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> Tahlequah is using much of her energy to cling to the dead calf, which weighs about 300 pounds, and she is unable to forage for food, scientists said during a news briefing on Thursday. They said that her closely knit pod was supporting her. Other female orcas, especially her sister, have been observed to be consistently at her side.
Utterly tragic. It's also singularly evil the devastation humans have brought to some of the hyperintelligent species on the planet.
I always have mixed feelings about this. It's sad. But how is her pod supporting her exactly? Are they bringing her food? If so is that food the dead offspring of other animals? I feel these kinds of stories often have a kind of selective empathy for the focused animal. Ultimately nature is extraordinarily cruel absent humans; imo humans are the only hope for something better, if such a thing even makes sense.
I've recently taken up hunting, mostly because my rural family prioritizes it.
The natural world is full of unimaginable cruelty. Wolves will take down young deer and eat them alive while parents watch. Bears will pin down whatever they can catch and who cares if it is alive. On and on, the amount of bloodshed required to support an omnivore/carnivore is simply bananas. Killer whales are hyper-intelligent aquatic nightmares, imho, that thankfully have not decided to eat humans.
We, humans, made the following bargain with nature, at least until recently: We will drive away the predators that keep you in constant alert and savage your children, and in exchange we will determine how and when you die (quickly, but perhaps also fearfully).
I agree - we can carefully manage the wilderness for our own benefit, and that may take away the randomized killings. But there is _no_ version of a carnivore or meat-eating omnivore that does not involve killing and savagery and disregard for the life that has been reduced to just a link in the grass-to-meat or plankton-to-meat foodchain.
I've come to terms with that and continue to eat meat.
I'm not a vegetarian etc., but you could argue that humans are both the only hope for something different, but also the only species capable of a particular sort of cruelty that comes from the society we live in for animals and other people.
That is, animals may kill to eat, but humans slaughter animals to get tastier/more convenient/etc., food.
Spot on. The whole world is in a constant state of SNAFU. That is the sole truth I’ve understood from many years of pondering and soul searching. To make sense of this world (and the universe) beyond our limited means of comprehension is a futile attempt. Everything is relative - compassion, love, hurt, morality. One being’s loss is anothers’ blessing (food).
I’m also not so hopeful about humans. A simple example: the way we mass produce and slaughter animals for food is beyond cruel. It’s impossible to not be on the wrong side of some argument if you look hard enough. No matter how ethical you are. I am honestly convinced the world just is. We give meaning to things to live as a civilization (and avoid conflict) but the universe/nature/world probably doesn’t give a shit.
> imo humans are the only hope for something better, if such a thing even makes sense.
Humans are the number one cause of environmental destruction and animal and plant suffering on Earth that is completely out of whack with what it takes for humans to live. All of the "hope for something better" you refer to are for humans to solve less than 1% that we have ourselves caused in the first place.
Oddly enough, I started thinking more like this.
I think it's because I've felt discriminated against myself and thinking about ways in which I myself discriminate against certain animals such as cows, pigs and chickens helps me to put it into perspective.
That said, my moral framework is consistent because it's based on intelligence. I will not eat dolphin or killer whale.
Among humans, I often find myself tolerating intelligent jerks, for the same reason.
I started penalizing for evil more strongly in recent years though. Before that, I subconsciously assumed that there was an inverse correlation between intelligence and evil, but it has come to my awareness that it's not the case. Reality is that, as intelligence goes up, evil, if present, gets better at hiding.
And yet nature has historically found balance. Humans, on a large scale, seem incapable of doing the same. At this point humans have become a perpetual extinction event with no end in sight.
every flower throws shade on another flower and that war we call peaceful nature.
can't agree more !!!
Yes, it made me think about animals panicking so much before slaughter that they often have heart attacks. And dairy cows who have their babies slaughtered who cry for weeks. Maybe these are apocryphal stories, but we are very much trained to believe we shouldn’t anthropomorphise animals. I hope that we are able to grow meat in a way without suffering as soon as possible.
As someone who has worked on farms i can verify that such things happen. I personally witnessed sheep behaving exactly as decided in The Silence of the Lambs. Our sheep were famously noisy and certainly were used to being moved around in lorries but when the abattoir lorry turned up you could almost smell their fear. I also witnessed a cow storm through four fences in order to be reunited with her calf.
The irony: The farm was run by vegetarians and as the only meat eater it became my responsibility to oversee any time an animal was taken to slaughter. This simultaneously put me off meat eating and vegetarians.
It’s ironic how accepted vegetarians, who have a dietary preference, are in society, and how hated vegans, who have an ethical argument against unnecessary killing of sentient animals, are in society.
I only turned vegan a couple of years ago as something clicked and I was able to make the connection between the food I was eating and the animals who were being killed, almost certainly unnecessarily, for that food. But before then I disliked vegans a lot, and was completely fine with vegetarians. I’m honestly unable to reconcile my thinking.
It’s kind of like how I don’t understand how I strongly believed in god before I lost faith. Now the idea that I ever could, or ever did, believe in a personal god seems unbelievable to me.
Human psychology is ridiculously interesting.
Why are the cows taken away from the calves, especially dairy cows? Just curious.
That reads like dark satire.
The scientist M. Temple Grandin is known for her great contributions in the field of mitigating pre-slaughter animal panic.
She is autistic. Her methodology included walking the chutes used to direct cattle to slaughter and working out in great detaiL mods that would reduce their stress. I've heard her interviewed a few times. She's extraordinary.
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Extraordinary? She invented a machine to hug cows before they get bolted in the head.
We’d be better off not making animal slaughter the core of the American diet.
Temple Grandin designed more efficient killing machines to streamline and reduce the costs of industrial scale slaughter.
> we are very much trained to believe we shouldn’t anthropomorphise animals
We shouldn't anthropomorphize animals. Instead, the point here is that emotions are not anthropic; humans do not have a monopoly on emotions.
Which is to say, we should be sure not to think that "grief" means the same thing for an orca that it means to a human; yet naturally animals do grieve in their own ways. (Heck, "grief" doesn't even mean the same thing for all humans!)
And in the context of orcas specifically, their emotional processing centers in their brain dwarf that of humans, even when taking the relative brain sizes into account. So by scientific accounting, it's likely their emotional intelligence is far more advanced than ours.
yeah, the funny thing about the anthropomorphism debate is that supposedly the thing that makes humans different from (other) animals is our "advanced" brain, i.e. language, civilization, etc.
in other words, all the ways we have to manage emotions, and all of our "non-emotional" functioning.
So we have somehow evolved to be able to better manage emotions.
Ok, so if we grant all of that, then haven't we just said that emotions are common to animals? So then how is it anthropomorphising to say that animals have the traits which we've just said define animals, whereas what makes humans special is that we have 'risen above' mere emotion?
https://www.google.com/search?q=rat+not+eating+after+death+o...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277240852....
I've kept rats for a long time, I don't know why, but I do know they change behaviour for a period of time once one dies.
Video of scientists getting a laugh response from tickled rats.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/eavesdrop-on-ultras...
In my opinion, this is why hunting is ethically superior. Almost nothing dies peacefully in the wild, it's either massive long term suffering, or being mauled by dogs, bears or big cats, strangled by pythons etc.
A skilled hunter can choose an adult animal without kids and take it fairly humanely.
Sadly, we all have to die somehow.
Hunters and fisherman generally have great respect for nature and the environment, which is important.
As a vegan I agree with that. However not all huntings are great, especially when conducted for fun instead of meat. Perhaps your already know the famous footage of new-head of NRA struggling to kill an elephant : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56923507.amp
(He says he gave later the meat to the villagers. I guess they ate it but I’m not sure they requested it in the first place)
It’s the same as how soldiers were trained to de-anthropomorphize their enemies.
That's why I can't wait for lab grown meat becoming a thing. I love meat and my understanding is that its healthy and necessary product but i also have nothing but respect to vegetarians.
why should we wait for lab grown meat if we can go vegan right now?
Love animals but “grown meat” has proven to be very gross.
It's such a travesty what we've done to the Southern Resident Orca population. We decimated their numbers with captures and killings, cutoff their food supply, and poisoned them via their environment and food supply. These are effectively war crimes committed by humans against the orcas, but even for an animal that likely meets and possibly even exceeds our emotional intelligence, articles like this are about as good as they can hope for from us.
Birth article in Sept - https://archive.ph/uZ5mx
Anthropomorphism?
In my science?!
Yes please!
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Let’s get some more cetapodomorphism in our human psych discussions.
This is one more reason that Orcas should not be kept in captivity.
reading this made me want to cry. my heart goes out to the momma whale.
I believe this is nice, but how do regular people actually find the time to care about this stuff?
If you have kids, bills, a job, listen to crap from politicians all day, where do you find the time to be this empathetic.
My kids school gives them milk as part of lunch, my kid likes milk now. You have to live in a very special world to get around this.
I was a vegetarian for a while, I was mostly starving hungry and I had to spend hours a day cooking and eating to feel full. It's a shit situation but yeah, it's the way it is for many people.