Listening to these remarkable recordings, I can't help but think that as time goes on, more and more of the artificial mental barriers we've built between us and non-human animals will fall. I hope with more research humanity stops seeing non-human animals as resources to be exploited but rather as sentient beings to be respected.
I think we need to draw a line somewhere. Are plants not "resources to be exploited?" How about the bacteria in our gut?
Ok, how about insects, say you don't even kill insects, what about if you accidentally step on a worm on a rainy day? Should we create "insect free zones" that keep bugs out (somehow) so that insects don't get needlessly killed on sidewalks or roads?
What about rats? Rats and house mice carry harmful diseases, and arguably, extermination is merely depriving these animals of their right to self-determination (to getting food and shelter, in your adobe.) Of course, they aren't mindful they are spreading illness and disease to you, but you're the more aware being who is in a power differential with them, and thus need to realize your responsibility in the interaction.
We can keep going down this rabbit hole. Someone already suggested not killing lobsters. Do they have significantly larger brains than mice or rats? It sounds like the answer is no[0]. In fact, their brains are the size of grasshoppers'...which means if we help respect the sentience of lobsters we probably have to respect the sentience of insects in general.
I consider myself a socialist, but some people are taking the "exploitation" talk of Marx too far and applying it to animals who are not sentient. I can understand drawing a line at Orcas, Dolphins, may be some primates or elephants, etc. But not all animals are the same and to treat them as sentient beings requires a large ignorance of reality of differences between the species.
This is quite a strawman. While there are some people in the world who do what you describe (but for different reasons)[1], doing away with the binary (and highly suspect) barrier of "rationality" that that has been invoked at least as far back as Kant to elevate humans over all other animals is not tantamount to granting viruses and intestinal flora the right to vote and a universal basic income.
There are other bases—very intuitive ones among them, like capacity to suffer or to anticipate the future—by which you could decide in a principled manner how much ethical consideration a certain organism is due.
Let me do away with the word "strawman"--perhaps I have misused the word here.
My point is that noobermin suggests that there are only two "bundles of rights" that we may give to organisms: those that we have traditionally given to humans and to non-human animals. Noobermin says that we must "draw a line" between organisms that we may exploit and organisms that we must regard as human-like. (That traditionally we have indeed used nothing more nuanced than a binary distinction is not important: we are talking about possible, not actual, ethical frameworks.)
This is wrong in principle because you can choose to assign individual rights on an individual basis. E.g., in one system of animal rights, I might say that everything with at least as much capacity to feel pain as a crustacean must be put under anesthesia before any surgical operations are performed on it, but I might also say that any animal with the ability to use tools may not be raised and killed for food. What's important here is not the particulars of my hypothetical animal rights framework. It's just that different animals would have different rights: chimpanzees and pigs would both not be permitted to be operated on without anesthesia, but pigs (and not chimpanzees) would be allowed to be eaten. Thus if we accept that you can make graded decisions in how you assign animals rights, you are not put on the slippery slope that ultimately claims you are committing genocide every time you use soap.
So I actually admit in the later reply down below that I don't really have a line. In fact, what I prefer is closer to what you suggest here: a level of respect for life that isn't bunched into two classes but should be on a spectrum dependent on their level of sentience. The reason I said the actual word "line" wasn't too literal, I meant it more in a colloquial sense; I think a more helpful wording would be "you can't include all animals under your definition of 'sentience', some will fall short and essentially make life very unpleasant for you and those humans you love."
The commenter I was replying too shared links that suggest that nearly all mammals should have their life respected and their interests "cannot be considered to have less weight than humans' interests[0]", which is an extreme position most people won't take.
> There are other bases—very intuitive ones among them, like capacity to suffer or to anticipate the future—by which you could decide in a principled manner how much ethical consideration a certain organism is due.
"Capacity to suffer" is no better defined than "rationality" is. Everything alive has the capacity to suffer, in that there are some states it seeks to avoid. If you try to imbue "suffering" with more metaphysical meaning than that... then you're relying on "rationality" to make your argument.
Yes, we do need to draw the line somewhere. I'm glad you agree. I'm also glad you agree that we shouldn't cause suffering to Orcas, Dolphins, primates, or elephants. Why do you think we should not cause suffering to those non-human animals but think that it's ok to cause suffering to other non-human animals?
My line in the sand is sentience (the ability to suffer). What's yours?
Ok I don't think I saw that explicitly in your post; it seemed like you implied all non-human animals should be considered sentient. Anyway, the ability to suffer honestly is a little difficult for me because I don't know what definition of suffering could be defined in the first place. As humans, we are the same species, so we can empathize with each others' suffering as we can communicate with each other. Not all animals can communicate with us, so we can't know whether they suffer or what that means.
From a mere "observation" stand point along the lines "behaviorism," well almost all animals including insects "suffer" and "feel pain" because they react to violent stimuli. So, that means we probably can't from your line in the sand hurt almost any mammal or insect. That seems a little extreme doesn't lead to a very pleasant life for more aware species like you and your friends. If you want to live like that, go ahead, but I don't think you have the right to impose that on other humans, who would find living like that extremely difficult.
I personally don't have definite line in the sand. I love rabbits (for I raised rabbits when I was a kid) and most rodents and wouldn't want to see them get hurt, but I used to have rat issues in my apartment, I had to kill them otherwise I'd be constantly sick, and that would impact people who I love and I need to be there for. I owe love to people I know before rodents. And for humans I don't know, would I fight for children on the east side of my city getting sick due to lead in the water? Yes, and before crying for the suffering of rats, cows, chickens, etc.
A lot of what you're saying makes a lot of sense. It's certainly very difficult to know if a non-human animal is suffering without them being able to communicate it using language. We can know when another human is suffering even if we don't speak their language because we can empathize with them, but this is harder for non-human animals.
I think you might be conflating "pain" with "suffering". Pain is simply a reaction to a negative stimuli. Pain response has been shown in plants and insects, for instance. But I don't place any value on pain that doesn't lead to a negative subjective experience. That's what I think is actually bad. Suffering has not been shown in plants or insects.
Suffering can be rather intellectual. As far as empathy is literally intellectual, insects likely don't share that, so their opinion isn't guiding. Certainly, the purely physical empathy, i.e. emotions, fear of loss, fear of fire, etc. via mirror neurons are bounded by a few instincts and always illuminating fear for ourselves. Will it kill me? kill it with fire! Could the fire spread and kill me? Then maybe it's not such a good idea. Was that my dog run over by a car? I should have taken better care. Will aliens simply extinguish us without prior warning and so, should we try to get ahead of them in the same way? Wouldn't that just expose us? It's a 50:50 chance either way. The default is to do nothing unless stimulated to. After that, combat involves communicating intent, a lot.
Likewise, the ability to communicate doesn't imply a need to. Conversely, the ability to communicate doesn't define consciousness. Precisely, the ability to refrain from communication is likewise important. So if an animal can't even shut the fuck up, that's where I draw a line. And I should take that into consideration more often when posting online. Further, action can be involuntary communication. So "A lot can be inferred from how enemies are treated".
Concerning invasive surgery, the practical need for analgesics is a smooth procedure, not the suffering of the patient.
Corollary: If something cannot rationalize it's suffering that's another line in the sand. E.g. children vs a society of fish missing a sibling.
> My line in the sand is sentience (the ability to suffer). What's yours?
This is the same argument as "What's a planet", my definition ensures that we still have nine!
I'll give you another one: "Which people keeps the Temple Mount", my solution says the Jews!
Lines need to be drawn somewhere, and people will be upset no matter where the line is drawn. Sometimes we need to accept that we got one line drawn to far to the left for our liking, another drawn too far to the right for our liking, but the choice is to either accept imperfect lines or spend our whole lives arguing or fighting.
I'll let you have eight planets, but that Temple Mount is mine!
Need - The source of suffering is desire. In an holistic approach, everything is part of me, my perception of the world. So I have to weigh the needs I can fulfill--not only my own--against the suffering I can endure. But there is no clear dividing line, only a fractal of high Hausdorff-dimension.
Thank you for your thougtful comment but I think you somewhat inflate two different points. On the one hand, there is sentience, on the other hand, there is our behavior towards other beings. You can certainly see the sentience in beings and still „punish“ or „correct“ them if they do wrong. This is what we have our judicary system for. In many places we already use this system in regards to animals (endangered species, etc.) but we could do more if we were to agree on the general idea that all life has some basic rights (and responsibilities).
So we can certainly aim to recognize the status of all animals and still keep on functioning. It might involve some degree of unease in certain situations (e.g., a bad feeling when stepping on an ant) but simply ignoring the sentience of other beings because of this unease seems like a lazy way out.
> I think we need to draw a line somewhere. Are plants not "resources to be exploited?" How about the bacteria in our gut?
No resource should ever be "exploited". For a clear cut example, take asteroid mining. Assuming we had the technology, there do not seem to be any obvious ethical concerns with mining asteroids beyond necessity, to our hearts' wildest content. Right?
Wrong. The most straightforward counterargument relies on noting that humans tend to be bad at planning for the future AND also tend to be bad at imagining how necessity requirements might scale up in the future. In other words, the asteroid belt at the moment may hold far more than enough mineral resources for our civilization at present, but there may come a future (perhaps some generations down) when there may be so many humans, that the asteroid belt may be too small a pool to even maintain basic necessities for everyone.
But there are better, perhaps less obvious counterarguments. Usually, the people "exploiting" the resources don't tend to be the ones doing the labour needed to harvest/refine the resource to a point where it is usable: instead, there tends to be a sub-group of people who usually only get to see a fraction of the benefit gained from that resource. I am not going to get into this, because it's a topic that has been discussed to death. Let's look at it instead from a different angle: assuming that everyone is participating in the harvesting/refinement of the resource equally---is it really the best use of our time to be continuously harvesting/refining the resource? We may also want to give everyone the chance to explore art, exercise, socialize, explore the world for the sake of exploring (e.g. doing science/mathematics for fun!)---you know, living a balanced lifestyle?
More importantly, limitations inspire creativity and innovation, while mindless use of abundant surpluses lead to epidemics of complacency. Instead of waiting for the environment to place hard limitations on us, and then dealing with them, we could also put soft limitations on ourselves, merely to help us think outside the box in terms of how we tackle problems. Note that I use "mindless" in the beginning of this paragraph on purpose: there are strong connections between this philosophy, and the more general philosophy of mindfulness, but I won't get into that right now.
Summarizing: we should never think in terms of "exploiting", but instead we should think in terms of "what do we need right now", and "how can we manage the resources we harvest so that we can benefit from them sustainably" (hint: recycling/reuse should be an integral part of whatever we design).
With this attitude, we move our attention to living beings that can be resources. We should ask the questions: do we really need to harvest this living being? Are there better ways of getting what we need? Once this being is harvested, how can we make sure to reduce wastage? Paying attention to these question also allows us to make hard decisions with some level of inner peace (e.g. think of how indigeneous people harvested animals for resources). It also puts us in a positive mindset for dealing with a situation where it turns out that a living being we harvested had far more sentience than we gave it credit for: we have contingency plans, and we rest easy knowing that we minimized damage.
> What about rats? Rats and house mice carry harmful diseases, and arguably, extermination is merely depriving these animals of their right to self-determination (to getting food and shelter, in your adobe.) Of course, they aren't mindful they are spreading illness and disease to you, but you're the more aware being who is in a power differential with them, and thus need to realize your responsibility in the interactions.
Pests usually come into being because we're either displacing their natural environments, or they have grown used to feeding off our waste. Thus, better waste management allows for control of pest-borne diseases, and urban planning which includes natural spaces within the fabric of the city allows "pests" some of their old habitat.
Exterminating pests tends to also have a domino effect on the ecological network they are a part of, with unforeseen consequences.
It is up to us to be creative about how we manage pests. Here's some inspiration: http://www.crowdedcities.com/ (crows being trained to pick up cigarette butt litter in cities, which they can exchange for food at special collectors/dispensers)
> We can keep going down this rabbit hole. Someone already suggested not killing lobsters. Do they have significantly larger brains than mice or rats? It sounds like the answer is no[0]. In fact, their brains are the size of grasshoppers'...which means if we help respect the sentience of lobsters we probably have to respect the sentience of insects in general.
I am sure there are people who suggest that we shouldn't be killing lobsters at all, but recent concerns regarding lobsters and crabs stems from the absolutely terrible living conditions these animals are made to endure after they are harvested (their pincers may be removed, so that they can be "stored" better, in highly crowded storage units, while alive). Furthermore, some "culinary techniques" also seem to require unnecessary suffering on the part of the animal (e.g. boiling lobsters alive).
Also, I think current science is pretty clear about the massive difference in sentience between something like a grasshopper, and something like a rat. Here's a youtube video for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HY_1-wC0Fg
> I consider myself a socialist, but some people are taking the "exploitation" talk of Marx too far and applying it to animals who are not sentient. I can understand drawing a line at Orcas, Dolphins, may be some primates or elephants, etc. But not all animals are the same and to treat them as sentient beings requires a large ignorance of reality of differences between the species.
I am not a capital S socialist, and I have serious reservations about Marx (in particular, he is prone to making over-general statements taken as fact, since he believes he is taking a "scientific approach"). I think, I am simply a community-ist. I believe in the power of communities: human ones, animal ones, and human-animal-plant hybrid ones. All life is to be valued, and in particular, network interactions are to be respected for their power.
Because they are sentient, they deserve a right to a life free of imposed suffering. I can argue for why sentience matters, and see my other reply for that, but if you want to argue a different standard, you're going to have to do that instead of just asking why not.
Remember, most philosophies have to start from a set of axioms. I mean, fundamentally, no logical system can be complete anyway (Godel of course, althought philosophy is often leagues of abstraction beyond a set theory). I am comfortable setting the axiom at "sentience matters".
I don't see how your other replies address why sentience matters, and I think that's the core of GP's comment.
Why is sentience an objective good or something to be valued?
Imo, morals and values are always relative and never absolute. As a result, there's no objective answer to where this line in the sand should be drawn.
You can say sentience is the measuring stick. I can say that life itself is the measuring stick. Neither position has an objective basis.
If you were to be thrown into a pot of boiling water and kept there for 10 minutes, would you rather be living and sentient or living and non-sentient?
I'm guessing you'd choose the latter as would everyone else which suggests there's an objective basis for sentience.
Those barriers are certainly falling. The campaign to end the live boiling of lobsters and crabs [1] is underway due to our findings that crustaceans can feel pain.
I remember seeing on cooking shows for at least the past decade that the preferred, humane method of killing a lobster or crab is a swift knife cut through the head.
I had thought that that was the generally accepted method, so I'm surprised that live boiling is still done.
It’s damn effective, harder to believe pain is felt by most (all?) animals than that it isn’t. The default assumption should be that they feel pain, not that they don’t.
I think creatures that don't feel pain would not survive long in the wild. If they don't feel pain they would not have any reason for avoiding dangerous situations.
Naturalism is a fallacy for a reason - there's no intrinsic advantage to being more like nature. Instead let's reason about it just as we would anything else.
There's also no need to tell people to calm down. The discussion in this thread appears quite calm to me.
> there's no intrinsic advantage to being more like nature
It all depends on how you define "advantage":
Being integrated into the ecosystem, instead of acting outside of it like it doesn't exist or matter at all to our survival, and thus being able to survive long-term is a rather big advantage. Otherwise, we might become victims of our own "success" [0].
Now, if you define advantage very narrowly, as in "What's in it for ME?" then you might have a point, tho it's a very shortsighted and egoistical point which leads back to [0].
I don't see how treating animals well removes us from the ecosystem. We have already drastically changed the ecosystem of the Earth - might as well do some positive things for it.
Humans presumably are seen as sentient yet [the majority of us?] are being exploited in one way or another: Capitalism has no inbuilt concept of respect.
If you meant not exploited for food, that is obviously different. I'm not aware of any humans that do that anymore.
It's really sad how any kind of critique of capitalism, no matter how minor, instantly triggers, the very same and very predictable, knee-jerk responses along the lines of "Communism killed billions!".
Like the wonders of capitalism don't kill anybody or like there are only those two choices between capitalism and some Soviet-style centrally planned communism.
Which begs the question: Do these people really think we've reached the end of the line in terms of economic systems?
I'm asking this question in all seriousness because I'm utterly confused by this lack of imagination/curiosity behind such a mindset.
> Optimal allocation of finite time and resources on a society scale is a hard problem.
Agreed
> Supposed alternatives to capitalism tend to ignore that.
Disagreed, capitalism ignores the finite nature of resources, while treating some of them, which are actually infinite, as finite (time).
Also, I'd argue that nothing about the resource allocation, the way capitalism does it, is in any way optimal, at least in regards to our actual finite resources.
Most of it boils down to hoarding "money", which isn't a finite resource (can be printed at will) nor is it an actually useful resource on its own (can't do much with it except burn it if it's paper). It's supposed to be a tool, but at this point, it feels like the tool has been declared the goal: Just hoard more of the money and you've "won" the game like it's the ultimate solution to all problems.
This dynamic also influences the allocation of resources to most "profitable" of individual entities, it's a dynamic that rewards hostile competition over friendly cooperation.
Which is a dangerous reward system considering we are all stuck on the same piece of rock, drifting through infinity, sharing the very same finite resources. Wasting so much energy, and resources on how to "screw each other" over for those finite resources, and increasingly bigger "profits", seems quite wasteful and ultimately a very petty way to go about our existence.
I'm not saying I know the ultimate fool-proof solution, I just want to point out the flaws with what we've currently got going and imho these flaws are massive and will come bite us in the back-end sooner or later [0].
I think you're confusing or at least clumsily terming a number of different concepts here and the confidence with which such miscomprehension is expressed is a great example of the kind of value created by juxtaposing a difficult problem with highly dubious pontification.
Ugh not this Marxist BS again. This is completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Let's talk about improving animal welfare in this thread and not go into yet another tangent about human political systems.
Why can't we respect human dignity like those communists who murdered and starved tens of millions of people, ruined economies, and consigned countless people to oppression and deprivation?
Edit: this account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. As the site guidelines say, we ban accounts that do that, so I'm banning this one. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
How is a response about what communists did relevant to a critique of capitalism?
Except if one can't think of any other alternative or starting point from which to criticize capitalism but communism (and even more so, how some specific regimes practiced it).
I think you're talking about Shell Oil in the 1990's, and their requesting the Nigerian military to help them deal with violent protesters, and allegedly peaceful protesters as well. Yep, that sounds like a problem that needed addressed.
That pales compared to the atrocities that have been done in the name of communism. It's frightening that young people have forgotten those lessons, even the oldest of which is less than 100 years ago.
The ideal of sacrificing the individual to benefit the group is where communism always ends up, and from there, it's never a long slide to the disappearings, the executions and the starvation. The American ideal of protecting the individual, even at the expense of the group is much more inline with the world I want to live in. Happily, you still end up with a strong group, since it's composed of motivated individuals that feel safe.
Whales are intelligent. They should not be killed by humans who mask the activities as scientific research.
Japan is a great country and a leader on many levels. I speak Japanese. I enjoy Japanese food and culture. The people are very kind and considerate. There are some who are concerned if you stop killing whales you must stop killing fish and other forms of sustenance. This is not the case. The difference is whales are not sustenance and are not something most Japanese would eat or enjoy to eat. Therefore to stop killing whales does not mean we must stop killing the fish we eat to survive.
Cultures evolve and more forward. Japan should move forward and stop killing whales.
Agreed. I chimed in on an earlier article supporting eating meat- but higher mammals are a special case.
Dolphins/Whales should be in the same category as Elephants and Apes. They are beings with complex social structures and individual personalities. They are not prey or husbandry animals, but apex animals.
David Brin's Uplift novels make this point very well- these are our fellow travelers on the road to sentience. We just go there first. Eating these animals is brushing right up against cannibalism to me.
No, it's a proxy for intelligence and higher forms of conscious awareness. There's no such thing as right to live for non-humans - if the world stops eating pigs, how many do you think would be alive? That applies in nature too where survival comes down to fitness and luck. But the higher the life form, the more human-like it is and the more humanely we should treat them. Ants get different dispensation from cows, and cows from dogs. Dolphins and elephants should get better treatment still, but this is not currently the case.
Apologies for being a bit pedantic, but I had never heard of the phrase 'keystone species' and went on to look it up. While an elephant could be (and perhaps is) a keystone species, I don't find that the status of being such a species is relevant for discussions on consciousness of animals because of what this term actually means and includes. Starfish, for example, could be considered a keystone species.
Not trying to be a jerk or anything (I'm also a vegetarian) but just wanted to bring this up in case anybody else was a bit curious about what the term meant or had maybe heard of the term before and was confused as to why it was included here. I'm also clearly open to a arguments discussing why a keystone species is inherently conscious.
And orca are not really whales. They are big dolphins. The name "killer whale" means "killer of whales", whale killer ... blame the french for that swap.
I downloaded a bbc show called "wild wales" expecting an epic doc about the sea. What i got was two guys in a camo tent feeding peanuts to squirrels. Language is hard.
The difference for me is that horses can be (and are) domesticated and raised for their meat. Nor are they necessarily endangered. If you find horsemeat barbaric, what about beef or chicken or pork? What about deer?
Americans have a cultural attachment to horses that is probably related to them being used the modal means of transportation for hundreds of years in a country that is very sparsely developed, where most points of interest are separated by a great deal of distance.
Horses are like cars that can be happy to take you somewhere. And you don't disrespect an American's automobile. We'd eat sausages made from horses that died normally, but slaughtering one for meat is like burning a car just to get warm on a chilly evening.
There's also the potential problem of former racehorses, pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs, contaminating the food supply with their pharmaceutically tainted meat.
It definitely isn't because horses are smart. It may be because some of them are movie and television stars, a few are star athletes, some are considered pets or companion animals, and many are considered tools or co-workers. They don't have great brains, but they do have personality, even if much of that has been supplied by popular culture rather than actual contact with the animals.
Americans don't eat their dogs and cats, either. Some of them are dumber than a sackful of hammers, but you just don't eat family.
Beef? Cows won't fit in the house. Bulls are dangerous.
Pork? Most pigs turn into big fat jerks when they hit maturity, then they grow heavy enough to be dangerous. Also, they dig up everything they can smell, and are not overly averse to offal and excrement.
Chicken? Chickens are non-mammals, so it's harder to project our mammalian attachment behaviors onto them.
Deer? If they wanted mercy from me, they would have stayed out of all the gardens I have ever planted. But I also know people who won't eat venison because of Bambi.
We just won't eat foods that have the wrong narrative. Horses have Mr. Ed, Trigger, Silver, Satan II, Secretariat, Flicka, that one you rode at summer camp that one time, Epona, mounted police horses, the Budweiser Clydesdales, etc., etc., etc. There's even a literary trope where the named horse character has more "common sense" than its rider.
Horses are huge animals and often have to be put down for injuries to their legs. It's a shame to let meat go to waste. I don't know about killing horses in their prime though if that's what they do.
Animals that have to be euthenised for one reason or another cannot, and nor should they enter the food chain for humans, cats, dog, or otherwise. Firstly, there are the drugs they use to humanely put down the patient which would be toxic to down stream consumers of the meat products, and secondly there maybe concerns about zoonosis.
No, the problem is that there are other drugs that might have been administered therapeutically, so animals that are in the food chain have to be managed differently than ones that are for companionship or racing. For example Bute is commonly used in horses, but is toxic for humans.
This in part was why the horse meat scandle was such a problem in the UK.
No, OP said that it would be a waste to not use the meat from such animals. To the child of that person's comment, there is a presumption that a non-poisonous method was used such as hammer or bolt-gun.
If the horse has to be euthanized, unless it happens far from vet care (say on a distant trail ride), it's going to be given a lethal dose of sedative. If it does happen far from care, then it'll be most likely shot in the head and the carcass burned or left for predators if it's not possible to dig a pit for it.
Source: live on a horse farm and have had to deal with weak or dead horses.
No, I don't have a problem with those other types of meat. I've spent a lot of time around all those different kinds of animals (well, not deer) and none of them are on the same level of intelligence as horses. Horses are smart like dolphins. Cattle and chickens are just stupid.
Why is this any more barbaric than eating cows or pigs or chickens? We raise them, we eat them, and they're delicious. I hope for humane slaughter but beyond that, bring on the Sauerbraten!
I am sure that your prolonged exposure to these farm animals has given you valuable insights into the nature of these animals. But I think you'd agree that informal observation has serious epistemological shortcomings. (I presume from what you wrote you did not engage in rigorous scientific observation of these animals.)
Personally, I've spent essentially no time around farm animals, but from what I understand about the scientific work in the area it seems likely that many farm animals have quite sophisticated minds. One review of experimental findings in pig intelligence[1] claims that "pigs possess complex ethological traits similar, but not identical, to dogs and chimpanzees".
I generally agree with you, I'm not sure I agree with your framing. I more agree with you when you say whales are not something most Japanese would eat, so it doesn't make sense to put this on Japan as a country to move forward and stop killing whales. There are some unsavory people and practices in all countries and amongst all groups, and by that logic we all need to be better people.
That said, that tax payer money might finance a new whaling ship might be closer to something you can pin on the government, so that's a valid concern I think.
>The difference is whales are not sustenance and are not something most Japanese would eat or enjoy to eat.
Wow this is presumptuous, whale meat has a long history in Japan and whales have been used for sustenance for a long time. That they should not be sustenance is your opinion.
Pigs are intelligent too. Unfortunately eating animals in general is fraught with moral quandary. Please stop making blanket statements about other peoples' cultures.
I'd have been ok with the parent post if it was about that, or if it was just stating an opinion and fairly treated the moral dilemma of eating intelligent meat. Instead it was like "I'm clearly not Japanese but I fancy its culture and its good good people don't want to eat whale meat" yeah, no.
I'm not sure why you reacted so strongly to what is a statement of hard truth. Whale meat was used for sustenance for a few decades following WW2, because that's all there was. With the availability of other meat, demand has fallen radically. It's not a hugely integral part of their culture, nobody is surviving off of it anymore, and it is in fact the case that most people, including Japanese, don't find it especially palatable.
Whale products are no longer used as sustenance, they are a delicacy. Stopping the hunting of whales would not cause anyone (except those who sell whale meat) to suffer or go hungry.
(Devils advocate here disclaimer) but imagine you're an isolated island with no large mammal population and pick a date long ago. Food is scarce and the ocean is large and these huge things are ripe but difficult for the taking. One is enough to feed a village for the better part of year... And when you eat it, it tastes like steak! A food you've never even contemplated existing! Add to that a rich cultural tradition that resists change and encourages strong dogmatic adherence that persists through the ages and is only bolstered through geographic isolation... And yeah I can see the Japanese's strong dedication to whale meat. Doesn't mean I like whaleing in the least or even agree with it but I can understand to some degree the difficulty of change and it must change. I also don't agree with these attempts at whale farming in Oklahoma.
Whales are intelligent empathetic creatures who can most definitely feel pain and a whole host of other complex emotions. Only the most dense of us humans could advocate for their continued use as a food source.
And when you eat it, it tastes like steak! A food you've never even contemplated existing!
Heh, least of the issues here, but it's a bit audacious to produce an analogy the core of which is "imagine never having experienced something with which you are familiar".
An assumption can be made that the CNS of the dolphin employs a frame time similar to humans, nominally 30
milliseconds. As a starting point, it is reasonable to assume that a typical phoneme is three to five times longer than 30 ms based on experience with human languages. A complication arises because of the multiple sources of sound within the dolphin’s nasal passages, recalling that the larynx of the dolphin is not in its throat (the passage along which food is ingested). These multiple acoustic sources suggest the dolphin can achieve an equivalent of the unique “throat singing” of the Inuit and Tuva people of Asia. Throat singing is also known as overtone singing.
Wikipedia provides a good description of throat singing. In Dolphin, the equivalent is clearly nasal singing. Nasal
singing in dolphin may be even more extensive.
As a starting point, the acoustic range of dolphin sounds (other than its forward focused echolocation sounds)
potentially useful in communications (language) extends from about 2000 Hz to at least 80,000 Hz (with whistles
extending up to about 40,000 Hz). In seeking to understand Dolphinia or Truncates, it makes no sense to restrict our
analyses to frequencies that the human can hear. Nor is it rational to limit the dolphin’s language to either a tonal or a stressed structure.
I hope some researcher(s) will put out organized videos of dolphins chatting alongside audio spectrograms. Remember the Enigma story, every message had certain words in it and was likely to have certain ones in certain places at certain times from certain senders to certain receivers... Certainly.
The role of larynx in cetacean sound production is still debated, but we do know that they posses at least 2 sound generating mechanisms that could work independently and simultaneously. It appears that right side phonic lip is involved in echolocation and pulsed sounds, the right one is involved in whistling. Two (maybe even 3, if larynx is indeed invoved too) sound producing mechanisms make their communication even more complex, since it greatly increases the sound combinations probabilities.
Many researchers have already done that, i.e. using video and audio for sound analysis, and here we are,60+ years later, still do not know the function of even a single call, apart, of course, from signature whistles and echolocation. This is a non-human communication system, 25 mln years in the making by creatures who rely on sounds in ways humans never will.
When we study cetaceans, we struggle to determine who produces the sound, who responds, even tagged animals are problematic, because the sound could be made by someone next to them. In large pelagic pods, it is a cacophony, they chat all the time and never shut up. It appears that at least in dolphins, whistles could be more of a long distance signals, but pulsed ones, like burst pulses, are more of a short distance signals, for those who are close by.
But make no mistake, some information is being transmitted, we know that. The Bastian experiment with all its flaws was first to demonstrate it,and it has been replicated too. Some researchers are not entirely convinced, but it is definitely a very interesting area to explore.
> the function of even a single call, apart, of course, from signature whistles and echolocation
Denise Herzing id'd seaweed, right?
Perhaps there are other ones easy to identify through existing sub-sea-level candid camera videos: hey, there's a [food they eat], let's go over there; help / danger, there's a [thing they fear]; I forgot my [phone / wallet / keys] in my other pair of pants, brb...
> we struggle to determine who produces the sound
What about based on signature whistles for addressing one another? It looks like there's a good amount of info on how they use it, so that could help, right?
> it is a cacophony
What about looking for only "vocal copy" instances between individuals to use as markers?
Denise Herzing used synthetic whistles trying to label things in our human way, pretty much the extension of Herman's line of thought. But we do not know if dolphins indeed label things in their natural communication system.
Signature whistles are tricky, and not everyone agrees that they are actually a thing. There was a recent study done in Israel where dolphins appeared to be using signature whistles of dolphins who died some time ago. It could mean that either signature whistles are not what we think they are, or that dolphins have routine conversations about their dead companions.
Imagine the combination of Orcas and/or other animals with artificial intelligence /cloud hookups, same as for humans. Certainly will be an interesting world...
