Researcher decodes prairie dog language
treehugger.com
treehugger.com
This article has summarized groundbreaking research that reveals sophisticated language use by the prairie dog. Their ability to coin new words has thus far defied reasonable explanation. To us it indicates that a divine Creator was required to endow these rodents with this language gift. Surely, even a higher level of design and intelligence would be required to enable the incredibly more complex linguistic abilities of mankind as spiritual children of the Living God.Were the authors catholics, they'd be either hypothesizing the existence of a Prairie Dog Jesus, or contemplating whether to send missionaries. I can't decide on what would be funnier.
I remember something about researchers realizing the dogs had a vocabulary when they would bark differently based on wether a person or a bird of prey was near.
One of the most interesting aspects of these calls is the "mobbing" signal, which is used to call other chickadees and even other bird species.
The birds are quite endearing; they have a small black cap on a white head and two easily recognizable calls -- the "chicka-dee-dee-dee" alarm call and a sad-sounding, two- or three-note call (2). If you live in the northeast U.S. and set up a bird feeder during the winter, you'll probably get them to visit.
1) http://www.washington.edu/news/2005/06/23/chickadees-alarm-c...
This seems much closer to a code than an actual language.
i didn't know what to say, so i just laughed, now i have to tell her that link ...
By the way, similar vocal studies have been done with zebra finch: http://ofer.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/
Just showed it to some kids, who were as fascinated as I was and peppered me with a million questions. Science is awesome.
"Who's on first! Who? Yes!"
It's led me to the conclusion that there are certainly species at least on our level of cognitive development, they just might have different value systems such that our pursuit of technology seems very foreign and strange.
It's also why I'm transitioning into vegetarianism (though still eating chicken eggs, which I can't find an ethical issue with).
I believe the value systems which govern our diets also seem very foreign and strange to the other species with whom we share Earth.
Other carnivorous animals are rarely aware of the fact that they are using other sentient beings for food (although sometimes they do demonstrate an awareness of this), but we can't help but be aware of it. We justify it with a values system which says that it is morally permissible to eat creatures that aren't as smart or are otherwise just different from us. But that's a tenuous sort of morality, and I honestly think that it gnaws at us more than we usually admit.
Think about how aliens are typically portrayed in science fiction films. They've crossed unimaginable light-years to come to earth, and are immensely smarter than us. But nine times out of ten, once they get here, they've got nothing better to do than kill and more often than not eat us. Same goes for superior machine consciousness: in our mythologies, it almost always wants to kill and/or consume us. Why?
I think it's a reflection of our own insecurities: if there's any species out there that's truly smarter than us, we'd better hope that it doesn't share our value system -- because if it does, then it will see us as entirely legitimate to farm and eat.
So I choose to do unto other species as I'd like other species to do unto me. But of course that's just my personal choice.
Part of my experience is a recent trip to India to see some historic sites. While there, it was just easier to eat at vegetarian restaurants, and it was remarkable how much healthier I felt. It will certainly involve some work because I grew up in the West and we simply don't have this sort of culture ingrained, but all great things take some work.
I guess what I found out is that we have a choice: we don't have to eat meat and we can still maintain and even improve our health. That was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak...
If you use anything made with/from animal labor or products, you are practicing the same form of morality, you've just changed what's acceptable from "murdering" to "enslaving", "robbing", etc.
It is also no more tenuous than arbitrarily drawing the line at bugs or bacteria. Thousands of innocent insects had to die to bring us a banana (--death from pesticides, from mechanical crushing during harvest, from geting squashed on the windscreen of the delivery trucks).
How do we define "suffering"? Is it the same emotional experiences we call "fear" and "sadness", i.e., the ability to have the concept "I am afraid/sad"? That means the animal needs to at least have a primitive form of understanding and introspection to qualify (e.g., great apes, chimps, bonobos).
If we go to the other extreme, we must admit we don't have a reliable method for communicating with animals (famous "dog whisperers" aside). We can only infer "suffering" is taking place when the animal reacts negatively to a negative external stimulus. But bacteria respond negatively to a negative external stimulus as well. Sure, there's mind-bogglingly more complexity in a mammalian brain than a bacterium, but if we reduce "suffering" to the observation of a negative reaction to a negative external stimulus, we must say even single cell organisms are "suffering."
Hard to strike the right balance.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_(physiology)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inducible_plant_defenses_agains...
Here's a summary of a paper in Nature about Bacterial perception:
http://biosingularity.com/2006/06/04/how-bacteria-sense-thei...
Better still is the communication, one example is quorum sensing. Bacteria sometimes take little polls before acting, like little mobs trying to rile each other up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_cooperation#Quorum_se...
To the bigger point, putting an ethical line in here somewhere always struck me as a bit of a sorites paradox, the endpoints are fairly easy (don't torture humans, don't worry about bacteria), but there's no obvious line in the middle where you couldn't make an argument to include or exclude just one more species, especially when you confront the staggering biodiversity out there, and start to see everything as more of a spectrum and less discrete.
I avoid smarter animals, like pigs, squid, and octopi (dogs, cats, monkeys, or ravens if they ever came up). Cows and chickens are fair game. This is basically arbitrary, but I don't believe it's any more or less tenuous than anyone else's system, we're all making a call with limited information. (As Thomas Nagel put it, no amount of human thinking reveals what it is like to live as a bat.)
I eat meat, but I do feel it would be more ethically right to avoid it. In the same manner, it would probably be more ethically right to not buy/drive a car, not use cell phones (conflict minerals), give more to charity etc. (So where do you draw the line at how much of your own money you get to keep for yourself?) Something can be ethically bad even if we do not draw a line in the sand (or, even if we do not as a society deprive someone of the freedom to do those bad things).
If I were a vegetarian, and drew the line at eggs or whatever, I would be drawing the line because a line would make it possible and practical to live as a vegetarian. (Similarly, the law has to draw a line somewhere.) Nature doesn't draw the sharp lines that our human languages do, but that doesn't mean we can't rank actions in terms of more or less ethical, it just means it's hard work.
- Douglas Adams
I guess when I was younger, I was able to justify it on the basis of what I concluded to be those species capable of "higher-order" thinking, when it's very apparent we're not sure if there's even that line to be drawn.
I personally would be interested in the opposite experiment - taking a newborn animal, and raising it as a human surrounded by humans and human culture, as much as possible, and observing its acclimation (or lack thereof). I couldn't really answer the question of ethics in this direction, but if it were feasible I think an experiment like that would be very eye-opening into the outer limits of other species' intelligence.
There have been specific scientific experiments as well, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee)
For the more than 100 million male chicks every year, the day they hatch will be the last day of their lives. Unable to lay eggs and too small be sold as broiler chickens, male chicks have no commercial value and are gassed or ground alive at just one day old. Tragically this is a reality across all egg production; cage free or “humane” eggs are no different. The killing of male chicks and eventual slaughter of “spent” hens are standard industry practice and can only be avoided by rejecting eggs entirely.
The stress of being treated as egg-laying machines causes hens to peck at themselves and others, ripping out feathers and eyes, a behavior that is unheard of in chickens raised outside of captivity.
Hens peck at each other to establish primacy in the wild, or in non-factory conditions very like the wild, losing feathers etc. Animal violence is not down to the conditions humans hold them in. Hence the phrase 'pecking order' which originated far before factory farming of chickens. Violence is probably worse in factory conditions and I'm sure some hens will simply go insane given the conditions you describe, but they do naturally peck at each other to establish dominance.
The killing of male chicks and eventual slaughter of “spent” hens are standard industry practice and can only be avoided by rejecting eggs entirely.
They are only standard industry practice in factory farms. On small free range farms or private holdings of chickens, these practices often don't hold. Note that most chickens won't survive in the wild though, so if they are released, they quickly die from predation.
Whether a vegetarian should eat the young of another species harvested before birth is another question (I can see arguments either way), but factory farming is not the only way to harvest eggs and not all eggs are produced that way.
Unless you are talking about Balut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(egg)), the eggs we are eating are usually not fertilized. So it's not `eating the young'.
I think the problem is with brutal mass-production agriculture rather than with eggs per se.
They have access to a rather large chicken run and often have complete free range through our large lot (& sometimes the neighbors...). My kids were just watching a hen follow a robin around, waiting for it to get a worm out of the lawn, so the hen could rush in and steal it.
The hens peck each other, often viciously drawing blood.
We've continued feeding hens after they've largely stopped laying.
We got mixed runs of chicks, and when the males started crowing, they were freed on a neighbor's farm to live out the rest of their natural lives. (Neighbors liked the idea of chickens, but not roosters crowing...)
So, I imagine we're enslaving the hens and abandoning the roosters, as well as consuming their unborn offspring.
Oh, well.