Made me think of this video where a parrot is watching YouTube videos it likes, changing to different ones, and seeming angry when ads (or the owner lol) interrupt its video-watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4
So much that is fascinating about non-human animals. I can't resist but think that there's a deep similarity between us, and them. One that we even don't suspect. Reminds me of Tom Regan's words:
"Animals have a past, a story, a biography. They have histories. Mink and bears, elephants and dolphins, pigs and chickens, cats and dogs: each is a unique somebody, not a disposable something."
And for the record, I personally suggest a vegan lifestyle, because I believe exploiting animals is morally wrong.
So I don't agree at all that by not using violence all the time we're going against our nature.
But in the case of food, I believe we are, because evidently we require certain substances to survive, and one of the best ways to get those is to eat meat. In most regions where humans live today, without meat or foods imported from faraway regions, we couldn't survive.
If it was the only way this would be more compelling. However it is just the easiest way.
Like arguably the best way to get money is to mug someone, but i don't think that makes it ethical when there are alternatives.
Seems like an oversimplification to me, and we don't know that they live their whole live in fear. We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators.
> I am not convinced that when animals are grown by humans in appropriate conditions [...]
They lack any kind of self determination, take a milk farm for example. The cows are inseminated/raped by humans until they die, children are taken away from their mothers shorty after birth, the girls are destined for a live of constant pregnancy, the boys for 9 month of power food and then the knife. So many animals that we use including many pets, would run away, if we opened the prison doors. I fail to see this form of enslavement as something positive.
> Do you believe all predators are "morally wrong", or only humans??
No, I don't believe that. But I believe you are making a false equivalence here, I have no moral qualms with an indigenous group of people hunting for a living. I do have a problem with industrial scale exploitation, when we have reasonable plant based alternatives, heck personally I don't even mind industrial scale insect farming. Do you think that two angry humans killing each other over a conflict is the same thing as industrial scale genocide with labor camps?
I don’t fool myself. Any industrial food industry is built on a foundation of manufactured pain.
> We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators.
I don't know... you may see that in an environment heavily modified by humans, like National Parks or zoos... but in really wild environments, there would be a healthy population of predators that "control" the population of those animals they hunt, so it seems it's almost inevitable that if you're prey, in a real wild environment, you would need to be on your toes absolutely all the time. This is what I've observed from the little interactions I had with really wild environments.
> Do you think that two angry humans killing each other over a conflict is the same thing as industrial scale genocide with labor camps?
That's a weird questions to ask, I don't see any relation whatsoever with what is being discussed.
> That's a weird questions to ask, I don't see any relation whatsoever with what is being discussed.
I painted a false equivalence in a related field with the same tools you did. In both cases people are killed, but the details matter. And for our discussion, killing animals != killing animals.
Look at the way cattle and sheep are farmed over moorlands in the UK, the animals are literally left alone on land hundreds of hectares large, they live in as "natural" environment as physically possible. We can argue that a human left in those conditions would be unhappy with the still limited space, but I don't think we can argue in good faith that any animal is "unhappy" in those circumstances.
If we substitute your children into their lifestyle, would you be ok with that? Run around these free fields, but there are fences, and you will have to subject yourself to mandatory harvest long before the end of your natural lifespan. Ah and sometimes a dude will come around and shove a stick with a magnet down your throat to collect metal junk you've eaten because people carelessly throw away trash. I never talked about happiness, I talked about self determination. Yes it's not all equally bad, but saying humane farming is like saying humane torture. A dichotomy and a lie. I'm not saying farming equals torture, I'm saying self determination and farming are fundamentally incompatible.
Animals are not humans though, so this comparison is completely moot(for me anyway).
>>Humans are still imposing their will on these animals.
That's like saying that I'm imposing my will on my dog by making him live with me. Like....I guess you are correct? That doesn't automatically make it bad - if it does for you, then I guess that's where we disagree.
>> I talked about self determination
I don't believe animals have self determination in the first place, not it in the same way humans do. A cow is neither capable of deciding its own fate, nor is any attempt to give it such agency even remotely reasonable. Again, I expect we will disagree here.
>> but saying humane farming is like saying humane torture
Uhmmm, again, no not really, because keeping an animal on an open moor like in my example wouldn't be called torture by literally anyone other than the most extreme believer in animal rights. After all that's where these animals normally live, the fact that there is a fence there(sometimes there isn't even one, or if there is the animal might literally never come across it), is literally the only difference between "wild" and "farmed" animal here.
But for the sake of the discussion - do you then consider hunting wild animals ethical or humane? Like a bunch of deer living in a forest, and they just get shot one day - is that more or less ethical than killing a sheep that spent its entire life out in the open? What makes that difference?
This is also true of vegetable farming.
If you are arguing that dividing humans from animals is arbitrary, the same is true of dividing the other kingdoms of life from Animalia.
The evidence is that most of our existence we hunted and gathered nomadically.
[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/developmen...
It's not just our supermarket. Our entire society is based on the genocide of animal species and destruction and violence. It is the most sick society and disgusting thing I have ever seen, on the level of the atrocities of all of human history.
There is a small park right outside my house and I constantly see crows just clowning around on other birds. I’ve seen them harass eagles just for fun and casually take food from pigeons.
So "our predecessors" isn't specific enough. One might mean our pre-ape ancestors, like you do, or the subgroup of apes that is hominids.
I mean a new "idea" is far from being able debunk anything, right?
Also, the debunking likely refers to the really old progressivist idea that any species that went extinct must have done so because it was inherently "inferior", instead of less well adapted to whatever changes the environment threw at them.
Either way, from what I understand the most recent well-supported theories of what caused neanderthal extinction is that their basal metabolic rate was so much higher compared to ours (due to adaptations to the ice age), that this simple caloric difference gave their body plan a long-term disadvantage over ours after the ice age ended[0].
And when I say "body plan" I refer to the part where apparently early humans and Neanderthals interbred so often that about 20% of Neanderthal DNA is still present in the modern human gene pool, and most humans have about 1 to 4% neanderthal DNA[1]. Similarly DNA from homo sapiens has also been found in neanderthal remains[2].
So were kind of reaching this point where Neanderthals and Denovisans seem to not quite match the definition that most people use when they say "different species". Our ancestors interbred a lot, and the genes that were advantageous stuck around. At that point using the word "extinction" without caveats becomes a bit misleading I think.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6d3uHSFxkM
"in order to access this functionality, you must first chew through the charging cable"
And that's to say nothing of the parrot ad click farms.
The earnestest researcher can't go survey every parrot in every home all around the world, but parrot owners can casually expose what their own parrots do.
Reminds me of the Twitter thread where a mite researcher discovers a new species in a photo posted by an amateur photographer.
That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube.
It's sort of astonishing to think about. From both the fact that the parrot can figure it out, and that the function and use of youtube is so intuitive to users that a parrot can learn it.
I've heard people describing parrots like hyperactive 4-5 year olds so many times... it's nice to see that in practice lol. It must be a great pet, I could never deal with the constant pooping though. Imagine having to deal with them making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years. How many poops even is that? Yikes.
If my math is right, over 70 years a parrot would give 1,227,240 shits about you.
Oh that's adorable. I have a parrot and poops aren't even the biggest mess he makes.
They love to fling food. And shredding. And throwing everything you hold dear. And even a tiny 120g parrot like mine is strong enough to open cupboards and drawers.
And they’re smart enough to remember people for many years and learn how to behave differently around different people based on past interactions.
Oh and you can throw them like a boomerang.
I had an Amazon parrot that needed less attention than an African Gray or a Cockatoo.
I'd still not recommend as a pet given that their lifespans are so long. It's a decades long commitment and they may even outlast you, in which case you need to figure out what's going to happen to them.
In this world, some of us humans try to fail Turing tests on purpose to get access to ad-free tech designed for pets. Yes, Google, I am a parrot, why?