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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

>disgustingly rapey

This anthromorphization is deeply annoying. What next? Turtles don’t care about age of consent?

I was a tourist in Athens once. Adjacent to the Presidential Mansion is the National Garden, quite lovely. At the time it had a miserable little zoo. In one of the cages was a pair of bedraggled hens. Their backs were entirely bare of any feathers. The reason they were bedraggled and bare was because they were locked in with a rooster. That rooster would mount and rut with them every four seconds or so, all day long, every day. It was one of the most cruel and grotesque tableus I've ever seen.

That's normal rooster behaviour even when free range. Farmers separate them most of the time.

nature is cruel.

if you think about it, most animals die fucked up deaths and end up starving, injured, or being torn apart by a predator.

That was not nature. That was a human who made the decision to keep those birds penned up together.

Most creatures pretty much procreate by rape.

This you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280898

Do you raise any livestock?

I don't. I help around a friend's horse farm sometimes.

I’m making my point that virtually all procreation is rape so calling it rape seems silly.

Hmm. You know this reveals more about you than it does about "nature", right? If you're serious, I suggest sincerely that you see a therapist, and not allow yourself to be alone with women (or otherwise whomever you are attracted to) until you get the ok. Your outlook is likely to lead to trouble for you and others.

Well sure but that’s normal behavior.

We have indoor rabbits and our boy rabbit often mounts the female one (they are both neutered). What else is there to call it but rape? He mounts her, she rejects it and runs away, he insists, eventually she has enough and they have a fight. It’s basically impossible to not call it rape

It’s mating behavior. The don't have the concept of rape. They don’t have peers who punish them for this behavior. It all instinct and nothing else.

It doesn't matter if they have a concept of it, I'm talking about our concept of it, and their behaviour accords to that concept

Zero chickens are aware of human concepts of order.

You might as well rail against clouds for forming, or rain for falling.

Agreed, of course

It's a loaded word though, with psychological and social implications that far exceed the simple description of the act. Absent the psychology and society, what is it? Obnoxious dominant behavior, maybe.

But in context, is it even obnoxious or is that just humans having opinions again? The hens don't appear to love it, but they don't like being rained on either. And just like being caught in a rainstorm, they shake themselves off, and get on with their day. Is this OK? I don't know, but it's thoroughly normal and necessary for species survival. Hens do not go into heat or have sex drives, so the hen will never initiate or encourage sex. So all chicken mating is nonconsensual. What does consent even mean here? Yet they survive as a (now domesticated) species.

Similarly, is it "murder" when a coyote eats a chicken? Maybe, but only if we're anthropomorphizing. Really it's just predation. It sets off our moral triggers, but it's an essential function of life -- and for that matter, we do it too and rarely feel bad about it.

Yes, essential all procreation in the wild amounts to rape. Most procreation involves dazzling the female for a few seconds so they can get close enough to rape them. Frankly anything that isn’t rape is abnormal.

I've raised meat rabbits. Screaming and bloodletting fights are a part of the clearly nonconsensual mating process.

Or there's dolphins, who will use the threat of drowning to force mating. Waterboarding females for sex.

It's not anthropomorphization. Nor "anthromophization".

Non consensual doesn’t mean anything to any animal.

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