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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of sunfish that have encountered humans.

This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lot of unethical practices in these industries that I'd like to see greatly improved, but putting a few individuals in an enclosure where there is at least some research and educational value seems like not even a rounding error on the state of animal welfare.

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Being cared for by conscientious humans, providing enrichment and variety, can be better than living in the wild. For any animal, living in the wild, life span tends to be short, and life tends to be brutal. Prey animals are hunted, and they scrounge for food; finding a steady, reliable, nutritious, and tasty source of food in the wild is vanishingly rare. Dealing with parasites, illness, injury, predation, and all the other stress and constant threats to life is why wild animals are dangerous. Peaceful, fulfilling, life is incredibly rare.

It's even incredibly rare for humans - we're currently in an age of plenty and abundance, with more people living better lives than at any other point in the history of our species.

Overfishing and the geopolitical nature of enforcement and exploitation aren't something we can affect at an individual level, but these aquarium staff are doing a good thing, making a pretty good life for a sunfish. An actual companion would be better, but as long as the cutouts are triggering relief for whatever social needs being affected, that's a good deal for the sunfish.

I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.

The interesting thing is predator and prey both die when they get too slow. Not sure which side has a worse ending there! Then there's disease or even a simple scratch getting infected.

The world's a brutal place, probably all worlds. Because the very nature of evolution means species that exploit the most thrive the most. The obvious exception of things like a solar feeding plant isn't even an exception. The great oxidation event caused one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet - we evolved to thrive on oxygen but for most of the other life alive at the time it'd be like if plants today produced cyanide gas.

Predators tend to have a thinner margin.

Even a slight injury to a predator can mean a slow death by starvation.

That's why videogame predators are so ridiculous. They keep coming after you, even when half their ass is blown away. A real predator will bugger off, as soon as it figures out that there might be a cost to attacking you. That's a big reason that many herbivore defenses seem kind of ridiculous, but work. They just need to make the predator nervous. Unless the predator is starving, it's likely to seek prey elsewhere.

There's also tremendous competition between predators.

Certain prey animals, especially gazelles, engage in dramatic leaps known as stotting. This behavior makes them highly visible to predators. One theory for why they do this is as a fitness signal to predators, who generally want to go for the easy pickin's, not the ones who present a challenge, and represent taking on more effort and risk of injury or just wasted energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting

Most lions also know not to prey on humans, for similar reasons: if a lion took a human, it risks being hunted down by other humans related to their prey. Most "man-eating" lions or tigers are starving or injured, therefore desperate, and lions are largely seen in Africa as pest creatures who take livestock.

(Hippopotamuses, by contrast, give absolutely no fucks and will kill you on sight. Africans consider the hippopotamus to be the fiercest animal by far, even more so than the lion.)

Huh. TIL.

I knew about the stotting, but figured it was for mating. The predator thing makes sense.

Hippos also hang out around humans a lot, which increases the chances of unfortunate misunderstandings (almost always resolving in favor of the hippo).

I remember visiting a village in Uganda, on the banks of the Nile.

They had a couple of jettys, going out into the river, and between them, a series of poles and whatnot. It looked like a fish hatchery.

Didn't matter. It was a hippo sofa. There was this hippo, just lying in the water, right in the middle of one of the busiest areas of the village. We were told that it was a regular. Everyone just ignored it.

The jury is still out, as to whether it is worse to be in front of an angry hippo, or behind an incontinent one.

Very few other animals put energy (either directly or through abstractions like "money", "welfare", and "centralized monopolies on the legitimate use of violence") into sustaining members of the species/group that can no longer defend and feed themselves.

Humans in the developed world do this so well that very few of them are even required to defend and feed themselves without these abstractions.

I think this is probably right. But does that mean that cancer, cardivascular disease, ALS, Parkinson, etc etc human diseases are incredibly rare among animals?

And sure, cutouts aren’t a perfect replacement for real social interaction, but it’s clear the staff are doing their best to address its emotional needs

The issue is about whether the animal is forced to endure pain, not weather we eat it or not. The same is true for how we keep the animals we eat, and why people are rightfully upset about how some cows and chickens and the like are kept during their short lives before slaughter.

Essentially, having the animal be free before we catch and immediately and hopefully quickly kill it for food is fine. Keeping it in a zoo where it's not suffering is fine.

Keeping it in poor conditions before we kill and eat it is not fine. Keeping it in poor conditions in a zoo is not fine.

This story is interesting in that it gives insight into the mental state of these zoo animals, something that is often hard for the public to see and understand. It should make you pause to consider if we're really keeping these animals in humane conditions, given that apparently even fish have possibly more complex internal mental states than we assume.

Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy.

This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together.

Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy. Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel? Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but against the law in Germany). And so on.

People in developed countries have become very good at dealing with cognitive dissonance.

I've seen some very large farms and they didn't seem like a horror show to me. Maybe they exist somewhere but I'm starting to get the feeling that "factory farm" is a term that people throw out to conjure a mental image of something that doesn't actually exist (or is the exception rather than the rule).

If factory farms were so benign, they wouldn’t need laws designed to encumber whistleblowers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag

The internet in general finds the black in the rainbow, Hacker News is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd, but the overall tendency is the same.

Additionally, most of us are taught "hurting things is bad" as children and many adults have a hard time reconciling that we have to intentionally hurt at least some living things to live, hurt an even greater amount of living things to flourish, and at a certain point decreasing suffering in one dimension increases it in another.

For those who haven't developed a more mature framework, they tend to revert to the childhood "hurting things is bad" lesson, and an alternative framework based on nuance and context around suffering is too emotionally painful for them to accept, even if they can intellectually admit to the logic.

> is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd

On behalf of the more intellectual crowd, I'm obliged to devastatingly elucidate that we're (quite singularly) more intrinsically adept at forcefully projecting ex post facto rationalizations upon our--invariably and universally--emotional decision-making processes whilst obfuscating the same under an avalanche of loquacious hifalutinisms.

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