for fun, entertainment, etc.

> most animals have consciousness, emotions, language, etc.

Ok, so some I could see (elephants, dolphins, etc), but if it's most I'm gonna need a source on that.

Well pretty much every animal is conscious (aware of it’s surroundings and interacting with it’s environment in a strategic way).

Almost every animal needs to be able to communicate with their own species either through cooperation, competition or finding a mate.

All mammals I know of (and I think by definition) nurse and care for their young. That means there’s some form of communication between the parents and the child.

And for emotions, it’s easy to see in domesticated cats and dogs, as well as wild primates. Fear, jealousy, anger, affection, etc. But it’s also been documented in many other species as well.

Here’s some more info:

https://online.uwa.edu/news/empathy-in-animals/

> We know that fish are conscious and sentient, rats, mice and chickens display empathy and feel not only their own pain but also that of other individuals

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_kind_of_e...

> Even rodents, once thought to be unaffected by emotions and devoid of facial expressions, have been found to “express anguish through narrowed eyes, flattened ears, and swollen cheeks.” They also have facial expressions for pleasure, and they recognize these states in other rats. As for horses, De Waal notes that their faces are “about as expressive as those of the primates.”

Most of these examples are about mammals. I'm pretty sure those aren't the majority of animals. I'm pretty sure it's insects. Well, for land dwelling animals, I'm not actually sure about ocean dwelling ones. With the amount of ocean we've mapped, do we actually know that side of this?

How does OP idealize animals? And why exactly does the leopard's capability for pity matter?

I can have pity on a baby, or a tree, and help preserve it, even if it doesn't have the capability to pity or perform a similar task for me.

I'd recommend reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by the primatologist Frans de Waal. It's not just about apes and monkeys and it might change what feels like a rather jaded view of non-human animals.

Careful, there could be an alien out there thinking the same about what you just wrote.

> Accounts that glorified the "adventure" of going into their habitats, killing their prey, and then shooting them with gun powder and a metal slug.

Except for the gun powder and metal slugs, that “adventure” is the story of humanity’s rise and spread. Humans are native to only a very small part of the world. We became the way we are because humans did go into new habitats, challenged the apex predators, took their prey, and displaced the previous apex predators.

That story of adventure resonates because it has resonated for millennia (consider the myths and paintings and sculptures). That story resonates, because you and I are descendants of people just like that who entered new habitats and outthought, outorganized, and outfought, all the predators that would want to kill them.

So my sympathies are with the man and not the leopard.

> that “adventure” is the story of humanity’s rise and spread.

It is a very different story when one kills a predator to make a new safe living space for themselves and their family. The person in question had a safe and comfortable place to live and went out of their way to kill a sentient being and then left the area thus secured.

One is about necessity and the other is a blood sport.

How do you figure humanity spreads if it never leaves those safe spaces?

It sounds like you are not reading what I wrote. Humanity does not spread by going from A to B, killing things in B and then returning to A. That is tourism and not spreading.

Also where does it say that humanity have to spread? I’m sympathetic with people whose current location become undesirable and they have to move to a new place. But “spreading” is not the goal.

All life spreads and lives wherever they can--humans included. That's just how life on Earth works. It is the natural way of things, for better or worse

And while it is possible to coast on prior success, or find an isolated enough niche, and pretend that it is not fundamental to all life everywhere - that doesn’t make it less of a delusion.

Society uses, builds, and works to maintain delusions like this because it helps keep us all from a mad max future. It’s one of those ‘useful to believe’ things most of the time.

But don’t buy it so much you let someone use it against you as a weapon, instead of as a mutual agreement.

I have a conjecture I can not prove, built up over decades: we are all wild animals, in personally varying degrees, regardless of species (for those normally labelled as such).

One example of this is people living with pet tigers and lions, who behave exactly like domestic sized felines, but of course are bigger than humans so can actually hurt you when wrestling in play, etc. . People kill other people out of fear, a wild animal sort of thing itself.

Anyway, I just have not thought of a counterexample to the assertion that wild animals extend into the realm of things called domestic.

It sounds like you're just redefining "domestic" to mean "not at all related to other animals". Domestication usually signifies that the species has gone through significant human caused changes from their wild ancestors, not that they've been completely divorced from all wild behaviors.

As for us homans, sure, of course we're evolutionarly related to other animals, and are going to exhibit some of the same behaviors.

I don't know about any of that sentience stuff. I'm with the leopard because it's a beautiful, wild cat and that other guy who won is an ugly, bald ape with a bushy beard.

That's enough for me to root for the wild beast in its natural habitat, against my own kind even, and I don't care about your morality of not harming sentient beings. The ugly bald ape with the bushy beard is a sentient being, too, and I wouldn't mind if the leopard ate his stupid face off.

I agree