Would you also object to training the mice that infest our houses to also engage in activities we consider useful? Perhaps say, training them to do their business outside?

I mean, to describe the animals, like crows or racoons, which live in cities and consume human detritus, as "wild" seems like somethings of a misstatement - I'm not sure what the best term would be but "feral", "parasitic" or "coadapted" are seem equally good. Training animals in an environment that's otherwise untouched by humans seems bad for the "naturalness" of said environment but situation seems no more invasive than spaying feral cats.

Indeed, if anyone is worried about the human domination of nature, they can take comfort that schemes like this should further raise the intelligence of crows to the point they'll have a shot at overthrowing the unjust reign of we naked apes.

> they can take comfort that schemes like this should further raise the intelligence of crows to the point they'll have a shot at overthrowing the unjust reign of we naked apes.

Here's the thing I think you're missing with this statement though, our rise to intelligence had nothing to do with a superior species endowing us with a head start. In fact, for early man it might have hobbled us to not be challenged because we're "really good at picking up cigarette butts".

Also, do you want to be the one that explains to the super-intelligent crows how we used them to pick up garbage?

It would be pretty much impossible for another intelligent species to appear on earth now without relating to human beings as a context. I mean, the relationship I was groping for above is Synanthrope[1]. Basically, an entire ecosystem of animals eating and using human garbage already exists - what else do you imagine these animal eat? Giving animals some training to also pick-up said garbage seems neither better nor worse than the status quo.

Plus, I don't think anyone will be doing any explaining to the crows - if the crows rise, they're be using fire and poison to exterminate them in the fashion we would use if one another species seemed to threaten our dominance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanthrope

Unless we create them. There will always be a point that the apex predators fail to recognize the threat until it is too late.

We should teach mice (and ants) to negotiate an agreement and stick to it. I would be fine feeding some mice or a lot of ants if they would just stay out of the house!

Isn't this more like teaching the crows commerce? If we controlled their food 100% and did not give it to them unless they did the work, I agree that would be slavery. This is just paying for a service.

I feel like there would be bigger ethical problems over the proper amount to "pay" them than whether or not the act of paying them for a service is ethical

I think a systemic misconception in this thread is that we're teaching crows anything other than how to get food from a device we designed.

They are not rational actors in this situation. They are never on the same playing field as we are. We would be taking advantage of their limited intelligence to do our bidding.

Ah. That's why it's not ethical to train a crow to do this, but it is ethical to pay a person to do this.

(Yes? I was genuinely wondering about this)

Yeah, pretty much, although if we keep going in this direction we'll end up talking about drugs, slot machines, human slavery, and what really is willpower and choice. Bioethics is incredibly interesting and underrated for dinner conversation.

How do you feel about the ethics of keeping animals as pets? Despite my ethical concerns, I have a cat as a roommate, but I generally think that pet ownership is unethical for precisely the reasons you discussed in the thread above.

My two cents: if you treat it as a proper responsibility and as essentially a furry child, you have no moral or ethical qualms. If you can satisfy its needs and help it lead a pleasant life free, that's enough.

On a related note, I had a professor in college who was a Buddhist and considered his living situation as involving a "cat who lived with me" and not "his cat" per se. I think that's a much healthier way to look at it. It preserves the cat's agency and rejects possession of another living being.

I think there is certainly a strong case against those that breed pets. But until the shelters are empty, I’ll always have a dog or two around.

And I’m not “keeping” them, they’re roommates. Lazy, unemployed, helpless roommates that can’t even feed themselves properly. They’re welcome to leave any time they like. But, though they’re dogs, they’re not idiots.

I have not done a paper on this or given it nearly as much thought as OP. That being said, my 2 cents is that paying a person to do it should also be considered unethical, because it's encouraging the reduction of human abilities to something very menial.

But if there were like, an ethics ranking, then it's probably more ethical than going the crow route.

A hundred years from now, when crows run all the major tobacco companies, it will be too late to do anything about this.

If we're both still alive in 100 years, I know which avian you'll be eating.

Crows have multiple ways to get food, and choose the ones they like. Is that not sufficiently rational?

What if their population expands beyond what's sustainable on conventional food and they become dependent on the "butts" food?

Replace “crows” with “humans”. Does your opinion change?

I find the interesting question to be the hypothetical one where they are rational actors. Crows are smart, relatively, so how does the conversation change if we apply that they are not just rational but also have agency?

Crows have demonstrated enough intelligence in experiments, that I am not willing to write them off as irrational actors.

I think your moral sentiments are misplaced. While it would be nice if people didn't litter, training animals to do something beneficial for us is not immoral as such, and especially not if no cruelty is involved. It certainly isn't slavery as slavery presumes rights, something animals do not have. To have an argument, you'd have to show that any negative effects of training surpass the positive. Even if it led to a decline in crow numbers for whatever reason, this isn't necessarily worse. The net positive could outweigh the net negative. For instance, crows are classified as a pest species in some areas and so a reduction in their numbers could be welcomed as a positive result.

What is worth focusing on in this domain is the unprecedented cruelty inflicted on animals in our times where, e.g., cosmetics, fashion and agriculture are concerned.

I think we have pretty clearly established that some animals have right. We may have established that most animals have rights, I'm not sure.

Try setting fire to a horse and see the legal results. Try making a species go extinct, even pests. So, there are some rights - and arguments for even stronger rights.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that it is clearly established. It most certainly is not. It sounds to me like you are confusing rights with moral obligations in respect to animals. It is a mistake to think that an absence of rights is an absence of moral duties, not to, but in respect to animals.

Those obligations we have are their rights. Really, go set fire to a horse and see what the courts do to you. The courts punish you because the animal had a right to not suffer and you'd have violated them.

I hunt and fish, so I'm not a granola munching hippy. Yet, animals still have rights. I can hunt and kill a deer. I can't hunt and kill a deer by intentionally causing excessive pain. There are laws against that. Those laws are the animal's rights.

You've confused legal rights with natural rights. Animals don't have natural rights and (generally) don't have legal rights. They're usually legally regarded as property. Anti-cruelty statutes do not presuppose or imply rights. The absence of animal rights does not mean cruelty suddenly ceases to exist.

I didn't say we have obligations (or really duties) _to_ animals but _in respect to_ animals. This is an important distinction.

Animals do not have a right not to suffer, but it is immoral to be cruel toward them. I can, legitimately, cause suffering in an animal if it is an unfortunate effect of, say, acting for an appropriately commensurate human good. I cannot morally do the same to a human being.

The crows aren't punished for not exhibiting this behavior. Positive reinforcement training is distinctively different than negative reinforcement training. Slavery is the latter

Slavery is not 'negative reinforcement training'. Indeed, it is possible to be a slave and be rewarded for good work. Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've artificially raised the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, for those crows that agree to your "bargain". Effectively, for the crows, the choice becomes "pick up cigarettes or starve".

I wouldn't worry about it though. If it ever gets tried on a large scale it'll be a hilarious disaster of unexpected second-order effects that will lead to the program's cancellation long before the whole crow species is subjugated.

> Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've artificially raised the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, for those crows that agree to your "bargain". Effectively, for the crows, the choice becomes "pick up cigarettes or starve".

This definition of slavery sounds a lot like capitalism.

It turns out, in an economic sense anyway, that paying people wages can be qualitatively worse than slavery.

To delve into the macabre, you can pay people less than the cost of maintaining a slave to do the same work, and those people are not a capital expenditure but an operational one, i.e. you don't take a loss if they happen to starve, get sick, or quit, you just hire someone else.

Yo have the perceived choice not to work, but that doesn’t mean you’ll survive. A hallmark of capitalism is smoke and mirrors.

Isn't it normal for every animal for them to be required to "do work or starve"? By your definition, does nature enslave every animal except humans who for a select number don't have to work for survival?

Kudos on your last point though. The overreaction on this thread needs to be brought back to that reality.

Perhaps. I think the line is drawn when you don't have a choice as to the nature of the work. Which raises the thought-provoking question of how little choice is too little - freedom to choose which section of field you pick cotton from is obviously at one end of the scale. What's at the other? What about "you can work at any job you want, as long as you never leave the country or speak ill of Glorious Leader?" How many choices do you need to be offered before it doesn't "count" anymore?

Agriculture itself must have felt like slavery to hunter-gatherers - work the fields, or get killed by those who do.

>>Slavery is where you have no choice but to work.

Only if you are denied choices you are entitled to, like running away, through negative reinforcement. Slavery is not simply the state of needing to work to survive. Such a definition would stigmatize all poor people in developing countries as slaves, and anyone employing them as a slaver. It would imply that the natural state of man, where he must hunt and gather to survive, as slavery. That would obviously be inconsistent with what the word means in common parlance.

> If it ever gets tried on a large scale it'll be a hilarious disaster of unexpected second-order effects that will lead to the program's cancellation long before the whole crow species is subjugated.

This was kinda how I summed up the paper actually, the amount of side effects on any large scale deployment is mind boggling.

I really don't think it matters if it's positive or negative reinforcement. You are making their trained survival dependent on a contraption which accepts trash for their services, that doesn't sound like room and board to you?

> that doesn't sound like room and board to you?

No, sounds like a job: do a task, get a reward. You do it, janitors do it. If the crows want...

If you're talking about jobs, most humans have a plethora of survival options.

Once a wild animal is trained to an easy single source of food, it prevents them from naturally diversifying their diet to prevent starvation, removing that natural challenge could be deadly.

This isn't just about doing a task and getting a reward, this is about addiction.

This experiment would not be removing any existing food sources but adding another one. I doubt there will be enough cigarette buds for every single crow for it to become the dominant method of obtaining food for the whole species.

It does matter because the crows have a choice. They are choosing the easiest way to get food.

You're implicitly claiming that crows have second order desires (what you "want to want", as opposed to first order desires, "what you want"). If crows don't have second order desires then this doesn't matter to them, it's just another way of getting food. They're not bothered by whatever it is that's the problem with cigarette butt food, they're incapable of being bothered by that: they want to food so they want to pick up cigarette butts, and they have no capacity to reflect on whether they want to want to pick up cigarette butts, so they're not bothered.

If crows do have second order desires, then it's possible they might be bothered, and then you have an ethics problem. And we actually have more reason to think crows might have second order desires than we do for other animals: crows recognize themselves in mirrors, which requires an awareness of self, therefore they have an awareness of self. An awareness of self is necessary for having second order desires. It's not enough to conclude that they have second order desires, but it's a shred of evidence. However, we usually consider young children to not have second order desires, so I'm fairly skeptical of the idea that crows have them.

It's not clear that there's any ethical violation even if crows do have second order desires, but if they don't, there's no ethical question at all.

Edit: no ethical violation where the crows are the victims in the sense that we're discussing.

>You're implicitly claiming that crows have second order desires (what you "want to want", as opposed to first order desires, "what you want").

I would think it's prudent to assume so unless incontrovertible evidence disproves this notion as opposed to assuming they dont until evidence presents itself.

>I would definitely draw a line between this kind of domestication and the domestication of animals by our ancestors for our own survival.

I don't understand why the treatment of other domesticated animals by our ancestors is the metric instead of the treatment of other domesticated animals today. Look at how our treatment of these crows compares to that of cows or chickens on any farm. Can you honestly say that training crows in the wild is the instance where we're crossing some ethical line?

I think crows (and grackles, and other urban birds) have already changed their behavior in lots of equally big ways, to take advantage of where we leave food scraps, etc. The only difference in this case is there's some planning. If we don't plan it, it's not like they retain their natural behavior. Urban raccoons, possums, grackles, crows, etc. do lots of things on a daily basis they would never do if not in a city.

I used to work in an office in front of a MacDonalds.

The pigeons wold go in the trash and take fries to eat.

There, I witnessed the fattest pigeon ever. The thing was so big, that it cold have a lifebar over his head.

In the train station near where I used to live there were a couple of pigeons which learned to simply lie on their backs on those plastic deterrent spikes. They looked quite comfortable.

I have mixed feelings about dogs. On the one hand, their faithfulness and loyalty is proverbial - better than human. On the other hand, we bred that subservience into them, selecting for willing, loving slaves.

Like Douglas Adams' vegan cow, bred to want to be eaten.

Domesticated dogs co-evolved with humans. They're born to be our companions.

So I am on first name terms with about 100 crows and jackdaws. What if I have the chat with them and tell them that from now on they have zero hours contracts employed picking up cigarette butts. So rather than hang around in the trees by the river waiting for some small child to turn up with bread, I will be expecting them to be diligently going along paths and through lawns picking up cigarette butts and then getting paid in posh bird friendly food for that. I can't see this going down well with the birds I know.

Do not feed wild animals is something I know and generally believe in and honour. However I feed the ducks, crows, pigeons, seagulls, geese and others that have decided against doing fabulous things such as emigrating and have decided to exist living on bread donated to them by small children. I also take others with me to feed the ducks, as if I really need the 'help'.

In fairness I do give them reasonably fresh homemade bread that is not empty calories or I give them goodies from the work fridge that need clearing out. I was horrified to see a lady giving the ducks mouldy bread recently, luckily they knew it to not be food.

I go for the airborne catches of food. So that means seagulls, jackdaws and crows. The crows know where they have to be for me to throw something to them and for them to catch. The same with the seagulls. There is some need to concentrate and pay attention, correctly sized pieces have to be thrown quite accurately and on time, with the seagulls they have to do a big 50m radius turn in the air to come in again if they didn't get lucky the first time. The mid air hover is most impressive as abilities go.

Despite knowing that feeding wild animals is always wrong and that bread poisons the water and has no nutritional value, I do take great pleasure in feeding the birds. For those few minutes I am not thinking of this problem or that problem, I am just in 'the zone' feeding those clever birds, as is whomever I have brought along to help. There is an art to it! But still, ethical? No, golden rule has been broken.

So why break the golden rule? Well, these birds have already decided not to do things like emigrate, the river doesn't have the insect and other life it would have and much else is wrong. So I look into their cute eyes and go along with 21st century realities, humans feed birds, okay?!?

What motivates others to feed the ducks interests me. The best answer yet provided is that 'birds are god's messengers' and that by feeding them that one can get 'a word in'.

>and the human responsible should be the asshole who picks it up.

You're suggesting a solution to a problem which is impossible. Crows may be a solution to the problem. Convincing all assholes to pick up their cigarettes is not a realistic solution.

I think they've solved it in Singapore.

Not that I'm in favor of the methods used.

Also, wouldn't the crows end up suffering from nicotine/tar poisoning on the long run?

More interesting, what happens when the crows realize that nicotine is a nootropic?

What happens when they realize they can burn down our homes with a smoldering butt?

The idea that there is a black/white side of convenience vs. survival is not reasonable. It is very much a gradient, and I’m afraid that there’s much more nuance to it.

For instance, if I have a dog trained to fetch my fowl from a lake after shooting it, is that convenience or survival? Does it not depend on the circumstance? In the deep cold of winter it may spare me from a swift death, for the very same hunter in the summer it may save me from spending 30 minutes fetching it so that I can spend that 30 minutes making camp or playing cards.

This trade off runs the entire gamut, all the way from extreme survival to extreme convenience, and who are you to say what is right or wrong? Further, is there not a point where cirgarette butt collection increases survival for living things? Do you wait for that inflection point before you begin calling this ethical?

You are disappointed that they were allowed to write an opinion piece while in college?

I'm assuming it wasn't a peer reviewed science paper, but an opinion piece on ethics. Being allowed to explore the boundaries is a big thing that higher learning can enable.

I'd be more disappointed if they had been prohibited. I wish I still had my ranting papers about randomness and infinity. Those weren't published, or even intended to be published. Instead, they were a tool in the process of learning.

Edited to add: I have a working dog. I figure he is earning his keep. He's pretty lazy but he points and retrieves and, if motivated, can follow a scent. Mostly he is a bum.

I just don't think we can in good conscience domesticate any more animals. We are a thriving empowered species on our own, we are starting to make our own creatures (both robotically and genetically) and we shouldn't have to subjugate more of nature for our overconsumption and shortsighted behaviors.

If all the cards get laid out and you find that the only animals that have good survival odds are those that we domesticate, would you be singing the same tune? I don't think it's of "bad conscience" when we, as veritable gods on this planet, must be appeased and kowtowed too. We are just as much slaves to our past and our power as any other creature is. The cruelty of nature doesn't end with us. We are still largely a part of it.

And even if it did, I don't see how offering crows a good deal on food is less cruel than otherwise. Perhaps the crows will evolve to take the human economy into account and become something better at surviving as a result. I suppose my point is that, even if we can't in good conscience domesticate more animals, it was not by a consideration of good conscience that they became domesticated in the first place.

You might be imparting human perceptions onto other species. Fun to think about though.

The other aspect of this is that the crows could become reliant on this mechanism as a food source and be unable to survive on their own once it is removed from the environment (or runs out of food).

So you are also against agriculture?

It might be unethical, but I'll take unethical civilization over ethical subsistence hunter gathering (remember that even subsistence farming is unethical)