Re:What the grieving mother orca tells us about how animals ...
by clay_the_ripper on Monday August 27, 2018 @12:35AM
(#17849450)
Whether they actually have similar internal experience or not I think still does not justify the way humans treat animals. If a developmentally disabled human was not able comprehend life, death or suffering, that would not excuse mistreatment of that person.
Whether animals understand life or not isn’t really the point, and I think these arguments are misused to justify explotation and mistreatment.
Re:What the grieving mother orca tells us about how animals ...
by emodendroket on Monday August 27, 2018 @04:02AM
(#17850078)
This whole discussion is about whether they understand it. But I think it's revealing that multiple people have shifted the discussion to the treatment of animals -- it seems to me like some of us, rather than thinking animals deserve better treatment because of their sentience, think animals must be sentient because they deserve better treatment. Personally, I do not find the evidence that humans have anything approaching a human internal life persuasive.
> Everywhere in nature, biologists say, are examples of animals behaving as though they were at least vaguely aware of death's brutal supremacy and yet unpersuaded that it had anything to do with them. Michael Wilson, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota who has studied chimpanzees at Jane Goodall's research site in Gombe, said chimps were "very different from us in terms of what they understand about death and the difference between the living and the dead." The Hallmark hanky moment alternates with the Roald Dahl macabre. A mother will try to nurse her dead baby back to life, Wilson said, "but when the infant becomes quite decayed, she'll carry it by just one leg or sling it over her back in a casual way."