At Egypt’s Tourism Gems, Animal Abuse Is an Ugly Flaw
The rampant mistreatment of horses, camels and donkeys at major attractions like the pyramids of Giza has prompted calls for visitors to boycott rides.
CAIRO — A trip to the storied pyramids of Giza was supposed to be a highlight of Noémi Haszon’s Egyptian vacation. But minutes later, the Hungarian tourist had retreated into her tour bus, shaken and revolted by what she had witnessed.
Inside the pyramids complex, emaciated horses panted and strained as they pulled buggies loaded with tourists up a steep slope. Drivers whipped them to make them go faster.
Some horses slipped and stumbled on the smooth tarmac surface. Others had open wounds. Despite the summer heat, there was no water supply.
“I was shocked,” recalled Ms. Haszon. “Those poor horses. It was like another world.”
For years, the sense of wonderment experienced by visitors at Egypt’s great sites, like the pyramids of Giza or the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, has been spoiled by scenes of heart-rending cruelty toward the animals working there.
More and photos at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/worl ... 3053090414
pets
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swamidada_1
- Posts: 239
- Joined: Sun Nov 18, 2018 9:21 pm
About a decade ago, I was visiting a shop in Jodia Bazaar in Karachi. While standing out side the shop I saw an old senior Makrani Bhai whipping donkey to move forward. I looked at donkey, she was very weak and unable to move, I saw tears rolling down the face of donkey, so weak. When owner of donkey hit hard that poor animal fell on ground. The passers by came to rescue the donkey and unload some packages from cart to ease weight. People gathered there cursed the owner of donkey cart for not feeding the poor animal. Makrani Bhai replied, I am an old man, have to feed my grand children beside this donkey also. There is hunger in my household. I am sorry but what shall I do?
I do believe the animals who help families to earn lively hood should be respected and not whipped.
Poverty and hunger creates frustration and negative thinking. Few days back in Pakistan, a jobless person killed his wife and 3 innocent siblings leaving suicide note that he can't feed his children. What a shame on humanity.
I do believe the animals who help families to earn lively hood should be respected and not whipped.
Poverty and hunger creates frustration and negative thinking. Few days back in Pakistan, a jobless person killed his wife and 3 innocent siblings leaving suicide note that he can't feed his children. What a shame on humanity.
Pit Bull About To Be Adopted Refuses To Leave Shelter Without Tiny Best Friend
As “man’s best friend,” dogs have an innate loyalty that ties them to those they love for as long as they live. Sometimes that loyalty isn’t shared with humans and instead shared with each other. When this energetic pit bull and an ailing chihuahua were brought to the shelter, they went in with nothing but each other. But when someone wanted to adopt the pit bull, her immediate reaction blew everyone away.
And the chihuahua would react the same when the pit bull needed surgery…
Abandoned With No One But Each Other
Merrill, a female pit bull mix, and Taco, a male chihuahua, were handed over to the Rocket Dog Rescue in October 2014. No one at the San Francisco-based rescue knew why Merrill and Taco’s owner gave them up, but they did notice something very particular about the unlikely pair.
Merrill and Taco were inseparable. which led the shelter to want to adopt them out together. But adopting them out as a pair proved to be harder than expected.
Watch slide show at:
https://www.giveitlove.com/pit-bull-abo ... st-friend/
As “man’s best friend,” dogs have an innate loyalty that ties them to those they love for as long as they live. Sometimes that loyalty isn’t shared with humans and instead shared with each other. When this energetic pit bull and an ailing chihuahua were brought to the shelter, they went in with nothing but each other. But when someone wanted to adopt the pit bull, her immediate reaction blew everyone away.
And the chihuahua would react the same when the pit bull needed surgery…
Abandoned With No One But Each Other
Merrill, a female pit bull mix, and Taco, a male chihuahua, were handed over to the Rocket Dog Rescue in October 2014. No one at the San Francisco-based rescue knew why Merrill and Taco’s owner gave them up, but they did notice something very particular about the unlikely pair.
Merrill and Taco were inseparable. which led the shelter to want to adopt them out together. But adopting them out as a pair proved to be harder than expected.
Watch slide show at:
https://www.giveitlove.com/pit-bull-abo ... st-friend/
MSMS says in his Memoirs:swamidada wrote:I was just thinking. Are dogs and bitches like men and women? Are there any resemblances in them. Can pets be called humans?
They eat, drink, bark (there way of talking), play, have intercourse, giving births, taking care of puppies and so on.
"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God. But men and women, being more highly developed, are immensely more advanced than the infinite number of other beings known to us."
http://www.ismaili.net/Source/0016b.html
What Distinguishes Humans from Other Animals?
https://www.livescience.com/33376-human ... ities.html
There's no consensus on the question of what makes us special, or whether we even are. The biggest point of contention is whether our cognitive abilities differ from those of other animals "in kind," or merely in degree. Are we in a class by ourselves or just the smartest ones in our class?
Charles Darwin supported the latter hypothesis. He believed we are similar to animals, and merely incrementally more intelligent as a result of our higher evolution. But according to Marc Hauser, director of the cognitive evolution lab at Harvard University, in a recent article in Scientific American, "mounting evidence indicates that, in contrast to Darwin's theory of a continuity of mind between humans and other species, a profound gap separates our intellect from the animal kind."
Hauser and his colleagues have identified four abilities of the human mind that they believe to be the essence of our "humaniqueness" mental traits and abilities that distinguish us from our fellow Earthlings. They are: generative computation, promiscuous combination of ideas, the use of mental symbols, and abstract thought. [Read: Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]
1. Generative computation
Humans can generate a practically limitless variety of words and concepts. We do so through two modes of operation recursive and combinatorial. The recursive operation allows us to apply a learned rule to create new expressions. In combinatorial operations, we mix different learned elements to create a new concept.
2. Promiscuous combination of ideas
"Promiscuous combination of ideas," Hauser explained, "allows the mingling of different domains of knowledge such as art, sex, space, causality and friendship thereby generating new laws, social relationships and technologies."
3. Mental symbols
Mental symbols are our way of encoding sensory experiences. They form the basis of our complex systems of language and communication. We may choose to keep our mental symbols to ourselves, or represent them to others using words or pictures.
4. Abstract thought
Abstract thought is the contemplation of things beyond what we can sense.
"This is not to say that our mental faculties sprang fully formed out of nowhere," Hauser wrote. "Researchers have found some of the building blocks of human cognition in other species. But these building blocks make up only the cement foot print of the skyscraper that is the human mind. The evolutionary origins of our cognitive abilities thus remain rather hazy. Clarity is emerging from novel insights and experimental technologies, however."
https://www.livescience.com/33376-human ... ities.html
PUBLISHED ON FEB 05, 2021 07:13 PM IST
The image shows the dog named Sadie.(Faceboook/@Ramapo-Bergen Animal Refuge)
TRENDING
His adopted dog saved his life when he had a stroke. Here’s what the canine did
By Trisha Sengupta
“What a wonderful girl,” wrote a Facebook user while praising the dog.
Pet parents know all too well that they’ll go any lengths to ensure their furry friends are happy and safe. Also, numerous posts on various social media platforms show that dogs will pretty much do the same when they can. Just like this German shepherd named Sadie who saved her human Brian Myers’ life after he suffered a stroke.
They started by explaining how Myers decided to adopt Sadie who was a nervous rescue and protective with new people. “Brian felt a special bond with Sadie, as he valued her intelligence, hesitancy to trust and fierce loyalty once she did form that trust. Brian gave Sadie a second chance at life, adopting Sadie and welcoming her home,” they wrote while describing the bond between the duo.
The dog also gave a second chance to life to her pet parent. “Last week, Brian suffered a stroke when home alone with Sadie. While he was collapsed, Sadie never left his side. She licked his face to keep him awake, and helped drag him across the room to his cell phone. Sadie was the only reason that Brian was able to call for help. This time, Sadie gave Brian a second chance at life,” they wrote.
The organization concluded the post with a few praiseful lines about the dog. They wrote how Sadie’s devotion and quick thinking helped Myers.
“I was sleeping and I had to use the bathroom in the night. As soon as I stepped on the floor I went down and hit the ground. I couldn’t get back up. I just grabbed on hold of her collar and she started pulling her weight backwards. And with that I was able to slide myself across the floor. Otherwise, I would probably still be laying there. I love her more than I can express. She was there for me in my time of crisis and she knew instinctively what to do somehow. I wouldn’t have gotten up off the floor if she wasn’t there for me,” Myers told CBS2.
Since being shared, the post has gathered tons of comments from people. They shared how they story left them emotional. Many couldn’t stop praising Sadie.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/
The image shows the dog named Sadie.(Faceboook/@Ramapo-Bergen Animal Refuge)
TRENDING
His adopted dog saved his life when he had a stroke. Here’s what the canine did
By Trisha Sengupta
“What a wonderful girl,” wrote a Facebook user while praising the dog.
Pet parents know all too well that they’ll go any lengths to ensure their furry friends are happy and safe. Also, numerous posts on various social media platforms show that dogs will pretty much do the same when they can. Just like this German shepherd named Sadie who saved her human Brian Myers’ life after he suffered a stroke.
They started by explaining how Myers decided to adopt Sadie who was a nervous rescue and protective with new people. “Brian felt a special bond with Sadie, as he valued her intelligence, hesitancy to trust and fierce loyalty once she did form that trust. Brian gave Sadie a second chance at life, adopting Sadie and welcoming her home,” they wrote while describing the bond between the duo.
The dog also gave a second chance to life to her pet parent. “Last week, Brian suffered a stroke when home alone with Sadie. While he was collapsed, Sadie never left his side. She licked his face to keep him awake, and helped drag him across the room to his cell phone. Sadie was the only reason that Brian was able to call for help. This time, Sadie gave Brian a second chance at life,” they wrote.
The organization concluded the post with a few praiseful lines about the dog. They wrote how Sadie’s devotion and quick thinking helped Myers.
“I was sleeping and I had to use the bathroom in the night. As soon as I stepped on the floor I went down and hit the ground. I couldn’t get back up. I just grabbed on hold of her collar and she started pulling her weight backwards. And with that I was able to slide myself across the floor. Otherwise, I would probably still be laying there. I love her more than I can express. She was there for me in my time of crisis and she knew instinctively what to do somehow. I wouldn’t have gotten up off the floor if she wasn’t there for me,” Myers told CBS2.
Since being shared, the post has gathered tons of comments from people. They shared how they story left them emotional. Many couldn’t stop praising Sadie.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/
Cat Survives Jumping from the Fifth Floor of a Burning Apartment Building: 'Perfect Landing'
Nicholas Rice
People Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:41 PM
Cat Survives Jumping from the Fifth Floor of a Burning Apartment Building: 'Perfect Landing'
A fortunate feline survived an apartment complex fire by jumping out of a fifth-floor window and landing safely on its feet.
On Thursday, Chicago Fire Department personnel shared a video on social media of the blaze they recently responded to at an apartment complex located in the city's Englewood neighborhood. Midway through the clip, a black cat appears in one of the building's open windows, briefly sticking its front paws out before deciding to make a daring jump. Onlookers can be heard gasping as the animal falls down the side of the building.
The video ends with the courageous cat miraculously landing on a patch of grass on all four paws and then bouncing once before running away from those nearby.
The cat was not injured, fire department spokesman Larry Langford told The Guardian, noting that the cat later tried to find its owner.
"It went under my car and hid until she felt better after a couple of minutes and came out and tried to scale the wall to get back in," he said.
"Nine lives for a cat that jumped from a fire at 65th and Lowe. Cat hit grass bounced and walked away!" the city's fire department wrote on Twitter alongside the video of the cat's nervy leap.
Many social media users quickly reacted to the cat cashing in one of its nine lives to escape the fire.
"Perfect landing
," one user tweeted as another said, "Wow!!! One down 8 to go," referring to the popular myth about cats having nine lives.
Meanwhile, another commentator couldn't believe the ordeal was even real. "Am I the only here who thinks there's no way this could be real?" they wrote.
No injuries were reported following the apartment complex fire, which was limited to one apartment, per The Guardian.
Nicholas Rice
People Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:41 PM
Cat Survives Jumping from the Fifth Floor of a Burning Apartment Building: 'Perfect Landing'
A fortunate feline survived an apartment complex fire by jumping out of a fifth-floor window and landing safely on its feet.
On Thursday, Chicago Fire Department personnel shared a video on social media of the blaze they recently responded to at an apartment complex located in the city's Englewood neighborhood. Midway through the clip, a black cat appears in one of the building's open windows, briefly sticking its front paws out before deciding to make a daring jump. Onlookers can be heard gasping as the animal falls down the side of the building.
The video ends with the courageous cat miraculously landing on a patch of grass on all four paws and then bouncing once before running away from those nearby.
The cat was not injured, fire department spokesman Larry Langford told The Guardian, noting that the cat later tried to find its owner.
"It went under my car and hid until she felt better after a couple of minutes and came out and tried to scale the wall to get back in," he said.
"Nine lives for a cat that jumped from a fire at 65th and Lowe. Cat hit grass bounced and walked away!" the city's fire department wrote on Twitter alongside the video of the cat's nervy leap.
Many social media users quickly reacted to the cat cashing in one of its nine lives to escape the fire.
"Perfect landing
," one user tweeted as another said, "Wow!!! One down 8 to go," referring to the popular myth about cats having nine lives.Meanwhile, another commentator couldn't believe the ordeal was even real. "Am I the only here who thinks there's no way this could be real?" they wrote.
No injuries were reported following the apartment complex fire, which was limited to one apartment, per The Guardian.
Heartbreaking video shows the moment an Indian elephant bids farewell to his beloved master who died of cancer
Sophia Ankel
Sat, June 12, 2021, 3:23 AM
Elephant in Indian village bids farewell to trainer
A screenshot of the video showing an elephant bid farewell to Damodaran Nair in Kerala, India, on June 4, 2021. Bijupanoorkaaran via Facebook
A heartbreaking video shows the moment an Indian elephant bid farewell to its long-time trainer.
Damodaran Nair, who took care of elephants in a village in Kerala, died of cancer on June 3.
The elephant paid his last respects to his master by waving his trunk and bowing his head.
A heartbreaking video shows the moment an elephant said goodbye to its long-time master after he died of cancer in Kerala, India, last week, the Indian Express reported.
Damodaran Nair was a so-called "mahout" who took care of elephants in the district of Kottayam for more than six decades. Before his death on June 3, the 74-year-old wanted to see his favorite elephant, Brahamdathan, one last time.
According to the elephant's owner, Rajesh Palattu, the two had been inseparable since meeting 25 years ago, and Nair treated the elephant-like his own son.
"The bond and love between the two, Damodaran Nair and Brahmadathan, was one to watch and emulate," Palattu said, according to Gulf News.
Nair passed away before his dying wish could be fulfilled, but his family made sure Brahamdathan could bid farewell one final time before the funeral.
Footage posted on social media captured the emotional moment, which shows Brahmadattan walking up to Nair's wrapped-up body, which appears to be lying at the entrance of a house.
A crowd of teary-eyed onlookers begins to weep as the elephant touches Nair's body with its trunk before raising and lowering it as if the animal is waving goodbye.
"We were all moved with tears rolling down our cheeks. It was one of the most trying parting moments one could witness," Palattu said, according to Gulf News.
Watch the moment below:
The video has garnered thousands of views on social media.
Traditionally, a mahout receives an elephant early on in its life and trains to keep it by his family. The mahout and elephant remain bonded to each other through their lives.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/he ... 19288.html
Sophia Ankel
Sat, June 12, 2021, 3:23 AM
Elephant in Indian village bids farewell to trainer
A screenshot of the video showing an elephant bid farewell to Damodaran Nair in Kerala, India, on June 4, 2021. Bijupanoorkaaran via Facebook
A heartbreaking video shows the moment an Indian elephant bid farewell to its long-time trainer.
Damodaran Nair, who took care of elephants in a village in Kerala, died of cancer on June 3.
The elephant paid his last respects to his master by waving his trunk and bowing his head.
A heartbreaking video shows the moment an elephant said goodbye to its long-time master after he died of cancer in Kerala, India, last week, the Indian Express reported.
Damodaran Nair was a so-called "mahout" who took care of elephants in the district of Kottayam for more than six decades. Before his death on June 3, the 74-year-old wanted to see his favorite elephant, Brahamdathan, one last time.
According to the elephant's owner, Rajesh Palattu, the two had been inseparable since meeting 25 years ago, and Nair treated the elephant-like his own son.
"The bond and love between the two, Damodaran Nair and Brahmadathan, was one to watch and emulate," Palattu said, according to Gulf News.
Nair passed away before his dying wish could be fulfilled, but his family made sure Brahamdathan could bid farewell one final time before the funeral.
Footage posted on social media captured the emotional moment, which shows Brahmadattan walking up to Nair's wrapped-up body, which appears to be lying at the entrance of a house.
A crowd of teary-eyed onlookers begins to weep as the elephant touches Nair's body with its trunk before raising and lowering it as if the animal is waving goodbye.
"We were all moved with tears rolling down our cheeks. It was one of the most trying parting moments one could witness," Palattu said, according to Gulf News.
Watch the moment below:
The video has garnered thousands of views on social media.
Traditionally, a mahout receives an elephant early on in its life and trains to keep it by his family. The mahout and elephant remain bonded to each other through their lives.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/he ... 19288.html
Modern Zoos Are Not Worth the Moral Cost
After being captives of the pandemic for more than a year, we have begun experiencing the pleasures of simple outings: dining al fresco, shopping with a friend, taking a stroll through the zoo. As we snap a selfie by the sea lions for the first time in so long, it seems worth asking, after our collective ordeal, whether our pleasure in seeing wild animals up close is worth the price of their captivity.
Throughout history, men have accumulated large and fierce animals to advertise their might and prestige. Power-mad men from Henry III to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday to the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar to Charlemagne all tried to underscore their strength by keeping terrifying beasts captive. William Randolph Hearst created his own private zoo with lions, tigers, leopards and more at Hearst Castle. It is these boastful collections of animals, these autocratic menageries, from which the modern zoo, with its didactic plaques and $15 hot dogs, springs.
The forerunners of the modern zoo, open to the public and grounded in science, took shape in the 19th century. Public zoos sprang up across Europe, many modeled on the London Zoo in Regent’s Park. Ostensibly places for genteel amusement and edification, zoos expanded beyond big and fearsome animals to include reptile houses, aviaries and insectariums. Living collections were often presented in taxonomic order, with various species of the same family grouped together, for comparative study.
The first zoos housed animals behind metal bars in spartan cages. But relatively early in their evolution, a German exotic animal importer named Carl Hagenbeck changed the way wild animals were exhibited. In his Animal Park, which opened in 1907 in Hamburg, he designed cages that didn’t look like cages, using moats and artfully arranged rock walls to invisibly pen animals. By designing these enclosures so that many animals could be seen at once, without any bars or walls in the visitors’ lines of sight, he created an immersive panorama, in which the fact of captivity was supplanted by the illusion of being in nature.
Mr. Hagenbeck’s model was widely influential. Increasingly, animals were presented with the distasteful fact of their imprisonment visually elided. Zoos shifted just slightly from overt demonstrations of mastery over beasts to a narrative of benevolent protection of individual animals. From there, it was an easy leap to protecting animal species.
The “educational day out” model of zoos endured until the late 20th century, when zoos began actively rebranding themselves as serious contributors to conservation. Zoo animals, this new narrative went, function as backup populations for wild animals under threat, as well as “ambassadors” for their species, teaching humans and motivating them to care about wildlife. This conservation focus “must be a key component” for institutions that want to be accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, a nonprofit organization that sets standards and policies for facilities in the United States and 12 other countries.
This is the image of the zoo I grew up with: the unambiguously good civic institution that lovingly cared for animals both on its grounds and, somehow, vaguely, in their wild habitats. A few zoos are famous for their conservation work. Four of the zoos and the aquarium in New York City, for instance, are managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is involved in conservation efforts around the world. But this is not the norm.
While researching my book on the ethics of human interactions with wild species, “Wild Souls,” I examined how, exactly, zoos contribute to the conservation of wild animals.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
After being captives of the pandemic for more than a year, we have begun experiencing the pleasures of simple outings: dining al fresco, shopping with a friend, taking a stroll through the zoo. As we snap a selfie by the sea lions for the first time in so long, it seems worth asking, after our collective ordeal, whether our pleasure in seeing wild animals up close is worth the price of their captivity.
Throughout history, men have accumulated large and fierce animals to advertise their might and prestige. Power-mad men from Henry III to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday to the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar to Charlemagne all tried to underscore their strength by keeping terrifying beasts captive. William Randolph Hearst created his own private zoo with lions, tigers, leopards and more at Hearst Castle. It is these boastful collections of animals, these autocratic menageries, from which the modern zoo, with its didactic plaques and $15 hot dogs, springs.
The forerunners of the modern zoo, open to the public and grounded in science, took shape in the 19th century. Public zoos sprang up across Europe, many modeled on the London Zoo in Regent’s Park. Ostensibly places for genteel amusement and edification, zoos expanded beyond big and fearsome animals to include reptile houses, aviaries and insectariums. Living collections were often presented in taxonomic order, with various species of the same family grouped together, for comparative study.
The first zoos housed animals behind metal bars in spartan cages. But relatively early in their evolution, a German exotic animal importer named Carl Hagenbeck changed the way wild animals were exhibited. In his Animal Park, which opened in 1907 in Hamburg, he designed cages that didn’t look like cages, using moats and artfully arranged rock walls to invisibly pen animals. By designing these enclosures so that many animals could be seen at once, without any bars or walls in the visitors’ lines of sight, he created an immersive panorama, in which the fact of captivity was supplanted by the illusion of being in nature.
Mr. Hagenbeck’s model was widely influential. Increasingly, animals were presented with the distasteful fact of their imprisonment visually elided. Zoos shifted just slightly from overt demonstrations of mastery over beasts to a narrative of benevolent protection of individual animals. From there, it was an easy leap to protecting animal species.
The “educational day out” model of zoos endured until the late 20th century, when zoos began actively rebranding themselves as serious contributors to conservation. Zoo animals, this new narrative went, function as backup populations for wild animals under threat, as well as “ambassadors” for their species, teaching humans and motivating them to care about wildlife. This conservation focus “must be a key component” for institutions that want to be accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, a nonprofit organization that sets standards and policies for facilities in the United States and 12 other countries.
This is the image of the zoo I grew up with: the unambiguously good civic institution that lovingly cared for animals both on its grounds and, somehow, vaguely, in their wild habitats. A few zoos are famous for their conservation work. Four of the zoos and the aquarium in New York City, for instance, are managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is involved in conservation efforts around the world. But this is not the norm.
While researching my book on the ethics of human interactions with wild species, “Wild Souls,” I examined how, exactly, zoos contribute to the conservation of wild animals.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
World's oldest known animal cave painting found in Indonesia
Nicola Smith
The Telegraph Thu, January 14, 2021
Archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest known cave painting: a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was made at least 45,500 years ago in Indonesia - Maxime Aubert/AFP
In a stunning, secret valley enclosed by limestone mountains on an Indonesian island, archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the world’s oldest known animal cave painting – a life-sized portrayal of an indigenous warty pig, which was made at least 45,500 years ago.
The figurative artwork, painted using red ocher pigment, shows a social interaction between a group of pigs and was first found in December 2017 during a survey led by Basran Burhan, a graduate student at Australia’s Griffith University, after local farmers led him deep inside the Leang Tedongnge cave.
The painting's age, outline for the first time in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday, provides the earliest evidence of human settlement on the island of Sulawesi, a region already considered by some experts to be rich in some of the oldest representational cave art in the world.
Professor Adam Brumm, also an archaeologist at Griffith University and a co-author of the study, told the Telegraph he had been amazed by the “beautiful, vivid portrayal” of the pigs after making the difficult trek to the remote cave.
“The painting depicts a scene and this is very rare in early cave art,” he said. “There is some sort of narrative going on..The artists portrayed [the pigs] as enormously fat and jolly looking. You sit there lost in wonder, pondering the meaning of it and trying to just decipher what the true story was behind it.”
This undated handout photo shows the Leang Tedongnge cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia - ADHI AGUS OKTAVIANA /AFP
The site is only about 40 miles from Makassar, a city of some 1.5 million, but the painting was previously undiscovered because of the forbidding local terrain which is only accessible in the dry season. The isolated Bugis community who live in the valley said Westerners had not ventured there before.
“You have to trek up and up into the limestone mountains along a rough jungle path,” said Mr Brumm, describing how at the top of the mountain his team had to walk through another tunnel-like cave before it emerged into a “spectacular” hidden valley.
He said the painting, which measures 53 by 21 inches, and shows a pig with a short crest of upright hair and horn-like facial warts facing two other partially preserved pigs, provided an insight into the ancient community’s connection with the animal world.
Humans have hunted Sulawesi warty pigs for tens of thousands of years, and they are a key feature of the region's prehistoric artwork, particularly during the Ice Age.
“It really speaks of this ancient and very longstanding spiritual connection with this one particular species of pig,” he said. “It seems to have been the case that the ice-age artists in Sulawesi were bound to the fate and future of this species.”
The age of the artwork was calculated by Maxime Aubert, a dating specialist, who identified a calcite deposit that had formed on top of the painting, then used Uranium-series isotope dating to deduce the deposit was at least 45,500 years old, although it may be older.
The cave paintings also help to inform understanding of early human migrations. The earliest settlers to reach Australia 65,000 years ago would probably have had to cross the islands of Indonesia, known as "Wallacea."
“We hope to find earlier evidence of rock art dating back to around 65,000 years ago,” said Mr Brumm. “There are all sorts of exciting prospects to look for this early art that could have been left by the earliest ancestors of aboriginal people in Australia.”
However, Paul Pettitt, a British archaeologist specialising in the Palaeolithic era, said that while the art was “impressive” that a few issues “give me reservations about the reliability of what they publish.”
His concern lies mainly in the definitive use of “minimum ages” to claim the discovery of the world’s oldest figurative art. The study needed “a little more integrated rigour before we start rewriting prehistory,” he said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wo ... 03080.html
Nicola Smith
The Telegraph Thu, January 14, 2021
Archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest known cave painting: a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was made at least 45,500 years ago in Indonesia - Maxime Aubert/AFP
In a stunning, secret valley enclosed by limestone mountains on an Indonesian island, archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the world’s oldest known animal cave painting – a life-sized portrayal of an indigenous warty pig, which was made at least 45,500 years ago.
The figurative artwork, painted using red ocher pigment, shows a social interaction between a group of pigs and was first found in December 2017 during a survey led by Basran Burhan, a graduate student at Australia’s Griffith University, after local farmers led him deep inside the Leang Tedongnge cave.
The painting's age, outline for the first time in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday, provides the earliest evidence of human settlement on the island of Sulawesi, a region already considered by some experts to be rich in some of the oldest representational cave art in the world.
Professor Adam Brumm, also an archaeologist at Griffith University and a co-author of the study, told the Telegraph he had been amazed by the “beautiful, vivid portrayal” of the pigs after making the difficult trek to the remote cave.
“The painting depicts a scene and this is very rare in early cave art,” he said. “There is some sort of narrative going on..The artists portrayed [the pigs] as enormously fat and jolly looking. You sit there lost in wonder, pondering the meaning of it and trying to just decipher what the true story was behind it.”
This undated handout photo shows the Leang Tedongnge cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia - ADHI AGUS OKTAVIANA /AFP
The site is only about 40 miles from Makassar, a city of some 1.5 million, but the painting was previously undiscovered because of the forbidding local terrain which is only accessible in the dry season. The isolated Bugis community who live in the valley said Westerners had not ventured there before.
“You have to trek up and up into the limestone mountains along a rough jungle path,” said Mr Brumm, describing how at the top of the mountain his team had to walk through another tunnel-like cave before it emerged into a “spectacular” hidden valley.
He said the painting, which measures 53 by 21 inches, and shows a pig with a short crest of upright hair and horn-like facial warts facing two other partially preserved pigs, provided an insight into the ancient community’s connection with the animal world.
Humans have hunted Sulawesi warty pigs for tens of thousands of years, and they are a key feature of the region's prehistoric artwork, particularly during the Ice Age.
“It really speaks of this ancient and very longstanding spiritual connection with this one particular species of pig,” he said. “It seems to have been the case that the ice-age artists in Sulawesi were bound to the fate and future of this species.”
The age of the artwork was calculated by Maxime Aubert, a dating specialist, who identified a calcite deposit that had formed on top of the painting, then used Uranium-series isotope dating to deduce the deposit was at least 45,500 years old, although it may be older.
The cave paintings also help to inform understanding of early human migrations. The earliest settlers to reach Australia 65,000 years ago would probably have had to cross the islands of Indonesia, known as "Wallacea."
“We hope to find earlier evidence of rock art dating back to around 65,000 years ago,” said Mr Brumm. “There are all sorts of exciting prospects to look for this early art that could have been left by the earliest ancestors of aboriginal people in Australia.”
However, Paul Pettitt, a British archaeologist specialising in the Palaeolithic era, said that while the art was “impressive” that a few issues “give me reservations about the reliability of what they publish.”
His concern lies mainly in the definitive use of “minimum ages” to claim the discovery of the world’s oldest figurative art. The study needed “a little more integrated rigour before we start rewriting prehistory,” he said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wo ... 03080.html
Five-horned ram steals show as Nigerians mark Eid
Tue, July 20, 2021, 10:59 AM
Curious shoppers stopped to see the bizarre animal which was among many others on sale as Muslims prepare for the Islamic holiday also known as Eid El-Kabir in Nigeria.
The video of the five-horned ram has gone viral with some viewers commenting that the animal appears to be wearing a crown similar to the statue of liberty and likening it to mini-god.
"Looking at the number of horns on its head they are five, which is Allah - 'ALLAH,'" said interior designer Usman Abdulrahman.
"I have never seen this kind of a thing before, and it is happening during in a festive period. This is my first time to see that a ram has five horns. God is using this to magnify himself and the good thing is it came at a time that we the Muslims are celebrating," said estate agent Wasiu Salaudeen.
Eid Al-Adha is the second of Islam's two major religious festivals, observed to commemorate the willingness of Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son Ismail as an act of obedience to Allah, before Allah replaced Ismail with a ram to be sacrificed instead.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fi ... 11416.html
Tue, July 20, 2021, 10:59 AM
Curious shoppers stopped to see the bizarre animal which was among many others on sale as Muslims prepare for the Islamic holiday also known as Eid El-Kabir in Nigeria.
The video of the five-horned ram has gone viral with some viewers commenting that the animal appears to be wearing a crown similar to the statue of liberty and likening it to mini-god.
"Looking at the number of horns on its head they are five, which is Allah - 'ALLAH,'" said interior designer Usman Abdulrahman.
"I have never seen this kind of a thing before, and it is happening during in a festive period. This is my first time to see that a ram has five horns. God is using this to magnify himself and the good thing is it came at a time that we the Muslims are celebrating," said estate agent Wasiu Salaudeen.
Eid Al-Adha is the second of Islam's two major religious festivals, observed to commemorate the willingness of Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son Ismail as an act of obedience to Allah, before Allah replaced Ismail with a ram to be sacrificed instead.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fi ... 11416.html
No monkey business allowed: Woman having ‘AFFAIR’ with chimpanzee banned from visiting it at Belgian zoo
21 Aug, 2021 19:54
A Belgian woman has ended up banned from visiting a chimpanzee at Antwerp Zoo after the keepers deemed the two were spending way too much time together. The woman claimed she was having an “affair” with the animal.
The bizarre ‘love story’ made the headlines across Belgian media on Friday, after Antwerp Zoo slapped a restraining order of sorts on Adie Timmermans, a long-standing visitor.
Over the past four years, Timmermans paid weekly visits to the zoo, seeking contact with one particular animal – a 38-year-old chimpanzee called Chita. The two then interacted through the enclosure’s glass, waving and blowing kisses at each other. The woman was devastated by the ban, telling local media in a tearful interview that both she and the animal would suffer from the forced break-up.
“I love that animal and he loves me. I haven’t got anything else. Why do they want to take that away?” she said.
We’re having an affair, I’ll just say.
The zoo, for its part, argued that the way too long human contact – particularly with Timmermans – is harmful for the animal, as it damages Chita’s standing with other chimpanzees of the group it lives with.
“When Chita is constantly busy with visitors, the other monkeys ignore him and don’t consider him part of the group, even though that is important. He then sits on his own outside of visiting hours,” the zoo said.
Timmermans, however, believes the zoo’s move to be unfair, as she argued that the chimpanzee had been actively interacting not only with her, but other visitors as well. “Other dozens of visitors are allowed to make contact. Then why not me?” she wondered.
Chita’s take on the zoo’s decision to forcibly end the relationship with Timmermans was not immediately known.
https://www.rt.com/news/532728-belgium- ... oo-affair/
21 Aug, 2021 19:54
A Belgian woman has ended up banned from visiting a chimpanzee at Antwerp Zoo after the keepers deemed the two were spending way too much time together. The woman claimed she was having an “affair” with the animal.
The bizarre ‘love story’ made the headlines across Belgian media on Friday, after Antwerp Zoo slapped a restraining order of sorts on Adie Timmermans, a long-standing visitor.
Over the past four years, Timmermans paid weekly visits to the zoo, seeking contact with one particular animal – a 38-year-old chimpanzee called Chita. The two then interacted through the enclosure’s glass, waving and blowing kisses at each other. The woman was devastated by the ban, telling local media in a tearful interview that both she and the animal would suffer from the forced break-up.
“I love that animal and he loves me. I haven’t got anything else. Why do they want to take that away?” she said.
We’re having an affair, I’ll just say.
The zoo, for its part, argued that the way too long human contact – particularly with Timmermans – is harmful for the animal, as it damages Chita’s standing with other chimpanzees of the group it lives with.
“When Chita is constantly busy with visitors, the other monkeys ignore him and don’t consider him part of the group, even though that is important. He then sits on his own outside of visiting hours,” the zoo said.
Timmermans, however, believes the zoo’s move to be unfair, as she argued that the chimpanzee had been actively interacting not only with her, but other visitors as well. “Other dozens of visitors are allowed to make contact. Then why not me?” she wondered.
Chita’s take on the zoo’s decision to forcibly end the relationship with Timmermans was not immediately known.
https://www.rt.com/news/532728-belgium- ... oo-affair/
3,000 villagers in India held a feast to mourn a beloved bull that lived with them for 20 years
Matthew Loh
Sun, August 22, 2021, 11:31 PM
India Bull
A bull at a Jal Yatra procession in Ahmedabad, India on 17 June, 2019. SAM PANTHAKY/AFP via Getty Images
The death of Babuji the bull has sent an entire Indian village into days of mourning.
Around 3,000 villagers held a grand death feast for Babuji on Saturday, as well as funeral rites and social ceremonies, reported The Times of India.
Babuji was considered by some in the village to be the incarnation of a Hindu guardian deity called Nandi.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Ceremonial rites, cremation, and a grand feast for thousands of people - a village in India has rolled out the works for the funeral of a beloved bull that lived with them for 20 years, reported The Times of India.
Babuji the bull died of natural causes on August 15, and the village of Kurdi, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, has been commemorating his death over the last week, honoring the animal as they would a village elder, per The Times.
It reported that on Saturday, around 3,000 people attended Babuji's death feast - called a terahvi - where priests chanted for his soul, and a photo shrine of the bull was showered with cash and flowers.
Village residents told The Times that Babuji was almost like a family member to them, and was considered a "gift from the divine." The bull was also found roaming a village holy site when he was young, prompting some to call him Nandi, a Hindu guardian deity usually depicted as a bull.
In the days before the death feast, the villagers conducted religious rites and mourning ceremonies for Babuji, including cremation and a rasam pagri, which is a funeral ceremony for the death of the eldest male in a family, added The Times.
Cows are considered sacred in many parts of India, and most states forbid cow slaughter or the eating of beef. One state, Madhya Pradesh, has even set up a "cow cabinet" to look after the welfare of the animals. In May, several men covered themselves in cow dung and urine under the belief that it would improve their immunity against COVID-19. Doctors have since warned against the practice, saying there was no scientific evidence to support it.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/3- ... 22685.html
Matthew Loh
Sun, August 22, 2021, 11:31 PM
India Bull
A bull at a Jal Yatra procession in Ahmedabad, India on 17 June, 2019. SAM PANTHAKY/AFP via Getty Images
The death of Babuji the bull has sent an entire Indian village into days of mourning.
Around 3,000 villagers held a grand death feast for Babuji on Saturday, as well as funeral rites and social ceremonies, reported The Times of India.
Babuji was considered by some in the village to be the incarnation of a Hindu guardian deity called Nandi.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Ceremonial rites, cremation, and a grand feast for thousands of people - a village in India has rolled out the works for the funeral of a beloved bull that lived with them for 20 years, reported The Times of India.
Babuji the bull died of natural causes on August 15, and the village of Kurdi, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, has been commemorating his death over the last week, honoring the animal as they would a village elder, per The Times.
It reported that on Saturday, around 3,000 people attended Babuji's death feast - called a terahvi - where priests chanted for his soul, and a photo shrine of the bull was showered with cash and flowers.
Village residents told The Times that Babuji was almost like a family member to them, and was considered a "gift from the divine." The bull was also found roaming a village holy site when he was young, prompting some to call him Nandi, a Hindu guardian deity usually depicted as a bull.
In the days before the death feast, the villagers conducted religious rites and mourning ceremonies for Babuji, including cremation and a rasam pagri, which is a funeral ceremony for the death of the eldest male in a family, added The Times.
Cows are considered sacred in many parts of India, and most states forbid cow slaughter or the eating of beef. One state, Madhya Pradesh, has even set up a "cow cabinet" to look after the welfare of the animals. In May, several men covered themselves in cow dung and urine under the belief that it would improve their immunity against COVID-19. Doctors have since warned against the practice, saying there was no scientific evidence to support it.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/3- ... 22685.html
Man Who Rescued Two Lion Cubs Seven Years Ago Returns And Meets Them Face To Face
There is nothing stronger than the bond between you and your animal, especially when you helped raise them.
People dedicate their whole lives to saving animals, just out of love, and this is what Kevin Richardson does.
One day, while working at the Lion Park in South Africa, he witnessed a mother lion reject two of her newborn cubs. Some people may have feared approaching the pair, but Kevin’s instincts told him otherwise.
Rather than letting them get taken and put in cages, he placed the cubs into a wildlife park, where they could flourish.
The goal at the center was to raise these cubs in a way that meant they could grow up into fully functioning adults without human assistance.
Seven years on, Kevin decided he was going to visit the pair, named Meg and Ammy, and understandably he was nervous about their reaction.
It had been a long time since they had seen each other, and he was unsure if they would remember him.
Kevin decided to approach the lions without hesitation, and thankfully for us, he recorded the encounter with a GoPro.
While one of the lions was by the water, he decided to jump in and approach her while calling her name.
“When I call Meg and she comes swimming and I see in her face, ‘If I come to you are you going to catch me?’.”
“She looks at me, I look at her, and we know. That’s trust.”
What happened next was truly incredible, as soon as she realized who Kevin was, she jumped straight into the water and embraced Kevin with a hug.
Kevin describes them as his ‘soul mates,’ they will always have this special bond no matter how long they are apart.
He also went on to explain how the cubs learnt to trust him so much, as they spent time together:
“To see the lions doing what lions do for me was exhilarating. It made me realise there was a different way to work with these predators in captivity. Meg and Amy and me have a history that goes to when they were born.”
Kevin felt that Meg and Amy were “destined for a bullet” by trophy hunters and said he “firmly believe that if I never had m and a back they would have landed up in some shape or form in the canned lion hunting market.”
Kevin, also known as the ‘lion whisper,’ also founded the “Kevin Richardson Wildlife Sanctuary,” which is a 3,000 lion shelter in the African savanna. He shelters 26 lions of different ages, many like Meg and Amy, who he had known from cubs.
Watch video at:
https://kingdomstv.com/who-rescued-two- ... e-to-face/
There is nothing stronger than the bond between you and your animal, especially when you helped raise them.
People dedicate their whole lives to saving animals, just out of love, and this is what Kevin Richardson does.
One day, while working at the Lion Park in South Africa, he witnessed a mother lion reject two of her newborn cubs. Some people may have feared approaching the pair, but Kevin’s instincts told him otherwise.
Rather than letting them get taken and put in cages, he placed the cubs into a wildlife park, where they could flourish.
The goal at the center was to raise these cubs in a way that meant they could grow up into fully functioning adults without human assistance.
Seven years on, Kevin decided he was going to visit the pair, named Meg and Ammy, and understandably he was nervous about their reaction.
It had been a long time since they had seen each other, and he was unsure if they would remember him.
Kevin decided to approach the lions without hesitation, and thankfully for us, he recorded the encounter with a GoPro.
While one of the lions was by the water, he decided to jump in and approach her while calling her name.
“When I call Meg and she comes swimming and I see in her face, ‘If I come to you are you going to catch me?’.”
“She looks at me, I look at her, and we know. That’s trust.”
What happened next was truly incredible, as soon as she realized who Kevin was, she jumped straight into the water and embraced Kevin with a hug.
Kevin describes them as his ‘soul mates,’ they will always have this special bond no matter how long they are apart.
He also went on to explain how the cubs learnt to trust him so much, as they spent time together:
“To see the lions doing what lions do for me was exhilarating. It made me realise there was a different way to work with these predators in captivity. Meg and Amy and me have a history that goes to when they were born.”
Kevin felt that Meg and Amy were “destined for a bullet” by trophy hunters and said he “firmly believe that if I never had m and a back they would have landed up in some shape or form in the canned lion hunting market.”
Kevin, also known as the ‘lion whisper,’ also founded the “Kevin Richardson Wildlife Sanctuary,” which is a 3,000 lion shelter in the African savanna. He shelters 26 lions of different ages, many like Meg and Amy, who he had known from cubs.
Watch video at:
https://kingdomstv.com/who-rescued-two- ... e-to-face/
Cat locked in abandoned house for two months SURVIVES
28 Aug, 2021 17:13
A Dutch cat has managed to survive for nearly two months locked in an abandoned house. The extremely malnourished animal, who had to resort to eating paper, was discovered by the new owners of the property.
The heart-wrenching story of the extremely tough cat was brought to light this week by Animal Shelter Vlaardingen, where the animal ended up. The cat was discovered in the western Dutch town of Schiedam, by the new owners of a house bought off a blind auction.
As the new owners came to inspect the property, the house – vacated by its previous resident on July 1 – turned out to be not exactly empty. As they opened the door, an extremely thin cat bolted out of the house, rushing to freedom after some 52 days in isolation.
The floppy-eared, dark striped cat was subsequently caught and brought to a veterinary clinic. Apart from being malnourished and weakened, it turned out to be healthy enough to get discharged a day later, ending up in the animal shelter.
The feline, named Finn by its rescuers, likely had access to water from a leak somewhere in the house that enabled it to survive that long. The cat, however, ran out of food long before the rescue – even if there was any left behind by the house's previous resident. Finn the cat had to consume anything arguably edible it came by, with assorted wrappers and paper discovered in its feces, the shelter said.
https://www.rt.com/news/533346-netherla ... ned-house/
28 Aug, 2021 17:13
A Dutch cat has managed to survive for nearly two months locked in an abandoned house. The extremely malnourished animal, who had to resort to eating paper, was discovered by the new owners of the property.
The heart-wrenching story of the extremely tough cat was brought to light this week by Animal Shelter Vlaardingen, where the animal ended up. The cat was discovered in the western Dutch town of Schiedam, by the new owners of a house bought off a blind auction.
As the new owners came to inspect the property, the house – vacated by its previous resident on July 1 – turned out to be not exactly empty. As they opened the door, an extremely thin cat bolted out of the house, rushing to freedom after some 52 days in isolation.
The floppy-eared, dark striped cat was subsequently caught and brought to a veterinary clinic. Apart from being malnourished and weakened, it turned out to be healthy enough to get discharged a day later, ending up in the animal shelter.
The feline, named Finn by its rescuers, likely had access to water from a leak somewhere in the house that enabled it to survive that long. The cat, however, ran out of food long before the rescue – even if there was any left behind by the house's previous resident. Finn the cat had to consume anything arguably edible it came by, with assorted wrappers and paper discovered in its feces, the shelter said.
https://www.rt.com/news/533346-netherla ... ned-house/
We Will Look Back on This Age of Cruelty to Animals in Horror
It’s hard to know where your charitable dollars will do the most good. This year, I’ll focus most of my giving on GiveDirectly, which does exactly what it promises: Gives money to the world’s poorest people, without attaching strings, conditions or complexity.
Its approach has been proven to work, in part because it is built on a foundation of respect: GiveDirectly recognizes that the global poor are the experts on their own lives, and their own needs, and that what they are missing is money. When giving to ease human suffering, sometimes the simplest strategy is best.
But about 10 percent of my donations every year goes to easing, or ending, the suffering of factory farmed animals, which is mind-melting in its scale. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 80 billion — yes, billion — land animals are slaughtered each year for food, and, according to some estimates, between 51 and 160 billion farmed fish join them. The overwhelming majority of these animals are raised and killed in conditions with no analogue in history, and they suffer terribly. But farm animals are often an afterthought even in animal-related giving, in which two-thirds of the money goes to shelters.
Two strategies dominate among groups trying to help factory farmed animals. One is amelioration: trying to better the conditions of these animals now. Here, the Humane League and Mercy for Animals are my picks. The second is substitution: replacing the animals with meat made from plants or grown from cells. Here, the Good Food Institute, New Harvest and the Material Innovation Initiative are my recommendations. In choosing these groups, I’ve relied heavily on the work Open Philanthropy and Animal Charity Evaluators have done assessing the effectiveness of dozens of animal-suffering groups, as well as my own reporting.
Naming the groups is the easy part. Now comes the hard part: Persuading you that they’re worthy of your support.
How we treat farm animals today will be seen, I believe, as a defining moral failing of our age. Humans have always eaten animals. We’ve hunted them, bred them, raised them and consumed them. What’s changed over the past century is that we’ve developed the technology to produce meat in industrialized conditions, and that has opened vast new vistas for both production and suffering.
In past eras, we didn’t have the antibiotics and sanitation chemicals needed to keep so many animals crowded so closely together, nor the preservation and transportation technologies needed to ship them en masse. Disease would rip through thick flocks, and carcasses would spoil across long trips. Today, the factory farms that produce the overwhelming majority of meat, both globally and domestically, are dark marvels of technology, as are the carefully bred and managed animals inside them.
Since the 1950s, broiler chickens have roughly quadrupled in size, and it now takes them 6 weeks, not 15, to grow to slaughter weight. These are inventions, not just chickens. But the cheap meat they made possible sent demand skyrocketing: In the United States alone, the available amount of chicken meat per person has shot from about 10 pounds in 1910 to about 65 pounds in 2018.
In 2020, David Coman-Hidy, president of the Humane League, told me about his work trying to persuade companies to shift from live shackling of chickens to atmospheric killing. In live shackling, which remains the dominant method, workers turn chickens upside down to shackle them by their legs to a conveyor. These are birds that have barely ever moved being handled by low-paid workers with inhuman production quotas. The birds flap and squawk in terror, and the shackling can leave them with broken legs or dislocated hips.
The conveyor is supposed to drag them through electrified water, stunning them before their throats are slit. But the panicked, spasming birds sometimes miss the bath, and their throats are cut while they are conscious and terrified. If the kill isn’t clean, they are pulled through boiling water that defeathers them while still conscious. You can watch the process here, if you have the stomach for it.
The Humane League, and others, are trying to persuade chicken producers to simply gas the birds to death. I’ve never forgotten what Coman-Hidy said when I asked him how he could bear to spend his days negotiating over the finer points of chicken slaughter. “The thought experiment that helped me is if I could die, or have a member of my family die, by being euthanized by gas, or have what I just described happen to them, what would I give to get the gas? And the answer is everything.”
This is activism that does not permit itself the comforts of purity. The Humane League and Mercy for Animals have become, in a way, part of a system they loathe. They are fighting to see farm animals treated in a way that’s far beneath what they believe to be moral, but far above what’s become normal. And they’re succeeding.
Battery cages, for instance, are small cages where egg-laying hens are kept for almost the entirety of their mature lives. According to 2017 guidelines by United Egg Producers, each bird should have 67 to 86 square inches of usable space within the cage. As the Humane League notes, a typical piece of paper is no more than 90 square inches.
The European Union has phased out battery cages and India has declared them illegal. In the United States, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington have either banned them or are in the process of doing so. Dozens of companies have pledged to source only cage-free eggs, including Trader Joe’s, Unilever, Pizza Hut, Mars and Hormel Foods. By no means do these pledges render the lives of these chickens luxe, and many cage-free hens still suffer terribly. There is simply no way to humanely raise so many birds, in such close quarters. But better is better.
Most meat, of course, is produced outside the United States. And so the Humane League founded the Open Wing Alliance, which now has 80 member organizations in 63 countries, to share strategies and drive global campaigns, like the successful effort to convince Yum! Brands to go cage free. Mercy for Animals works in Brazil, India, Hong Kong and Canada.
But amelioration won’t reduce the number of animals being raised in industrial facilities for food. Substitution might. Do you really need a chicken to make a nugget? Or a cow to make a burger? When we slaughter a cow to produce ground beef, we used the cow as a machine to turn the plants the cow ate into meat. The question is whether we can replace the cow with something else that turns plants into meat.
For now, I’d say the plant-based burgers, sausages and nuggets are pretty good, and they’re getting better, fast. There’s no reason a Happy Meal nugget should ever involve a chicken. But there’s a long way to go in mimicking more texturally demanding meats, like bacon or fatty tuna or even steak.
Perhaps those meats can one day be grown directly. This has passed from the realm of science fiction into reality, and I’ve swallowed the evidence. A few months ago, I went to Upside Foods and tried “cultivated” chicken. When I said, a bit awed, that it tasted just like chicken, my hosts laughed and said that’s because it was chicken. They just took chicken cells and grew them into a chicken breast rather than an entire bird.
The question is whether this can be done at scale, for the hundreds of millions of tons of meat we eat. The technical challenges here are real, and some believe them insurmountable. Even if they can be overcome, the political challenges are daunting, too. Meat producers are organizing around the world to try and stop these products from coming to market, and to wrap them in red tape and warning labels if they threaten profits.
But the benefits to directly growing meat, at scale, would be incalculable — and not just for animals. Meat production is a huge driver of climate change, of deforestation and of pandemic and antibiotic risk. Having the meat we love without the health and environmental consequences it now imposes would prevent vast human suffering, too. This should be a moonshot we’re making as a society, but it’s being left, instead, to private capital, and so there’s too little basic science being done, and too many advances are patented and protected.
The Good Food Institute is the most important organization pushing this work. It’s second-to-none in the influence of its public policy efforts, its centrality to the ecosystem of companies and researchers, and its international footprint. It has also been effective at convincing traditional meat companies to explore alternative proteins, which could lead both to important products and turn political enemies into allies. It’s my top recommendation, though I want to note that Animal Charity Evaluators found some cultural turbulence in their staff survey. I’m glad to see that the Institute is taking those concerns seriously.
New Harvest is more directly focused on building the scientific community and funding the research to make cellular agriculture possible. It’s directly focused on the technical challenges of cultivated meat. If those aren’t solved, then all the lobbying efforts in the world won’t matter.
The Material Innovation Initiative is the third on my list. It’s trying to build alternatives to animal-based materials used for fashion, cars and home goods. There has been much less innovation and investment here than in alternative proteins, and that suggests enormous opportunities if an ecosystem of financing and information-sharing and start-ups can be built.
Technological advances, as well as the global desire for cheap meat, have turned this into an age of animal cruelty. But we can also see glimmers of how it might, one day, end. Perhaps we live in the lag between when it became possible to treat sentient animals as industrial inputs and when it will become unnecessary and perhaps even indecent to do so, because we will be able to grow or mimic most meat with less animal involvement, and abusive treatment of animals will be easier to abhor.
But that future is not assured. It must be created, and the Humane League, Mercy for Animals, the Good Food Institute, New Harvest and the Material Innovation Initiative are trying to do just that.
This column is part of Times Opinion’s Holiday Giving Guide 2021. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in the giving guide, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
It’s hard to know where your charitable dollars will do the most good. This year, I’ll focus most of my giving on GiveDirectly, which does exactly what it promises: Gives money to the world’s poorest people, without attaching strings, conditions or complexity.
Its approach has been proven to work, in part because it is built on a foundation of respect: GiveDirectly recognizes that the global poor are the experts on their own lives, and their own needs, and that what they are missing is money. When giving to ease human suffering, sometimes the simplest strategy is best.
But about 10 percent of my donations every year goes to easing, or ending, the suffering of factory farmed animals, which is mind-melting in its scale. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 80 billion — yes, billion — land animals are slaughtered each year for food, and, according to some estimates, between 51 and 160 billion farmed fish join them. The overwhelming majority of these animals are raised and killed in conditions with no analogue in history, and they suffer terribly. But farm animals are often an afterthought even in animal-related giving, in which two-thirds of the money goes to shelters.
Two strategies dominate among groups trying to help factory farmed animals. One is amelioration: trying to better the conditions of these animals now. Here, the Humane League and Mercy for Animals are my picks. The second is substitution: replacing the animals with meat made from plants or grown from cells. Here, the Good Food Institute, New Harvest and the Material Innovation Initiative are my recommendations. In choosing these groups, I’ve relied heavily on the work Open Philanthropy and Animal Charity Evaluators have done assessing the effectiveness of dozens of animal-suffering groups, as well as my own reporting.
Naming the groups is the easy part. Now comes the hard part: Persuading you that they’re worthy of your support.
How we treat farm animals today will be seen, I believe, as a defining moral failing of our age. Humans have always eaten animals. We’ve hunted them, bred them, raised them and consumed them. What’s changed over the past century is that we’ve developed the technology to produce meat in industrialized conditions, and that has opened vast new vistas for both production and suffering.
In past eras, we didn’t have the antibiotics and sanitation chemicals needed to keep so many animals crowded so closely together, nor the preservation and transportation technologies needed to ship them en masse. Disease would rip through thick flocks, and carcasses would spoil across long trips. Today, the factory farms that produce the overwhelming majority of meat, both globally and domestically, are dark marvels of technology, as are the carefully bred and managed animals inside them.
Since the 1950s, broiler chickens have roughly quadrupled in size, and it now takes them 6 weeks, not 15, to grow to slaughter weight. These are inventions, not just chickens. But the cheap meat they made possible sent demand skyrocketing: In the United States alone, the available amount of chicken meat per person has shot from about 10 pounds in 1910 to about 65 pounds in 2018.
In 2020, David Coman-Hidy, president of the Humane League, told me about his work trying to persuade companies to shift from live shackling of chickens to atmospheric killing. In live shackling, which remains the dominant method, workers turn chickens upside down to shackle them by their legs to a conveyor. These are birds that have barely ever moved being handled by low-paid workers with inhuman production quotas. The birds flap and squawk in terror, and the shackling can leave them with broken legs or dislocated hips.
The conveyor is supposed to drag them through electrified water, stunning them before their throats are slit. But the panicked, spasming birds sometimes miss the bath, and their throats are cut while they are conscious and terrified. If the kill isn’t clean, they are pulled through boiling water that defeathers them while still conscious. You can watch the process here, if you have the stomach for it.
The Humane League, and others, are trying to persuade chicken producers to simply gas the birds to death. I’ve never forgotten what Coman-Hidy said when I asked him how he could bear to spend his days negotiating over the finer points of chicken slaughter. “The thought experiment that helped me is if I could die, or have a member of my family die, by being euthanized by gas, or have what I just described happen to them, what would I give to get the gas? And the answer is everything.”
This is activism that does not permit itself the comforts of purity. The Humane League and Mercy for Animals have become, in a way, part of a system they loathe. They are fighting to see farm animals treated in a way that’s far beneath what they believe to be moral, but far above what’s become normal. And they’re succeeding.
Battery cages, for instance, are small cages where egg-laying hens are kept for almost the entirety of their mature lives. According to 2017 guidelines by United Egg Producers, each bird should have 67 to 86 square inches of usable space within the cage. As the Humane League notes, a typical piece of paper is no more than 90 square inches.
The European Union has phased out battery cages and India has declared them illegal. In the United States, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington have either banned them or are in the process of doing so. Dozens of companies have pledged to source only cage-free eggs, including Trader Joe’s, Unilever, Pizza Hut, Mars and Hormel Foods. By no means do these pledges render the lives of these chickens luxe, and many cage-free hens still suffer terribly. There is simply no way to humanely raise so many birds, in such close quarters. But better is better.
Most meat, of course, is produced outside the United States. And so the Humane League founded the Open Wing Alliance, which now has 80 member organizations in 63 countries, to share strategies and drive global campaigns, like the successful effort to convince Yum! Brands to go cage free. Mercy for Animals works in Brazil, India, Hong Kong and Canada.
But amelioration won’t reduce the number of animals being raised in industrial facilities for food. Substitution might. Do you really need a chicken to make a nugget? Or a cow to make a burger? When we slaughter a cow to produce ground beef, we used the cow as a machine to turn the plants the cow ate into meat. The question is whether we can replace the cow with something else that turns plants into meat.
For now, I’d say the plant-based burgers, sausages and nuggets are pretty good, and they’re getting better, fast. There’s no reason a Happy Meal nugget should ever involve a chicken. But there’s a long way to go in mimicking more texturally demanding meats, like bacon or fatty tuna or even steak.
Perhaps those meats can one day be grown directly. This has passed from the realm of science fiction into reality, and I’ve swallowed the evidence. A few months ago, I went to Upside Foods and tried “cultivated” chicken. When I said, a bit awed, that it tasted just like chicken, my hosts laughed and said that’s because it was chicken. They just took chicken cells and grew them into a chicken breast rather than an entire bird.
The question is whether this can be done at scale, for the hundreds of millions of tons of meat we eat. The technical challenges here are real, and some believe them insurmountable. Even if they can be overcome, the political challenges are daunting, too. Meat producers are organizing around the world to try and stop these products from coming to market, and to wrap them in red tape and warning labels if they threaten profits.
But the benefits to directly growing meat, at scale, would be incalculable — and not just for animals. Meat production is a huge driver of climate change, of deforestation and of pandemic and antibiotic risk. Having the meat we love without the health and environmental consequences it now imposes would prevent vast human suffering, too. This should be a moonshot we’re making as a society, but it’s being left, instead, to private capital, and so there’s too little basic science being done, and too many advances are patented and protected.
The Good Food Institute is the most important organization pushing this work. It’s second-to-none in the influence of its public policy efforts, its centrality to the ecosystem of companies and researchers, and its international footprint. It has also been effective at convincing traditional meat companies to explore alternative proteins, which could lead both to important products and turn political enemies into allies. It’s my top recommendation, though I want to note that Animal Charity Evaluators found some cultural turbulence in their staff survey. I’m glad to see that the Institute is taking those concerns seriously.
New Harvest is more directly focused on building the scientific community and funding the research to make cellular agriculture possible. It’s directly focused on the technical challenges of cultivated meat. If those aren’t solved, then all the lobbying efforts in the world won’t matter.
The Material Innovation Initiative is the third on my list. It’s trying to build alternatives to animal-based materials used for fashion, cars and home goods. There has been much less innovation and investment here than in alternative proteins, and that suggests enormous opportunities if an ecosystem of financing and information-sharing and start-ups can be built.
Technological advances, as well as the global desire for cheap meat, have turned this into an age of animal cruelty. But we can also see glimmers of how it might, one day, end. Perhaps we live in the lag between when it became possible to treat sentient animals as industrial inputs and when it will become unnecessary and perhaps even indecent to do so, because we will be able to grow or mimic most meat with less animal involvement, and abusive treatment of animals will be easier to abhor.
But that future is not assured. It must be created, and the Humane League, Mercy for Animals, the Good Food Institute, New Harvest and the Material Innovation Initiative are trying to do just that.
This column is part of Times Opinion’s Holiday Giving Guide 2021. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in the giving guide, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
He Did Right by Animals. And Didn’t Take Bull from Anyone.
Bernard Rollin was a pioneer in animal rights. He left us with this scalding interview.
Well into the 1980s, doctors would perform open-heart surgery on infants without giving them pain-relieving drugs. This is hard to believe: By the standards of contemporary medicine, not to mention common sense, the practice is akin to torture. Yet then-conventional wisdom held that babies did not feel pain, at least not in any meaningful way. Their brains and nervous systems were considered undeveloped. And regardless of what they felt, they wouldn’t remember it.
One can read about this in Science and Ethics, written in 2006 by Bernard Rollin, an iconoclastic philosopher who died in November at age 78. When I read of his passing, I recalled a conversation we had several years ago. Rollin, who devoted much of his life to speaking for the voiceless, was still enraged at what happened to those babies. He might have made the point that knowledge changes, sometimes profoundly, and that one era’s objective truth may be revealed, by the light of another era, as a fallacy held together by thoughtless habit. The exact word he used was “mindfuck.”
THE HORSE BEFORE DESCARTES: Howard Rollin reformed veterinary teaching and helped draft legislation requiring the use of pain-alleviating drugs for animals used in medical research.
Our interview, as it happened, was not about neonatal medicine, but about the ethics of research on animals. Rollin had arrived at Colorado State University in 1969, a long-haired, motorcycle-riding, Brooklyn-born and Columbia University-trained philosopher. A decade later he was asked to teach the school’s first veterinary ethics class. It was the first such class anywhere, and Rollin went on to become a pioneer in the modern animal rights movement, arguing in 1981’s Animal Rights and Human Morality that animals have a right to moral consideration—a position that, then as now, is not universally accepted. It was the first of some 22 books and 800 scholarly articles, though Rollin was more than just an academic.
At a time when “the failure to control pain in animals was ubiquitous in veterinary medicine and research,” as he wrote in Putting the Horse Before Descartes: My Life’s Work on Behalf of Animals, Rollin helped draft federal legislation requiring the use of pain-alleviating drugs for animals used in medical research. He reformed veterinary teaching at his own school, served on national committees, and met with farmers, ranchers, and scientists, trying to convince them that, far from being radical, his values dovetailed with their own.
Our own conversation was prompted by an ongoing research project on so-called fistulated cows, into whose sides holes are cut that give scientists and veterinarians access to the contents of their stomachs. Often they don’t receive pain relief. From there we went on to talk about animal husbandry, vet schools, and the cowboys and ranchers he had come—improbably, but Rollin delighted in defying stereotypes—to admire.
More and interview at:
https://nautil.us/issue/109/excavation/ ... rom-anyone
Bernard Rollin was a pioneer in animal rights. He left us with this scalding interview.
Well into the 1980s, doctors would perform open-heart surgery on infants without giving them pain-relieving drugs. This is hard to believe: By the standards of contemporary medicine, not to mention common sense, the practice is akin to torture. Yet then-conventional wisdom held that babies did not feel pain, at least not in any meaningful way. Their brains and nervous systems were considered undeveloped. And regardless of what they felt, they wouldn’t remember it.
One can read about this in Science and Ethics, written in 2006 by Bernard Rollin, an iconoclastic philosopher who died in November at age 78. When I read of his passing, I recalled a conversation we had several years ago. Rollin, who devoted much of his life to speaking for the voiceless, was still enraged at what happened to those babies. He might have made the point that knowledge changes, sometimes profoundly, and that one era’s objective truth may be revealed, by the light of another era, as a fallacy held together by thoughtless habit. The exact word he used was “mindfuck.”
THE HORSE BEFORE DESCARTES: Howard Rollin reformed veterinary teaching and helped draft legislation requiring the use of pain-alleviating drugs for animals used in medical research.
Our interview, as it happened, was not about neonatal medicine, but about the ethics of research on animals. Rollin had arrived at Colorado State University in 1969, a long-haired, motorcycle-riding, Brooklyn-born and Columbia University-trained philosopher. A decade later he was asked to teach the school’s first veterinary ethics class. It was the first such class anywhere, and Rollin went on to become a pioneer in the modern animal rights movement, arguing in 1981’s Animal Rights and Human Morality that animals have a right to moral consideration—a position that, then as now, is not universally accepted. It was the first of some 22 books and 800 scholarly articles, though Rollin was more than just an academic.
At a time when “the failure to control pain in animals was ubiquitous in veterinary medicine and research,” as he wrote in Putting the Horse Before Descartes: My Life’s Work on Behalf of Animals, Rollin helped draft federal legislation requiring the use of pain-alleviating drugs for animals used in medical research. He reformed veterinary teaching at his own school, served on national committees, and met with farmers, ranchers, and scientists, trying to convince them that, far from being radical, his values dovetailed with their own.
Our own conversation was prompted by an ongoing research project on so-called fistulated cows, into whose sides holes are cut that give scientists and veterinarians access to the contents of their stomachs. Often they don’t receive pain relief. From there we went on to talk about animal husbandry, vet schools, and the cowboys and ranchers he had come—improbably, but Rollin delighted in defying stereotypes—to admire.
More and interview at:
https://nautil.us/issue/109/excavation/ ... rom-anyone
Baby cow escapes New York slaughterhouse to find refuge in New Jersey sanctuary
William Westhoven, Morristown Daily Record
Sat, December 25, 2021, 10:09 AM
A Christmas break is keeping a young cow from becoming a Christmas steak.
A 400-pound Hereford heifer that escaped a slaughterhouse last week in Queens has found refuge at Skylands Animal Sanctuary and Rescue center in Sussex County.
New York Police said the cow, estimated to be 9 months old, ran away from an area business last Friday and was corralled by rangers later that day in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
"She will now be spending the holiday season at her new home, a local rescue sanctuary," the NYPD Special Ops Department wrote in a Tweet.
"Only in New York!" they added.
The New York City Parks Department also went to social media to praise its staff who "managed to rescue the cow through quick thinking and action."
Looks like our Urban Park Rangers were in a sentimental Moo-d today," they wrote.
The NYPD dispatched its ESU Truck 10 to assist at the scene.
The next day, Skylands posted that "Stacy" was in temporary quarantine at their 230-acre facility in Wantage.
"Little Stacy is doing well, getting used to us as she awaits test results that will hopefully give her the OK to go in with some other kids," they wrote.
During the quarantine period, "She gets human visitors and can see and hear other cows," they explained. "She just can’t get up close with them."
Young Hereford cow that escaped a Queens, N.Y. slaughterhouse finds a new home at Skylands Animal Sanctuary and Rescue Center in Wantage.
Young Hereford cow that escaped a Queens, N.Y. slaughterhouse finds a new home at Skylands Animal Sanctuary and Rescue Center in Wantage.
Once Stacy clears quarantine, she will join the approximately 450 other permanent residents at Skylands. The population there includes 93 other cows or bovine creatures, according to director Mike Stura.
The animals have permanent homes at the sanctuary after being rescued "from slaughterhouses, live markets, farms, extreme neglect, abuse, religious ceremonies, abandonment and are even found wandering streets."
"No matter where they are from or from what dire circumstances they escape, they are provided with proper veterinary care, the best foods, water, a safe place to live, eat and sleep as well as lots of love around the clock," Skylands states on its website. "Every animal requires room to run and live unencumbered by the threat of harm and each one gets exactly what they need here."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ba ... 24533.html
William Westhoven, Morristown Daily Record
Sat, December 25, 2021, 10:09 AM
A Christmas break is keeping a young cow from becoming a Christmas steak.
A 400-pound Hereford heifer that escaped a slaughterhouse last week in Queens has found refuge at Skylands Animal Sanctuary and Rescue center in Sussex County.
New York Police said the cow, estimated to be 9 months old, ran away from an area business last Friday and was corralled by rangers later that day in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
"She will now be spending the holiday season at her new home, a local rescue sanctuary," the NYPD Special Ops Department wrote in a Tweet.
"Only in New York!" they added.
The New York City Parks Department also went to social media to praise its staff who "managed to rescue the cow through quick thinking and action."
Looks like our Urban Park Rangers were in a sentimental Moo-d today," they wrote.
The NYPD dispatched its ESU Truck 10 to assist at the scene.
The next day, Skylands posted that "Stacy" was in temporary quarantine at their 230-acre facility in Wantage.
"Little Stacy is doing well, getting used to us as she awaits test results that will hopefully give her the OK to go in with some other kids," they wrote.
During the quarantine period, "She gets human visitors and can see and hear other cows," they explained. "She just can’t get up close with them."
Young Hereford cow that escaped a Queens, N.Y. slaughterhouse finds a new home at Skylands Animal Sanctuary and Rescue Center in Wantage.
Young Hereford cow that escaped a Queens, N.Y. slaughterhouse finds a new home at Skylands Animal Sanctuary and Rescue Center in Wantage.
Once Stacy clears quarantine, she will join the approximately 450 other permanent residents at Skylands. The population there includes 93 other cows or bovine creatures, according to director Mike Stura.
The animals have permanent homes at the sanctuary after being rescued "from slaughterhouses, live markets, farms, extreme neglect, abuse, religious ceremonies, abandonment and are even found wandering streets."
"No matter where they are from or from what dire circumstances they escape, they are provided with proper veterinary care, the best foods, water, a safe place to live, eat and sleep as well as lots of love around the clock," Skylands states on its website. "Every animal requires room to run and live unencumbered by the threat of harm and each one gets exactly what they need here."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ba ... 24533.html
USA TODAY
'A form of selfishness': Pope Francis criticizes people who choose to have pets over kids
Marina Pitofsky, USA TODAY
Wed, January 5, 2022, 3:32 PM
Pope Francis this week criticized individuals who opt for having pets instead of children, saying that a “denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us.”
The pope on Wednesday made the comments while speaking about the figure of Joseph serving as the “foster father” of Jesus.
“Joseph shows us that this type of bond is not secondary; it is not an afterthought, no,” Pope Francis said. “This kind of choice is among the highest forms of love, and of fatherhood and motherhood. How many children in the world are waiting for someone to take care of them.”
He also lauded individuals around the world who adopt children and called for simplifying adoption procedures.
But he added that “Today … we see a form of selfishness," and that some individuals “do not want to have children, or just one and no more,” as translated in multiple reports.
“And many, many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one – but they have two dogs, two cats… Yes, dogs and cats take the place of children,” he said.
“This denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us, it takes away our humanity. And in this way civilization becomes aged and without humanity, because it loses the richness of fatherhood and motherhood,” he added.
This is not the first time the 85-year-old pope has addressed those who opt for pets instead of children. In 2014, he called the choice “another phenomenon of cultural degradation,” according to multiple reports.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pope Francis criticizes people who have dogs, cats instead of children
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 30467.html
'A form of selfishness': Pope Francis criticizes people who choose to have pets over kids
Marina Pitofsky, USA TODAY
Wed, January 5, 2022, 3:32 PM
Pope Francis this week criticized individuals who opt for having pets instead of children, saying that a “denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us.”
The pope on Wednesday made the comments while speaking about the figure of Joseph serving as the “foster father” of Jesus.
“Joseph shows us that this type of bond is not secondary; it is not an afterthought, no,” Pope Francis said. “This kind of choice is among the highest forms of love, and of fatherhood and motherhood. How many children in the world are waiting for someone to take care of them.”
He also lauded individuals around the world who adopt children and called for simplifying adoption procedures.
But he added that “Today … we see a form of selfishness," and that some individuals “do not want to have children, or just one and no more,” as translated in multiple reports.
“And many, many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one – but they have two dogs, two cats… Yes, dogs and cats take the place of children,” he said.
“This denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us, it takes away our humanity. And in this way civilization becomes aged and without humanity, because it loses the richness of fatherhood and motherhood,” he added.
This is not the first time the 85-year-old pope has addressed those who opt for pets instead of children. In 2014, he called the choice “another phenomenon of cultural degradation,” according to multiple reports.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pope Francis criticizes people who have dogs, cats instead of children
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 30467.html
BBC
Uttar Pradesh: Why deadly cow attacks are an issue in Indian state election
Nitin Srivastava - BBC Hindi, Uttar Pradesh
Mon, January 24, 2022, 6:21 PM
Ram Raj was drinking tea at his home in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on a chilly November evening last year when a stray cow attacked him.
Over the next few minutes, his young grandchildren screamed and watched in horror as the animal mauled him. The 55-year-old farmer died of severe injuries on the way to hospital.
"It was a painful death and my mother-in-law has stopped having proper meals ever since," his daughter-in-law, Anita Kumari, said.
Such attacks have become common in India's most populous state, where a ban on cow slaughter has led to a huge rise in the cattle population. So much so that they have become an issue in the state's upcoming elections, which are set to begin on 10 February.
Hindus consider the cow holy, but until recently many farmers took their old cows to slaughterhouses.
"We used to sell our cows once they stopped giving milk or were no longer fit for ploughing fields. That was our back-up plan for hard times," says Shiv Pujan, a paddy farmer.
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government has cracked down heavily on cow slaughter in keeping with its right-wing Hindu agenda - the practice is now illegal in 18 states, including Uttar Pradesh, or UP.
Here, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a hardline BJP leader himself, shut down several allegedly illegal slaughterhouses after coming to power in 2017 - even though this is a huge business in UP, which is a major exporter of buffalo meat.
Cattle traders, many of them Muslims or Dalits (formerly untouchables, who are at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy), have even been attacked and killed by vigilantes often linked to the BJP or local right-wing groups.
So, many of them have given up on the business, fearful of buying or transporting cattle. And farmers now simply abandon old and unproductive cows.
"Now there aren't any buyers so obviously, no-one can sell them," Mr Pujan says, adding that he and others are forced to leave old cattle in nearby forests.
These stray cattle are often seen roaming the towns and villages in UP, where farmers and locals say they turn hungry and aggressive. One such cow entered the courtyard of Ram Raj's home and when he and his family got scared and started yelling, it attacked him.
Mr Pujan himself was recently attacked by a herd of stray cattle while trying to chase them away from his field.
"Two of them tried to push me down to the ground and I ran for my life," he said, showing his bandaged hand, which was cut while he scaled a barbed wire fence.
Mr Pujan is a devoted Hindu who believes the cow is holy, but he also says he is frustrated with the government's blanket order that all of them should be protected.
Farmers like him say the stray cows also destroy crops, cause road accidents and kill people.
Shiv Pujan says the cow is holy but stray cattle are a menace to everyone
"My son is an orphan now because of the stray cows roaming around. Who will look after us?" asks Poonam Dubey whose husband was killed by a stray bull.
Bhupendra Dubey, 36, had returned to his village after losing his job during the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020. He died when the animal attacked him in the local market, where he had gone to buy sweets for his son.
About 100km (62 miles) away, Ram Kali, 80, has been in a coma since 2019, when she was attacked by a cow. Her family says she still doesn't know that her only son died of Covid-19 early last year.
Opposition parties have taken up the issue in UP, a largely rural state where farmers are a crucial voting bloc.
The governing BJP's state spokesperson, Sameer Singh, said that the government was "devising new strategies" to deal with the problem.
"These should not be called stray cows as the animal itself is part of the Hindu culture. We never leave our elders to die when they grow old, how can we leave our cows to die on the roads?"
The cows are meant to be housed in cow shelters - Mr Adityanath's government has allocated millions of rupees to construct more shelters. They also imposed a special alcohol tax to maintain thousands of state-run cow shelters.
Bimla Kumari is among farmers who do night patrols to keep cattle out of the fields
But this hasn't solved the problem. A government-run shelter that BBC Hindi visited in Ayodhya district was packed with cows jostling for space.
"There are 200 cows here, which is our maximum capacity. Some 700-1,000 stray cows are still roaming around the area," said Shatrughan Tiwari, who looks after the shelter.
Many farmers, meanwhile, are guarding their farms round the clock.
They form groups that take turns to patrol the fields through the night, braving the cold and snakes.
"We have groups of people from across the village who keep taking turns. A new team will arrive in the morning to replace us, and then we will go home and rest," said Bimla Kumari, a 64-year-old farmer.
Others, like Dina Nath, said they are fed up with the issue, and are considering boycotting the election.
"What is the point in voting if our problems aren't solved by it?"
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ut ... 46831.html
Uttar Pradesh: Why deadly cow attacks are an issue in Indian state election
Nitin Srivastava - BBC Hindi, Uttar Pradesh
Mon, January 24, 2022, 6:21 PM
Ram Raj was drinking tea at his home in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on a chilly November evening last year when a stray cow attacked him.
Over the next few minutes, his young grandchildren screamed and watched in horror as the animal mauled him. The 55-year-old farmer died of severe injuries on the way to hospital.
"It was a painful death and my mother-in-law has stopped having proper meals ever since," his daughter-in-law, Anita Kumari, said.
Such attacks have become common in India's most populous state, where a ban on cow slaughter has led to a huge rise in the cattle population. So much so that they have become an issue in the state's upcoming elections, which are set to begin on 10 February.
Hindus consider the cow holy, but until recently many farmers took their old cows to slaughterhouses.
"We used to sell our cows once they stopped giving milk or were no longer fit for ploughing fields. That was our back-up plan for hard times," says Shiv Pujan, a paddy farmer.
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government has cracked down heavily on cow slaughter in keeping with its right-wing Hindu agenda - the practice is now illegal in 18 states, including Uttar Pradesh, or UP.
Here, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a hardline BJP leader himself, shut down several allegedly illegal slaughterhouses after coming to power in 2017 - even though this is a huge business in UP, which is a major exporter of buffalo meat.
Cattle traders, many of them Muslims or Dalits (formerly untouchables, who are at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy), have even been attacked and killed by vigilantes often linked to the BJP or local right-wing groups.
So, many of them have given up on the business, fearful of buying or transporting cattle. And farmers now simply abandon old and unproductive cows.
"Now there aren't any buyers so obviously, no-one can sell them," Mr Pujan says, adding that he and others are forced to leave old cattle in nearby forests.
These stray cattle are often seen roaming the towns and villages in UP, where farmers and locals say they turn hungry and aggressive. One such cow entered the courtyard of Ram Raj's home and when he and his family got scared and started yelling, it attacked him.
Mr Pujan himself was recently attacked by a herd of stray cattle while trying to chase them away from his field.
"Two of them tried to push me down to the ground and I ran for my life," he said, showing his bandaged hand, which was cut while he scaled a barbed wire fence.
Mr Pujan is a devoted Hindu who believes the cow is holy, but he also says he is frustrated with the government's blanket order that all of them should be protected.
Farmers like him say the stray cows also destroy crops, cause road accidents and kill people.
Shiv Pujan says the cow is holy but stray cattle are a menace to everyone
"My son is an orphan now because of the stray cows roaming around. Who will look after us?" asks Poonam Dubey whose husband was killed by a stray bull.
Bhupendra Dubey, 36, had returned to his village after losing his job during the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020. He died when the animal attacked him in the local market, where he had gone to buy sweets for his son.
About 100km (62 miles) away, Ram Kali, 80, has been in a coma since 2019, when she was attacked by a cow. Her family says she still doesn't know that her only son died of Covid-19 early last year.
Opposition parties have taken up the issue in UP, a largely rural state where farmers are a crucial voting bloc.
The governing BJP's state spokesperson, Sameer Singh, said that the government was "devising new strategies" to deal with the problem.
"These should not be called stray cows as the animal itself is part of the Hindu culture. We never leave our elders to die when they grow old, how can we leave our cows to die on the roads?"
The cows are meant to be housed in cow shelters - Mr Adityanath's government has allocated millions of rupees to construct more shelters. They also imposed a special alcohol tax to maintain thousands of state-run cow shelters.
Bimla Kumari is among farmers who do night patrols to keep cattle out of the fields
But this hasn't solved the problem. A government-run shelter that BBC Hindi visited in Ayodhya district was packed with cows jostling for space.
"There are 200 cows here, which is our maximum capacity. Some 700-1,000 stray cows are still roaming around the area," said Shatrughan Tiwari, who looks after the shelter.
Many farmers, meanwhile, are guarding their farms round the clock.
They form groups that take turns to patrol the fields through the night, braving the cold and snakes.
"We have groups of people from across the village who keep taking turns. A new team will arrive in the morning to replace us, and then we will go home and rest," said Bimla Kumari, a 64-year-old farmer.
Others, like Dina Nath, said they are fed up with the issue, and are considering boycotting the election.
"What is the point in voting if our problems aren't solved by it?"
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ut ... 46831.html
BBC
Shankar the elephant: Plea to send lonely African animal home from India
Zoya Mateen - BBC News, Delhi
Mon, January 31, 2022, 2:54 AM
Twenty-four years ago, a young elephant named Shankar was plucked from the wilderness of Africa, loaded onto a plane to India, and placed in Delhi zoo. Now, a plea in the city's high court seeks to send him back home.
The petition - filed by 16-year-old Nikita Dhawan, founder of the non-profit Youth For Animals - alleges that Shankar has been living in isolation for years. It demands that he be removed from the zoo and rehabilitated in a wildlife sanctuary that houses other African elephants.
It also accuses zoo authorities of mistreating the animal - the BBC contacted officials but they declined to comment.
Ms Dhawan says that through Shankar, she wants to raise awareness about the plight of all captive elephants in the country.
"Indian culture gives elephants an elevated status. They are everywhere, in temples, in private ownership and are embedded in our history," she said. "Yet, we don't take care of them."
The tragic lives of India's mistreated captive elephants
Animal rights activists have long advocated for more humane treatment of India's captive elephants, which live in dismal conditions. Many, owned by private individuals, are used for religious processions, logging activities and sometimes even begging.
Shankar is one of two African elephants in Indian zoos - the second is another male at Mysore Zoo in Karnataka state.
Shankar wasn't always alone - he came to India in 1998 with a companion, Bombai.
The two young African elephants - whose larger, fan-shaped ears make it easy to distinguish them from their Asian counterparts - were a diplomatic gift from Zimbabwe to then Indian president Shankar Dayal Sharma.
Zoo officials have said they don't know where in Africa the elephants are from.
For some years, Shankar and Bombai seemed content enough at the zoo, touching, nuzzling and smelling each other.
But in 2005, Bombai died unexpectedly, according to the petition. The BBC couldn't ascertain the cause of her death.
Since then, Shankar has lived a solitary life. Now more than 26 years old, he is kept in a "bleak enclosure of steel posts and metal fences", Ms Dhawan says.
She decided to fight for his release after visiting the zoo in September and seeing Shankar.
"What really struck us was his condition, he looked terribly sad," she says.
There are two other Asian elephants at the zoo - Laxmi and Hira. But they are kept apart from Shankar, making it impossible for them to see and smell each other.
The zoo has said it is exploring options to end Shankar's isolation - director Sonali Ghosh told The Indian Express newspaper in November that she had written to parks in Africa to ask if they could find a mate for the animal, or take him back.
Reports say the zoo also attempted to bring the three elephants together. But they found it difficult as Shankar was "untrained and obstinate", the zoo's former director, Ramesh Pandey had said.
Activists allege that this is because of Shankar's environment.
"It is happening because he is isolated in inadequate surroundings," says Shubhobroto Ghosh, Wildlife Projects Manager of non-profit World Animal Protection of India. Male African elephants, he adds, are perfectly capable of "making social bonds".
A woman trying to save India's tortured elephants
Elephants in the wild live in close-knit herds and form lifelong bonds with each other. Even in the best of circumstances, such kinship is hard to replicate in a zoo.
Experts have warned that keeping elephants in cramped enclosures can affect them psychologically, causing them to develop neurotic behaviour.
People look elephants at Delhi Zoo on the first day of its reopening, on August 1, 2021 in New Delhi, India. The Delhi zoo was reopened to the public on Sunday, three and a half months after it was temporarily shut due to a surge in coronavirus cases during the second wave.
Shankar is kept apart from the other two elephants at the zoo
Over the years, Shankar's predicament has caught the attention of animal advocacy groups and rescue organisations, including the UK-based Aspinall Foundation, which has offered to rehabilitate Shankar in a suitable location in Africa at their cost.
Ms Dhawan has also started an online petition asking the zoo to release Shankar and send him to a "wildlife refuge or sanctuary where there are ample African elephants". More than 96,500 people have signed it so far.
Mr Ghosh says that if the court orders that Shankar should be shifted, he will be examined by experts, who will determine whether he is fit for translocation.
"The idea is not to pick him from the zoo and plant him somewhere in Africa just like that," he says.
The world's loneliest elephant is finally going free
Shankar's case has also opened up larger questions on whether it's okay to keep a sentient creature like an elephant in captivity.
"Elephants simply cannot thrive in zoos," Mr Ghosh said. "There are numerous studies from around the world that confirm this. So it makes no sense to capture them only to subject them to torture and suffering in unnatural places."
In 2009, the Central Zoo Authority of India had banned the display of elephants in zoos and prohibited keeping an elephant alone for more than six months.
But activists say this has done little to improve the conditions of elephants such as Shankar.
Mr Ghosh says a ruling in favour of Shankar's freedom would go a long way: "The case will set a precedent and will aid the cause of all captive elephants in India."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sh ... 53500.html
Shankar the elephant: Plea to send lonely African animal home from India
Zoya Mateen - BBC News, Delhi
Mon, January 31, 2022, 2:54 AM
Twenty-four years ago, a young elephant named Shankar was plucked from the wilderness of Africa, loaded onto a plane to India, and placed in Delhi zoo. Now, a plea in the city's high court seeks to send him back home.
The petition - filed by 16-year-old Nikita Dhawan, founder of the non-profit Youth For Animals - alleges that Shankar has been living in isolation for years. It demands that he be removed from the zoo and rehabilitated in a wildlife sanctuary that houses other African elephants.
It also accuses zoo authorities of mistreating the animal - the BBC contacted officials but they declined to comment.
Ms Dhawan says that through Shankar, she wants to raise awareness about the plight of all captive elephants in the country.
"Indian culture gives elephants an elevated status. They are everywhere, in temples, in private ownership and are embedded in our history," she said. "Yet, we don't take care of them."
The tragic lives of India's mistreated captive elephants
Animal rights activists have long advocated for more humane treatment of India's captive elephants, which live in dismal conditions. Many, owned by private individuals, are used for religious processions, logging activities and sometimes even begging.
Shankar is one of two African elephants in Indian zoos - the second is another male at Mysore Zoo in Karnataka state.
Shankar wasn't always alone - he came to India in 1998 with a companion, Bombai.
The two young African elephants - whose larger, fan-shaped ears make it easy to distinguish them from their Asian counterparts - were a diplomatic gift from Zimbabwe to then Indian president Shankar Dayal Sharma.
Zoo officials have said they don't know where in Africa the elephants are from.
For some years, Shankar and Bombai seemed content enough at the zoo, touching, nuzzling and smelling each other.
But in 2005, Bombai died unexpectedly, according to the petition. The BBC couldn't ascertain the cause of her death.
Since then, Shankar has lived a solitary life. Now more than 26 years old, he is kept in a "bleak enclosure of steel posts and metal fences", Ms Dhawan says.
She decided to fight for his release after visiting the zoo in September and seeing Shankar.
"What really struck us was his condition, he looked terribly sad," she says.
There are two other Asian elephants at the zoo - Laxmi and Hira. But they are kept apart from Shankar, making it impossible for them to see and smell each other.
The zoo has said it is exploring options to end Shankar's isolation - director Sonali Ghosh told The Indian Express newspaper in November that she had written to parks in Africa to ask if they could find a mate for the animal, or take him back.
Reports say the zoo also attempted to bring the three elephants together. But they found it difficult as Shankar was "untrained and obstinate", the zoo's former director, Ramesh Pandey had said.
Activists allege that this is because of Shankar's environment.
"It is happening because he is isolated in inadequate surroundings," says Shubhobroto Ghosh, Wildlife Projects Manager of non-profit World Animal Protection of India. Male African elephants, he adds, are perfectly capable of "making social bonds".
A woman trying to save India's tortured elephants
Elephants in the wild live in close-knit herds and form lifelong bonds with each other. Even in the best of circumstances, such kinship is hard to replicate in a zoo.
Experts have warned that keeping elephants in cramped enclosures can affect them psychologically, causing them to develop neurotic behaviour.
People look elephants at Delhi Zoo on the first day of its reopening, on August 1, 2021 in New Delhi, India. The Delhi zoo was reopened to the public on Sunday, three and a half months after it was temporarily shut due to a surge in coronavirus cases during the second wave.
Shankar is kept apart from the other two elephants at the zoo
Over the years, Shankar's predicament has caught the attention of animal advocacy groups and rescue organisations, including the UK-based Aspinall Foundation, which has offered to rehabilitate Shankar in a suitable location in Africa at their cost.
Ms Dhawan has also started an online petition asking the zoo to release Shankar and send him to a "wildlife refuge or sanctuary where there are ample African elephants". More than 96,500 people have signed it so far.
Mr Ghosh says that if the court orders that Shankar should be shifted, he will be examined by experts, who will determine whether he is fit for translocation.
"The idea is not to pick him from the zoo and plant him somewhere in Africa just like that," he says.
The world's loneliest elephant is finally going free
Shankar's case has also opened up larger questions on whether it's okay to keep a sentient creature like an elephant in captivity.
"Elephants simply cannot thrive in zoos," Mr Ghosh said. "There are numerous studies from around the world that confirm this. So it makes no sense to capture them only to subject them to torture and suffering in unnatural places."
In 2009, the Central Zoo Authority of India had banned the display of elephants in zoos and prohibited keeping an elephant alone for more than six months.
But activists say this has done little to improve the conditions of elephants such as Shankar.
Mr Ghosh says a ruling in favour of Shankar's freedom would go a long way: "The case will set a precedent and will aid the cause of all captive elephants in India."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sh ... 53500.html
Charlotte Observer
Rooster named ‘Cluck Norris’ terrorized NC shelter staff. They finally got rid of him
Mark Price
Fri, February 4, 2022, 6:39 AM
A rooster’s reign of terror at Union County’s animal shelter has ended after an extremely brave soul offered to adopt “Cluck Norris,” as the bird is known on social media.
Cluck surrendered his grip on the shelter Thursday, Feb, 3, and staff did not mince words on getting rid of a chicken that had to be kept “in single cell housing” to protect his keepers.
“Cluck had a good run at the shelter and did his best to inspire chaos in spite of the love and care offered to him,” shelter staff wrote Facebook.
“Normally, adopted animals leave the shelter with immunization records and other animal care related items. In ‘Cluck’s’ case, we sent him to his new home with an anger management referral, a self-help book, and an ankle monitor. Operations at the shelter have since returned to their normal, calm state.”
The shelter, located east of Charlotte, didn’t identify the person who adopted the chicken, but did share video of Norris in the lobby, impatiently waiting to be picked up.
His notoriety spread this week on social media after the Union County Sheriff’s Office posted a Feb. 2 plea for help on Facebook. The alpha bird was exhibiting all the attributes of a cock fighter — pacing, strutting, crowing and refusing to acknowledge that size matters in a brawl.
The sheriff’s office said they would release the bird to anyone who promised it would never come back.
“Seriously, someone come and adopt this rooster,” the office wrote.
“This rooster was affectionately given his new name after he was placed in animal general population and immediately began to establish his role as shelter kingpin. ... ‘Cluck’ is intimidating staff members by constantly ‘squawking’ hurtful insults.”
The post became a hot topic on social media, racking up 1,400 reactions and nearly 700 comments in two days, including one person who said the sheriff’s office should deputize the bird to fight crime.
Others joked it was a rare case of the jail trying to escape one of its inmates.
“Give him an arrest voucher and put him on a bus or plane,” Jo Newman Holbrook wrote.
“I know a guy who might want him. His name is Harland Sanders,” Eddie M. Helms posted, referring to the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ro ... 13293.html
Rooster named ‘Cluck Norris’ terrorized NC shelter staff. They finally got rid of him
Mark Price
Fri, February 4, 2022, 6:39 AM
A rooster’s reign of terror at Union County’s animal shelter has ended after an extremely brave soul offered to adopt “Cluck Norris,” as the bird is known on social media.
Cluck surrendered his grip on the shelter Thursday, Feb, 3, and staff did not mince words on getting rid of a chicken that had to be kept “in single cell housing” to protect his keepers.
“Cluck had a good run at the shelter and did his best to inspire chaos in spite of the love and care offered to him,” shelter staff wrote Facebook.
“Normally, adopted animals leave the shelter with immunization records and other animal care related items. In ‘Cluck’s’ case, we sent him to his new home with an anger management referral, a self-help book, and an ankle monitor. Operations at the shelter have since returned to their normal, calm state.”
The shelter, located east of Charlotte, didn’t identify the person who adopted the chicken, but did share video of Norris in the lobby, impatiently waiting to be picked up.
His notoriety spread this week on social media after the Union County Sheriff’s Office posted a Feb. 2 plea for help on Facebook. The alpha bird was exhibiting all the attributes of a cock fighter — pacing, strutting, crowing and refusing to acknowledge that size matters in a brawl.
The sheriff’s office said they would release the bird to anyone who promised it would never come back.
“Seriously, someone come and adopt this rooster,” the office wrote.
“This rooster was affectionately given his new name after he was placed in animal general population and immediately began to establish his role as shelter kingpin. ... ‘Cluck’ is intimidating staff members by constantly ‘squawking’ hurtful insults.”
The post became a hot topic on social media, racking up 1,400 reactions and nearly 700 comments in two days, including one person who said the sheriff’s office should deputize the bird to fight crime.
Others joked it was a rare case of the jail trying to escape one of its inmates.
“Give him an arrest voucher and put him on a bus or plane,” Jo Newman Holbrook wrote.
“I know a guy who might want him. His name is Harland Sanders,” Eddie M. Helms posted, referring to the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ro ... 13293.html
Re: pets
Even Worms Feel Pain
An evolutionary biologist argues that animals could feel more pain than humans.
Who feels more pain, a person or a cat? A cat or a cockroach? It’s widely assumed animal intelligence and the capacity to feel pain are positively correlated, with brainier animals more likely to feel pain, and vice versa. But what if our intuition is wrong and the opposite is true? Perhaps animals that are less intelligent feel not only as much pain but even more.
Thinking about pain is psychologically challenging. It can be, well, a pain. “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt,” wrote Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain. It’s all too easy to dismiss the pain of others while treating our own as unquestioned fact.
This disparity is even more true when it comes to perceiving the pain of animals, where Western society has placed Descartes before the truth. Animals, he famously claimed, are mere automata. They don’t feel pain like we do, and so, carrying the notion of human exceptionalism much too far, Descartes didn’t hesitate to cut animals open while they were alive, without concern for what they were clearly feeling. The same was true of other giants of early science, such as William Harvey, whose discovery of the heart’s role in circulating blood was based in large part on his own heartless vivisection of living dogs.
This argument begins with a simple question: What is pain for?
A correlate of this attitude, rarely challenged even today, is that the more similar animals are to us, the more likely they are to feel pain. And in proportion as they are “simple”—i.e., stupid—they can’t. I want to take issue with this and suggest a counterintuitive hypothesis: That animals with less cognitive capacity might feel at least as much and perhaps more pain than their smarter cousins. I vividly recall, as a child, watching with horror as my uncle threaded a worm on a hook. The victim wriggled with what in a human would unquestionably be agony, while my uncle reassured me, “It’s not feeling pain.” As an adult researcher (who should have known better), I’ve seen snakes, fish, and cockroaches spasm when subjected to electric shocks.
This argument, admittedly hypothetical, begins with a simple question: What is pain for? It leads to a similarly simple answer: It provides a valuable warning that something dangerous (literally, hurtful) is going on. You’ve stepped on a tack or touched a hot stove. Whether you’re an animal or a person, something has bitten or poisoned you, stepped on your toe or your tail. Pain can induce an individual to withdraw from a damaging situation, to protect a vulnerable and damaged body part, and to avoid further experiencing whatever produced the unpleasant sensation. It typically, but not always, resolves once the painful stimulus is removed, and it serves as a major indicator—often, the most demanding and important one—that removing the stimulus would be in the individual’s interest.
The absence of pain, accordingly, can itself be dangerous. This is why people suffering from Hansen’s Disease (“leprosy”) often lose their fingers, toes, or parts of their face, because one consequence of this illness is a loss of peripheral pain sensation. As unpleasant as it is and how terrible when severe and chronic, pain is important. It can be, paradoxically, our friend.
ROYAL PAINS: Human pain is multifaceted, but our big brains can outsmart it sometimes. Animals, argues David P. Barash, have no such luck. Chart by Usman Zafar Paracha / Shutterstock
Insofar as it is a crucial alarm signal, pain should be a cross-species universal, no less valuable for paramecia than for people. I agree with the argument made by Richard Dawkins in his book Science in the Soul, in a chapter titled “But Can They Suffer?,” that smaller-brained creatures just might have greater need for this signal. “Isn’t it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement?” Dawkins asked.
There are many benefits to having a big brain, something that evolutionary theory would predict given that complex neuronal networks are metabolically expensive to produce and maintain. The brains of Homo sapiens occupy roughly 2 percent of adult body weight, while accounting for 20 percent of our energy budget. Among those adaptive payoffs, the more functional the brain, the greater the learning capacity of those possessing it. Of course, this capacity is employed in all sorts of endeavors, including memory, among which one of the less often recognized benefits is the ability to recall physical circumstances that have been disadvantageous, even dangerous—that is, which are likely to have caused pain. Once they have experienced pain, those capable of remembering it have a distinct advantage. They can learn about the precipitating circumstances and avoid repeating them. Once burned, twice shy.
But what if you’re an animal less endowed with intelligence, and with associated (and associative) memory? You might be doomed to repeat each painful experience, Groundhog Day style, because you are less able to connect the relevant dots leading to the distressing outcome. Not so for intelligent animals. Indeed, such animals should be able to learn what to avoid in proportion as they are neuronally endowed. The dummies, accordingly, would benefit more than the smarty-pants from an especially potent stimulus, a blast of something deeply unpleasant—call it “pain”—more likely to evoke whatever passes for memory and learning in their admittedly dim minds. If so, then they would benefit from a particularly loud alarm bell: More pain rather than less.
More...
https://nautil.us/even-worms-feel-pain-14243/
An evolutionary biologist argues that animals could feel more pain than humans.
Who feels more pain, a person or a cat? A cat or a cockroach? It’s widely assumed animal intelligence and the capacity to feel pain are positively correlated, with brainier animals more likely to feel pain, and vice versa. But what if our intuition is wrong and the opposite is true? Perhaps animals that are less intelligent feel not only as much pain but even more.
Thinking about pain is psychologically challenging. It can be, well, a pain. “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt,” wrote Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain. It’s all too easy to dismiss the pain of others while treating our own as unquestioned fact.
This disparity is even more true when it comes to perceiving the pain of animals, where Western society has placed Descartes before the truth. Animals, he famously claimed, are mere automata. They don’t feel pain like we do, and so, carrying the notion of human exceptionalism much too far, Descartes didn’t hesitate to cut animals open while they were alive, without concern for what they were clearly feeling. The same was true of other giants of early science, such as William Harvey, whose discovery of the heart’s role in circulating blood was based in large part on his own heartless vivisection of living dogs.
This argument begins with a simple question: What is pain for?
A correlate of this attitude, rarely challenged even today, is that the more similar animals are to us, the more likely they are to feel pain. And in proportion as they are “simple”—i.e., stupid—they can’t. I want to take issue with this and suggest a counterintuitive hypothesis: That animals with less cognitive capacity might feel at least as much and perhaps more pain than their smarter cousins. I vividly recall, as a child, watching with horror as my uncle threaded a worm on a hook. The victim wriggled with what in a human would unquestionably be agony, while my uncle reassured me, “It’s not feeling pain.” As an adult researcher (who should have known better), I’ve seen snakes, fish, and cockroaches spasm when subjected to electric shocks.
This argument, admittedly hypothetical, begins with a simple question: What is pain for? It leads to a similarly simple answer: It provides a valuable warning that something dangerous (literally, hurtful) is going on. You’ve stepped on a tack or touched a hot stove. Whether you’re an animal or a person, something has bitten or poisoned you, stepped on your toe or your tail. Pain can induce an individual to withdraw from a damaging situation, to protect a vulnerable and damaged body part, and to avoid further experiencing whatever produced the unpleasant sensation. It typically, but not always, resolves once the painful stimulus is removed, and it serves as a major indicator—often, the most demanding and important one—that removing the stimulus would be in the individual’s interest.
The absence of pain, accordingly, can itself be dangerous. This is why people suffering from Hansen’s Disease (“leprosy”) often lose their fingers, toes, or parts of their face, because one consequence of this illness is a loss of peripheral pain sensation. As unpleasant as it is and how terrible when severe and chronic, pain is important. It can be, paradoxically, our friend.
ROYAL PAINS: Human pain is multifaceted, but our big brains can outsmart it sometimes. Animals, argues David P. Barash, have no such luck. Chart by Usman Zafar Paracha / Shutterstock
Insofar as it is a crucial alarm signal, pain should be a cross-species universal, no less valuable for paramecia than for people. I agree with the argument made by Richard Dawkins in his book Science in the Soul, in a chapter titled “But Can They Suffer?,” that smaller-brained creatures just might have greater need for this signal. “Isn’t it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement?” Dawkins asked.
There are many benefits to having a big brain, something that evolutionary theory would predict given that complex neuronal networks are metabolically expensive to produce and maintain. The brains of Homo sapiens occupy roughly 2 percent of adult body weight, while accounting for 20 percent of our energy budget. Among those adaptive payoffs, the more functional the brain, the greater the learning capacity of those possessing it. Of course, this capacity is employed in all sorts of endeavors, including memory, among which one of the less often recognized benefits is the ability to recall physical circumstances that have been disadvantageous, even dangerous—that is, which are likely to have caused pain. Once they have experienced pain, those capable of remembering it have a distinct advantage. They can learn about the precipitating circumstances and avoid repeating them. Once burned, twice shy.
But what if you’re an animal less endowed with intelligence, and with associated (and associative) memory? You might be doomed to repeat each painful experience, Groundhog Day style, because you are less able to connect the relevant dots leading to the distressing outcome. Not so for intelligent animals. Indeed, such animals should be able to learn what to avoid in proportion as they are neuronally endowed. The dummies, accordingly, would benefit more than the smarty-pants from an especially potent stimulus, a blast of something deeply unpleasant—call it “pain”—more likely to evoke whatever passes for memory and learning in their admittedly dim minds. If so, then they would benefit from a particularly loud alarm bell: More pain rather than less.
More...
https://nautil.us/even-worms-feel-pain-14243/
Animals Feel What’s Right and Wrong, Too
It’s time to take moral emotion in animals seriously.
BY JAMES HUTTON
Amy’s job is pretty repetitive, but normally she doesn’t mind doing what she’s asked. Today, however, she’s working alongside Sidney. Amy can’t help noticing that Sidney is receiving a small reward every time he completes a task, while she gets nothing. After a few rounds of this treatment, Amy has had enough. She refuses to go on performing her tasks, disengaging completely.
Amy’s behavior probably makes a certain kind of sense to you. Here’s what I expect you’re thinking: Amy must feel like she’s being treated unfairly (and rightly so, you might think). It is this perception about the ethics of the situation—her sense of not being treated fairly—that motivates Amy’s refusal to go on working.
But there are a couple of important details about Amy and Sidney that you should know. The first is that they aren’t workers in any conventional sense, but participants in an experiment. The experiment in question, which is taking place at the University of Vienna, is part of an effort to understand the motivations that underlie cooperative behavior. The second important detail is that Amy and Sidney aren’t human beings, but border collies. A team of animal psychologists, led by Friederike Range, are closely observing them to determine whether domestic dogs show an aversion to disparities in reward. The behavior of Amy and the other dogs in the experiment suggests that they do.1 Dogs notice when they aren’t getting the same rewards as their peers, and once they’ve figured this out, they refuse to go on performing tricks on demand.
THE STING OF UNFAIRNESS: You might think it is hopelessly romantic and unscientific to say your dog can sense unfairness, philosopher James Hutton says. But two big ideas from philosophy and psychology suggest a feeling for what’s right and wrong might really be within reach for some non-human animals. Photo by Dezy / Shutterstock
So, what do you make of Amy’s behavior now that you know she’s a dog and not a human? Is it still viable to think she’s perceiving her treatment as unfair? You might think that attributing a moral attitude like a sense of fairness to a dog is hopelessly romantic, anthropomorphic, and thoroughly unscientific. Moreover, you might think the capacity to experience the world in moral terms is something uniquely human, perhaps bound up with our ability to form abstract principles and engage in complex ethical reasoning. But there are two big ideas—one from moral philosophy and one from animal psychology—which suggest that a sense of fairness, a feeling for what’s right and wrong, might really be within reach for some non-human animals.
The first big idea is that the moral attitudes of human beings are thoroughly emotional in nature. Of course, we sometimes draw ethical conclusions by reasoning, carefully thinking through the implications of the principles we believe. This, for example, is how many of us have come to recognize that innocuous-seeming activities like catching a plane have weighty ethical significance. But other times we just have an intuitive sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. You can often just see that someone’s behavior is kind, cruel, uncalled-for, or unfair, without having to derive this conclusion from some deeper moral principle. This intuitive moral sense is what enables us to make moral judgments on the fly, to navigate nuances of rightness and wrongness that are difficult to codify in abstract rules and, sometimes, to see shortcomings in the moral principles with which we have been brought up.
Emotional feelings allow us to expand our moral horizons in the face of lived experience.
Philosophers have long suspected that this intuitive moral sense is essentially a capacity for certain kinds of emotion: We experience positive emotions of satisfaction and admiration toward good conduct and negative emotions of anger, disgust, and guilt toward the bad. The past two decades have witnessed a huge revival of interest in this idea, due to scientific findings about how moral judgment works. When we make fast and intuitive moral judgments, the parts of our brains associated with emotions light up2; manipulating people’s emotional responses, by exposing them to disgusting smells,3 for example, seems to lead to corresponding shifts in patterns of moral assessment; individuals with emotional deficits such as psychopathy appear to lack an intuitive sense of rightness and wrongness.4 All this evidence strongly suggests that emotions are integral to the human sense of right and wrong.
In my own research, I’ve argued that this conclusion extends to the experiential component of our ability to perceive rightness and wrongness.5 When a person feels she is being treated unfairly, rather than concluding this on the basis of reasoning, the feeling is an emotional one. These emotional feelings allow us to expand our moral horizons and revise our ethical principles in the face of lived experience. Our inner lives are punctuated by moral experiences, and these moral experiences are constituted by various forms of emotion.
How does this apply to non-human animals like the border collies? Can we justify the idea that creatures like Amy perceive certain kinds of treatment as unfair?
Our first big idea tells us that a human in Amy’s situation would perceive the unfairness of the situation by experiencing an emotion such as anger or indignation. What if a dog like Amy could experience similar emotions? If so, there would be a clear sense in which she is having a moral experience, just as a human would in her position. It would follow that the ability to perceive the world in moral terms isn’t unique to human beings but shared by other members of the animal kingdom.
But are we really justified in ascribing emotions like anger or indignation to other animals? This is where the second big idea comes in.
For a long time, the dominant methodology in animal psychology was to ascribe as little mental life as possible. This began as an attitude of healthy skepticism toward the all-too-human tendency of projecting our own thoughts and feelings onto animals at the slightest provocation. But by the 1950s, this approach had ossified into a blanket refusal to take seriously the idea that non-human animals have inner lives. However, in the decades since then, researchers have built up a huge body of evidence that some non-human animals can perform cognitively demanding tasks, from using tools6 and recognizing themselves in mirrors to working together to solve7 complex puzzles. This has forced scientists to become less cagey about exploring the mental lives of animals—to consider claims about animal minds on a case-by-case basis rather than denying them by default.
Many species show a willingness to give up food to help another creature in distress.
Part and parcel of this is a new willingness to take seriously the idea that animals have emotions. In an opinion piece published in the journal Affective Science last month, cognitive scientist Mariska Kret and her collaborators report that “most contemporary researchers do not deny the existence of emotions in animals.”8 What remains contentious, however, is whether the emotions of non-human animals are accompanied by conscious feelings. Here, too, Kret and her colleagues argue that it’s time for scientists to shift to a more permissive approach. “When related species show similar behavior under similar circumstances, these are likely driven by similar psychological processes,” they write. “Until the contrary can be demonstrated, we must assume that similar behavior in these species is paired with similar emotions and in some cases similar feelings.” This means that when another mammal shows signs of emotion—like facial expressions, changes in heart rate, and shifts in cognitive processing—our default hypothesis should be that they are consciously feeling emotions.
The same stance is advocated by primatologist Frans de Waal and philosopher Kristin Andrews in an article that recently appeared in Science.9 “To deny felt emotions [in non-human animals],” they write, “does not seem a reasonable position given the fundamental similarity between the nervous systems of humans and other animal species and the shared evolutionary history that has promoted similar emotionally mediated reactions to the environment and social partners.”
De Waal and Andrews note that our evidence that other human beings are experiencing conscious feelings is always indirect, too. You don’t feel my anger firsthand but detect it via external signs such as how I act and what I say. Some scientists are only willing to ascribe conscious feelings when a human being reports having them, but verbal evidence is no more infallible or indispensable than other external signs. The face can provide a “window on human emotions” just as much as the voice. Indeed, an over-reliance on verbal evidence has led to serious moral failings in the past, such as the practice of performing surgery on babies without anesthetics (“We can’t be sure the baby is feeling anything just because she is crying and whimpering!”), which only stopped in the 1980s.10 To do better in the present, we need to take signs that other animals are feeling emotions at face value unless there is substantive evidence to the contrary.
So, there is nothing inherently outlandish or unscientific in the suggestion with which we began, that a dog like Amy can experience certain kinds of treatment as unfair.
But what positive evidence do we have that other animals can feel specifically moral emotions, like indignation at unfair treatment or concern for another’s well-being? For all we’ve said so far, other mammals might be experiencing non-moral emotions, such as fear oriented exclusively toward their own well-being, without experiencing the world in moral terms. That would still be important; we care about animal suffering, so it’s important for us to understand the ways they experience emotional as well as physical pain. But it would fall short of the more radical idea that animals have moral experiences.
This line of thought leads Frans de Waal to doubt that other animals can see the world in moral terms. “I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a ‘moral being,’” he wrote in The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. “This is because sentiments do not suffice. There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves. Moral emotions are disconnected from one’s immediate situation. They deal with good and bad at a more abstract, disinterested level.”
If animals really do experience the world in moral terms, what does this mean for how we should treat them?
But perhaps de Waal’s negative conclusions about animal moral experience are too pessimistic. Think again of Range’s dogs. Admittedly, they only respond to disparities in reward when they are the ones getting the short straw. Amy stops giving the paw when she notices the disparity, while Sidney carries on giving the paw and getting the treats. But is the human sense of fairness really so much more disinterested than this? We are much better at noticing when we are on the receiving end of unfairness than when others are. Sure, we can do things that dogs can’t do to move beyond this—we can listen to different points of view and use reasoning to bracket our own interests. But at the experiential level, our moral emotions seem hardly less partial than the border collies’ reactions. It’s therefore unclear that de Waal’s focus on disinterestedness marks a genuine difference between humans’ moral emotions and the emotions of which animals are capable.
What’s more, we do see signs of selflessness or disinterestedness in the behavior of other non-human species. An experiment by Sarah Brosnan and colleagues found that chimpanzees become agitated by disparities in reward even when they are the ones getting the better deal, refusing to work for tasty grapes when another chimpanzee is only getting mediocre carrots.11 Moreover, in the wild, high-ranking chimpanzees break up fights they aren’t involved in, even when this means punishing their own friends. And many species, from rats12 to pigeons13 to rhesus monkeys14 to chimpanzees, show a willingness to give up food to help another creature in distress. These behaviors are evidence that these animals are experiencing emotions directed at the well-being of others rather than at their own lot, removing any rationale for denying that these are genuinely moral emotions.
Based on evidence like this, cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff and philosopher Jessica Pierce recommend a cautious but permissive approach to ascribing moral emotions to animals. In Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, they write, “Can we draw a line that separates species in which morality has evolved from those in which it hasn’t? Given the rapidly accumulating data on the social behavior of numerous and diverse species, drawing such a line is surely an exercise in futility, and the best we can offer is that if you choose to draw a line, use a pencil. For the line will certainly shift ‘downwards’ to include species to which we would never have dreamed of attributing such complex behaviors.”
We need to be somewhat tentative in ascribing moral experiences to any given species, but there are compelling reasons to take this possibility extremely seriously.
If animals really do experience the world in moral terms, what does this mean for how we should treat them? It would require us to rethink the range of harms we must avoid causing. Suppose that mother pigs feel moral concern for the well-being of their piglets. That would mean that, when a mother witnesses her piglets undergoing painful operations like tail-docking and castration, her interests are harmed, too. Those of us who work with pigs—and those who choose which farming practices to support with our wallets—would need to consider the moral bonds pigs feel toward one another as well as the physical and emotional pain they can feel.
Even more radically, animals who are motivated by a sense of right and wrong are, in a very real sense, moral agents. Respecting moral agency is one of the cornerstones of modern ethics, so this might require us to consider more extreme forms of animal liberation. Philosopher Susana Monsó and colleagues argue that training a dog to fight constitutes an unacceptable stunting of its moral agency, because this involves “eliminating any potential caring response to a conspecific in distress.”15 Similarly, lab experiments in which scientists intentionally destroy rats’ capacity for empathy might be analogous to the long-discredited practice of lobotomizing children with behavioral problems.
A broader lesson, increasingly acknowledged by experts in this field, is that there is much to be gained when scientists and philosophers work together. Scientists’ experimental findings have driven philosophers to make conceptual and ethical innovations. In turn, these innovations have led to improvements in methodology and a better grasp of what the scientific findings mean. With continued cross-pollination between science and philosophy, we will continue to deepen our understanding of our own moral minds and the moral lives of animals.
James Hutton is a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Follow him on Twitter @JamesHuttonPhil.
Lead image: Cranach / Shutterstock
https://nautil.us/animals-feel-whats-ri ... too-16083/
It’s time to take moral emotion in animals seriously.
BY JAMES HUTTON
Amy’s job is pretty repetitive, but normally she doesn’t mind doing what she’s asked. Today, however, she’s working alongside Sidney. Amy can’t help noticing that Sidney is receiving a small reward every time he completes a task, while she gets nothing. After a few rounds of this treatment, Amy has had enough. She refuses to go on performing her tasks, disengaging completely.
Amy’s behavior probably makes a certain kind of sense to you. Here’s what I expect you’re thinking: Amy must feel like she’s being treated unfairly (and rightly so, you might think). It is this perception about the ethics of the situation—her sense of not being treated fairly—that motivates Amy’s refusal to go on working.
But there are a couple of important details about Amy and Sidney that you should know. The first is that they aren’t workers in any conventional sense, but participants in an experiment. The experiment in question, which is taking place at the University of Vienna, is part of an effort to understand the motivations that underlie cooperative behavior. The second important detail is that Amy and Sidney aren’t human beings, but border collies. A team of animal psychologists, led by Friederike Range, are closely observing them to determine whether domestic dogs show an aversion to disparities in reward. The behavior of Amy and the other dogs in the experiment suggests that they do.1 Dogs notice when they aren’t getting the same rewards as their peers, and once they’ve figured this out, they refuse to go on performing tricks on demand.
THE STING OF UNFAIRNESS: You might think it is hopelessly romantic and unscientific to say your dog can sense unfairness, philosopher James Hutton says. But two big ideas from philosophy and psychology suggest a feeling for what’s right and wrong might really be within reach for some non-human animals. Photo by Dezy / Shutterstock
So, what do you make of Amy’s behavior now that you know she’s a dog and not a human? Is it still viable to think she’s perceiving her treatment as unfair? You might think that attributing a moral attitude like a sense of fairness to a dog is hopelessly romantic, anthropomorphic, and thoroughly unscientific. Moreover, you might think the capacity to experience the world in moral terms is something uniquely human, perhaps bound up with our ability to form abstract principles and engage in complex ethical reasoning. But there are two big ideas—one from moral philosophy and one from animal psychology—which suggest that a sense of fairness, a feeling for what’s right and wrong, might really be within reach for some non-human animals.
The first big idea is that the moral attitudes of human beings are thoroughly emotional in nature. Of course, we sometimes draw ethical conclusions by reasoning, carefully thinking through the implications of the principles we believe. This, for example, is how many of us have come to recognize that innocuous-seeming activities like catching a plane have weighty ethical significance. But other times we just have an intuitive sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. You can often just see that someone’s behavior is kind, cruel, uncalled-for, or unfair, without having to derive this conclusion from some deeper moral principle. This intuitive moral sense is what enables us to make moral judgments on the fly, to navigate nuances of rightness and wrongness that are difficult to codify in abstract rules and, sometimes, to see shortcomings in the moral principles with which we have been brought up.
Emotional feelings allow us to expand our moral horizons in the face of lived experience.
Philosophers have long suspected that this intuitive moral sense is essentially a capacity for certain kinds of emotion: We experience positive emotions of satisfaction and admiration toward good conduct and negative emotions of anger, disgust, and guilt toward the bad. The past two decades have witnessed a huge revival of interest in this idea, due to scientific findings about how moral judgment works. When we make fast and intuitive moral judgments, the parts of our brains associated with emotions light up2; manipulating people’s emotional responses, by exposing them to disgusting smells,3 for example, seems to lead to corresponding shifts in patterns of moral assessment; individuals with emotional deficits such as psychopathy appear to lack an intuitive sense of rightness and wrongness.4 All this evidence strongly suggests that emotions are integral to the human sense of right and wrong.
In my own research, I’ve argued that this conclusion extends to the experiential component of our ability to perceive rightness and wrongness.5 When a person feels she is being treated unfairly, rather than concluding this on the basis of reasoning, the feeling is an emotional one. These emotional feelings allow us to expand our moral horizons and revise our ethical principles in the face of lived experience. Our inner lives are punctuated by moral experiences, and these moral experiences are constituted by various forms of emotion.
How does this apply to non-human animals like the border collies? Can we justify the idea that creatures like Amy perceive certain kinds of treatment as unfair?
Our first big idea tells us that a human in Amy’s situation would perceive the unfairness of the situation by experiencing an emotion such as anger or indignation. What if a dog like Amy could experience similar emotions? If so, there would be a clear sense in which she is having a moral experience, just as a human would in her position. It would follow that the ability to perceive the world in moral terms isn’t unique to human beings but shared by other members of the animal kingdom.
But are we really justified in ascribing emotions like anger or indignation to other animals? This is where the second big idea comes in.
For a long time, the dominant methodology in animal psychology was to ascribe as little mental life as possible. This began as an attitude of healthy skepticism toward the all-too-human tendency of projecting our own thoughts and feelings onto animals at the slightest provocation. But by the 1950s, this approach had ossified into a blanket refusal to take seriously the idea that non-human animals have inner lives. However, in the decades since then, researchers have built up a huge body of evidence that some non-human animals can perform cognitively demanding tasks, from using tools6 and recognizing themselves in mirrors to working together to solve7 complex puzzles. This has forced scientists to become less cagey about exploring the mental lives of animals—to consider claims about animal minds on a case-by-case basis rather than denying them by default.
Many species show a willingness to give up food to help another creature in distress.
Part and parcel of this is a new willingness to take seriously the idea that animals have emotions. In an opinion piece published in the journal Affective Science last month, cognitive scientist Mariska Kret and her collaborators report that “most contemporary researchers do not deny the existence of emotions in animals.”8 What remains contentious, however, is whether the emotions of non-human animals are accompanied by conscious feelings. Here, too, Kret and her colleagues argue that it’s time for scientists to shift to a more permissive approach. “When related species show similar behavior under similar circumstances, these are likely driven by similar psychological processes,” they write. “Until the contrary can be demonstrated, we must assume that similar behavior in these species is paired with similar emotions and in some cases similar feelings.” This means that when another mammal shows signs of emotion—like facial expressions, changes in heart rate, and shifts in cognitive processing—our default hypothesis should be that they are consciously feeling emotions.
The same stance is advocated by primatologist Frans de Waal and philosopher Kristin Andrews in an article that recently appeared in Science.9 “To deny felt emotions [in non-human animals],” they write, “does not seem a reasonable position given the fundamental similarity between the nervous systems of humans and other animal species and the shared evolutionary history that has promoted similar emotionally mediated reactions to the environment and social partners.”
De Waal and Andrews note that our evidence that other human beings are experiencing conscious feelings is always indirect, too. You don’t feel my anger firsthand but detect it via external signs such as how I act and what I say. Some scientists are only willing to ascribe conscious feelings when a human being reports having them, but verbal evidence is no more infallible or indispensable than other external signs. The face can provide a “window on human emotions” just as much as the voice. Indeed, an over-reliance on verbal evidence has led to serious moral failings in the past, such as the practice of performing surgery on babies without anesthetics (“We can’t be sure the baby is feeling anything just because she is crying and whimpering!”), which only stopped in the 1980s.10 To do better in the present, we need to take signs that other animals are feeling emotions at face value unless there is substantive evidence to the contrary.
So, there is nothing inherently outlandish or unscientific in the suggestion with which we began, that a dog like Amy can experience certain kinds of treatment as unfair.
But what positive evidence do we have that other animals can feel specifically moral emotions, like indignation at unfair treatment or concern for another’s well-being? For all we’ve said so far, other mammals might be experiencing non-moral emotions, such as fear oriented exclusively toward their own well-being, without experiencing the world in moral terms. That would still be important; we care about animal suffering, so it’s important for us to understand the ways they experience emotional as well as physical pain. But it would fall short of the more radical idea that animals have moral experiences.
This line of thought leads Frans de Waal to doubt that other animals can see the world in moral terms. “I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a ‘moral being,’” he wrote in The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. “This is because sentiments do not suffice. There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves. Moral emotions are disconnected from one’s immediate situation. They deal with good and bad at a more abstract, disinterested level.”
If animals really do experience the world in moral terms, what does this mean for how we should treat them?
But perhaps de Waal’s negative conclusions about animal moral experience are too pessimistic. Think again of Range’s dogs. Admittedly, they only respond to disparities in reward when they are the ones getting the short straw. Amy stops giving the paw when she notices the disparity, while Sidney carries on giving the paw and getting the treats. But is the human sense of fairness really so much more disinterested than this? We are much better at noticing when we are on the receiving end of unfairness than when others are. Sure, we can do things that dogs can’t do to move beyond this—we can listen to different points of view and use reasoning to bracket our own interests. But at the experiential level, our moral emotions seem hardly less partial than the border collies’ reactions. It’s therefore unclear that de Waal’s focus on disinterestedness marks a genuine difference between humans’ moral emotions and the emotions of which animals are capable.
What’s more, we do see signs of selflessness or disinterestedness in the behavior of other non-human species. An experiment by Sarah Brosnan and colleagues found that chimpanzees become agitated by disparities in reward even when they are the ones getting the better deal, refusing to work for tasty grapes when another chimpanzee is only getting mediocre carrots.11 Moreover, in the wild, high-ranking chimpanzees break up fights they aren’t involved in, even when this means punishing their own friends. And many species, from rats12 to pigeons13 to rhesus monkeys14 to chimpanzees, show a willingness to give up food to help another creature in distress. These behaviors are evidence that these animals are experiencing emotions directed at the well-being of others rather than at their own lot, removing any rationale for denying that these are genuinely moral emotions.
Based on evidence like this, cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff and philosopher Jessica Pierce recommend a cautious but permissive approach to ascribing moral emotions to animals. In Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, they write, “Can we draw a line that separates species in which morality has evolved from those in which it hasn’t? Given the rapidly accumulating data on the social behavior of numerous and diverse species, drawing such a line is surely an exercise in futility, and the best we can offer is that if you choose to draw a line, use a pencil. For the line will certainly shift ‘downwards’ to include species to which we would never have dreamed of attributing such complex behaviors.”
We need to be somewhat tentative in ascribing moral experiences to any given species, but there are compelling reasons to take this possibility extremely seriously.
If animals really do experience the world in moral terms, what does this mean for how we should treat them? It would require us to rethink the range of harms we must avoid causing. Suppose that mother pigs feel moral concern for the well-being of their piglets. That would mean that, when a mother witnesses her piglets undergoing painful operations like tail-docking and castration, her interests are harmed, too. Those of us who work with pigs—and those who choose which farming practices to support with our wallets—would need to consider the moral bonds pigs feel toward one another as well as the physical and emotional pain they can feel.
Even more radically, animals who are motivated by a sense of right and wrong are, in a very real sense, moral agents. Respecting moral agency is one of the cornerstones of modern ethics, so this might require us to consider more extreme forms of animal liberation. Philosopher Susana Monsó and colleagues argue that training a dog to fight constitutes an unacceptable stunting of its moral agency, because this involves “eliminating any potential caring response to a conspecific in distress.”15 Similarly, lab experiments in which scientists intentionally destroy rats’ capacity for empathy might be analogous to the long-discredited practice of lobotomizing children with behavioral problems.
A broader lesson, increasingly acknowledged by experts in this field, is that there is much to be gained when scientists and philosophers work together. Scientists’ experimental findings have driven philosophers to make conceptual and ethical innovations. In turn, these innovations have led to improvements in methodology and a better grasp of what the scientific findings mean. With continued cross-pollination between science and philosophy, we will continue to deepen our understanding of our own moral minds and the moral lives of animals.
James Hutton is a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Follow him on Twitter @JamesHuttonPhil.
Lead image: Cranach / Shutterstock
https://nautil.us/animals-feel-whats-ri ... too-16083/
Re: pets
An elephant kills woman in India — then returns to trample her corpse at her funeral.
Jane Nam
Fri, June 17, 2022, 7:18 PM
An elephant in India made headlines for not only killing a woman, but for crashing her funeral to trample her corpse as well.
On June 10, onlookers were horrified to see the same elephant that had attacked and killed 70-year-old Maya Murmu, which grabbed her dead body from the pyre before trampling on it. The giant threw her body once more before leaving the site of the funeral.
Murmu had been fetching water in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district in India when she was attacked.
The elephant had reportedly wandered off from its home in Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary before encountering the elderly woman.
More from NextShark: Over 100,000 People Sign Petition to Investigate Teen Shot 7 Times By Police While Surrendering
Despite being rushed to a hospital after the attack, Murmu died from her injuries, according to Rasgovindpur police station inspector Lopamudra Nayak.
Though elephants are typically gentle, majestic beasts known for their stellar memory, they can be dangerous to people when threatened, provoked or abused. Conservation charity founder and lawyer Duncan McNair made a comment to Newsweek that “endangered elephants can be deadly dangerous” when attacked, also noting that Asian elephants have been subject to extreme “torture and stabbing” by poachers and tourism industry agents.
Human-elephant clashes are not particularly rare in the Odisha district, and in India more broadly. Due to their sophisticated cognitive abilities, elephants have been known to carry out acts of revenge.
Last month, a 40-year old woman was trampled to death outside her house by an elephant in southern Tamil Nadu state’s Nilgiris district.
A few months prior, in March, a wild elephant attacked a woman in the forest of central Chhattisgarh state’s Bilaspur district. The elderly woman died in the incident, but her 8-year-old grandson, who was injured while trying to run away, survived.
Elephants are not only “cultural icons” throughout Asia — as described by the World WildLife Fund — they also play a critical role in the ecosystem, helping maintain the integrity of forests and grasslands.
Producing roughly 220 pounds of dung per day, they help spread germinating seeds, a process important for maintaining plant populations.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/el ... 04870.html
Jane Nam
Fri, June 17, 2022, 7:18 PM
An elephant in India made headlines for not only killing a woman, but for crashing her funeral to trample her corpse as well.
On June 10, onlookers were horrified to see the same elephant that had attacked and killed 70-year-old Maya Murmu, which grabbed her dead body from the pyre before trampling on it. The giant threw her body once more before leaving the site of the funeral.
Murmu had been fetching water in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district in India when she was attacked.
The elephant had reportedly wandered off from its home in Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary before encountering the elderly woman.
More from NextShark: Over 100,000 People Sign Petition to Investigate Teen Shot 7 Times By Police While Surrendering
Despite being rushed to a hospital after the attack, Murmu died from her injuries, according to Rasgovindpur police station inspector Lopamudra Nayak.
Though elephants are typically gentle, majestic beasts known for their stellar memory, they can be dangerous to people when threatened, provoked or abused. Conservation charity founder and lawyer Duncan McNair made a comment to Newsweek that “endangered elephants can be deadly dangerous” when attacked, also noting that Asian elephants have been subject to extreme “torture and stabbing” by poachers and tourism industry agents.
Human-elephant clashes are not particularly rare in the Odisha district, and in India more broadly. Due to their sophisticated cognitive abilities, elephants have been known to carry out acts of revenge.
Last month, a 40-year old woman was trampled to death outside her house by an elephant in southern Tamil Nadu state’s Nilgiris district.
A few months prior, in March, a wild elephant attacked a woman in the forest of central Chhattisgarh state’s Bilaspur district. The elderly woman died in the incident, but her 8-year-old grandson, who was injured while trying to run away, survived.
Elephants are not only “cultural icons” throughout Asia — as described by the World WildLife Fund — they also play a critical role in the ecosystem, helping maintain the integrity of forests and grasslands.
Producing roughly 220 pounds of dung per day, they help spread germinating seeds, a process important for maintaining plant populations.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/el ... 04870.html
How Animals See Themselves
By Ed Yong
Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of “An Immense World.”
Spectacle floods into my eyes whenever I watch a wildlife documentary. A vortex of small fish is gradually picked off by waves of oceanic predators. Snakes chase after marine iguanas. Giraffes clash at sunset.
While the nature shows I grew up with were more like didactic lectures, their modern counterparts — all of which seem to have the word “Planet” in the title — have the bombast of summer blockbusters. Technological advances are partly responsible. Wild creatures are difficult to film, and when footage is fleeting and scarce, narration must provide the intrigue and flair that the visuals lack. But new generations of sophisticated cameras can swoop alongside running cheetahs at ground level, zoom in on bears cavorting on inaccessible mountainsides and capture intimate close-ups of everything from wasps to whales. Shots can now linger. Nature documentaries can be cinematic.
But in the process, they have also shoved the square peg of animal life into the round hole of human narratives. When animals become easier to film, it is no longer enough to simply film them; they must have stories. They must struggle and overcome. They must have quests, conflicts, even character arcs. An elephant family searches for water amid a drought. A lonely sloth swims in search of a mate. A cheeky penguin steals rocks from a rival’s nest.
Nature shows have always prized the dramatic: David Attenborough himself once told me, after filming a series on reptiles and amphibians, frogs “really don’t do very much until they breed, and snakes don’t do very much until they kill.” Such thinking has now become all-consuming, and nature’s dramas have become melodramas. The result is a subtle form of anthropomorphism, in which animals are of interest only if they satisfy familiar human tropes of violence, sex, companionship and perseverance. They’re worth viewing only when we’re secretly viewing a reflection of ourselves.
We could, instead, try to view them through their own eyes. In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.
The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.
While walking my dog, I see a mockingbird perched on a lamp post. With eyes on the side of its head, it has close to wraparound vision; while we move into our visual world, birds move through theirs. Their eyes also have four types of color-sensing cells compared to our three, allowing them to see an entire dimension of colors that we cannot; those colors, which are present on their feathers, allow male and female mockingbirds to tell each other apart even though they look the same to us. A mockingbird’s hearing differs from ours, too: It is so fast that when it mimics the songs of other birds, it accurately captures notes that fly by too quickly for our ears to make out.
I watch the mockingbird for about a minute, during which it belts out a few bars and flies off. But what more does it need to do? The baseline condition of its existence is magical. Its simplest acts of seeing, hearing and feeling are spectacular without spectacle.
By thinking about our surroundings through other Umwelten, we gain fresh appreciation not just for our fellow creatures, but also for the world we share with them. Through the nose of an albatross, a flat ocean becomes a rolling odorscape, full of scented mountains and valleys that hint at the presence of food. To the whiskers of a seal, seemingly featureless water roils with turbulent currents left behind by swimming fish — invisible tracks that the seal can follow. To a bee, a plain yellow sunflower has an ultraviolet bull’s-eye at its center, and a distinctive electric field around its petals. To the sensitive eyes of an elephant hawk moth, the night isn’t black, but full of colors.
Even the most familiar of settings can feel newly unfamiliar through the senses of other creatures. I walk my dog — Typo, a corgi — three times a day, passing the same streets and buildings that I’ve seen thousands of times. But though this urban landscape seems boring and stagnant to my eyes, its smellscape is constantly fascinating to Typo’s nose. He sniffs constantly, his nasal anatomy allowing him to continuously draw in odors even while exhaling. He sniffs the individual leaves of emergent springtime plants with utmost delicacy. He sniffs patches of dried urine left behind by the neighborhood dogs — the equivalent of a human scrolling through their social media feed. On every walk, there’ll be at least one moment when Typo grinds to a halt and excitedly explores a patch of sidewalk that looks nondescript but is clearly bursting with enthralling odors. By watching him, I feel less inured to my own life, more aware of the perpetually changing environment around me. Such awareness is a gift, which Typo gives to me daily.
These sensory worlds can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, for nature documentaries to capture (although some, like Netflix’s Night on Earth, make a valiant effort). No special effects can truly convey the wraparound nature of bird vision to the front-facing eyes of a human viewer or translate the wide spectrum of colors visible to a bird into the much narrower set that our eyes can see. Nonvisual senses are even harder for a visual medium to capture. You can play recordings of a whale’s song, but that doesn’t show what it means for whales to hear each other across oceanic distances. You can depict the magnetic field that envelops the planet, but that can’t begin to capture the experience of a robin using that field to fly across a continent.
In his classic 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote that the conscious experiences of other animals are inherently subjective and hard to describe. You could envision yourself with webbing on your arms or insects in your mouth, but you’d still be creating a mental caricature of you as a bat. “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” Nagel wrote. Most bat species perceive the world through sonar, sensing their surroundings by listening for the echoes of their own ultrasonic calls. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task,” Nagel wrote.
Our own senses constrain us, creating a permanent divide between our Umwelt and another animal’s. Technology can help to bridge that chasm, but there will always be a gap. Crossing it requires what the psychologist Alexandra Horowitz calls “an informed imaginative leap.” You cannot be shown what another Umwelt is like; you must work to imagine it.
Watching modern nature documentaries has almost become too easy, as if I am being passively swept away by the torrent of vivid imagery — eyes open, jaw agape, but brain relaxed. By contrast, when I think about other Umwelten, I feel my mind flexing, and the joy of an impossible task nonetheless attempted. In these small acts of empathy, I understand other animals more deeply — not as fuzzy, feathered proxies for my life, but as wondrous and unique entities of their own, and as the keys to grasping the true immensity of the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3
‘An Immense World’ Is a Thrilling Tour of Nonhuman Perception
Book Review
Ed Yong’s book urges readers to break outside their “sensory bubble” to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings.
AN IMMENSE WORLD
How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
By Ed Yong
Illustrated. 449 pages. Random House. $30.
A dolphin that echolocates a human in water can perceive not only the human’s outer shape but also what’s inside, including skeleton and lungs. Tree frog embryos — ensconced inside their unhatched eggs — can detect the vibrations of an attacking predator and release an enzyme from their faces that dissolves the casings that house them, allowing them to exit and escape.
That I found myself surprised at so many moments while reading “An Immense World,” Ed Yong’s new book about animal senses, speaks to his exceptional gifts as a storyteller — though perhaps it also says something regrettable about me. I was marveling at those details because I found them weird; but it turns out, if I try to expand my perspective just a bit, they aren’t so weird after all. One of Yong’s themes is that much of what we think of as “extrasensory” is “simply sensory.” A term like “ultrasound” is “an anthropocentric affectation.” The upper frequency limit for the average human ear may be a measly 20 kilohertz, but most mammals can hear well into the ultrasound range.
Yong offers these facts in a generous spirit, clearly aware that part of what will enthrall readers is discovering just how few of these facts many of us have known. I would have called the book “illuminating,” but Yong made me realize how much bias is baked into an adjective like this; humans, as a species, are “so relentlessly visual” that light for us has “come to symbolize safety, progress, knowledge, hope and good” — and so we have illuminated the planet to make it a more comfortable place for us, while making it less inhabitable for others. Artificial lights have been a fatal attraction for sea turtle hatchlings, migrating songbirds and some insects, steering them toward predators or disorienting them to the point of exhaustion.
Understanding this requires us to stretch the boundaries of our own “unique sensory bubble” in order to glean what we can of how other species experience their surroundings. Yong’s book is funny and elegantly written, mercifully restrained when it comes to jargon, though he does introduce a helpful German word that he uses throughout: Umwelt. It means “environment,” but a little more than a century ago the Baltic German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll used it to refer more specifically to that sensory bubble — an animal’s perceptual world.
The animals in Yong’s book are mostly nonhuman, but scientists are necessarily part of his story too. “A scientist’s explanations about other animals are dictated by the data she collects, which are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses,” Yong writes. The human Umwelt will necessarily shape how we apprehend other Umwelten. “An Immense World” inevitably refers to the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s foundational essay on this struggle, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
But some humans might be more open-minded than others. A number of the sensory biologists Yong meets are perceptually divergent, seeing color differently or having difficulty remembering familiar faces: “Perhaps people who experience the world in ways that are considered atypical,” he writes, “have an intuitive feeling for the limits of typicality.”
Ed Yong, whose new book is “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.”
Credit...Urszula Soltys
“An Immense World” is organized by stimuli and their corresponding senses, beginning with smell and taste and extending to the ability of some animals — birds, bumblebees — to detect Earth’s magnetic field. When it comes to sight, there’s a trade-off between sensitivity and resolution; humans tend to have extraordinary visual acuity during the day but have a much harder time seeing at night, while animals with better night vision don’t register the crisp images at a distance that we do. “Senses always come at a cost,” Yong writes. “No animal can sense everything well.” The world inundates us with stimuli. Registering some of it is taxing enough; fully processing the continuous deluge of it would be overwhelming.
Still, an animal will use the various senses it has at its disposal to make sense of the world around it. A mosquito is attracted to the heat of warm-blooded hosts, but it will only attack if it first smells carbon dioxide — the sensation of heat without carbon dioxide isn’t a meal for a mosquito but a sign of possible danger. A researcher tells Yong that protecting humans from mosquitoes is a complicated undertaking, requiring her to consider multiple senses at once; the tiny insect has “a plan B at every point.”
Exchanges like this are an outlier in the book. Yong isn’t all that interested in the familiar question of how to exploit the senses of animals for human benefit; he wants us to try to understand how animals experience the world so that we can understand how animals experience the world. A mouse’s whiskers are for whisking, allowing it to scan the space around its head; what looks like a fly’s chaotic flight path turns out to reflect the finely attuned thermometers of its antennae, which steer it toward more comfortable temperatures. “Animals are not just stand-ins for humans or fodder for brainstorming sessions,” Yong writes. “They have worth in themselves.”
If there is a benefit to trying to imagine ourselves into the experiences of others, maybe it lies in the enormous difficulty of doing so; the limits of every species’ sensory bubble should serve as a reminder that each one of us has purchase on only a sliver of reality. Yong’s previous book, “I Contain Multitudes,” was an exploration of microbes and microbiomes; his writing for The Atlantic on the Covid-19 pandemic has frequently shown how the response to the crisis has been limited by our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Yong would like us to think more expansively — something that humans are, it turns out, equipped to do.
Thinking expansively would help us realize that nature’s true wonders aren’t limited to a remote wilderness or other sublime landscape — what Yong calls “otherworldly magnificence.” There is as much grandeur in the soil of a backyard garden as there is in the canyons of Zion. Recognizing the breadth of this immense world should spur in us a sense of humility. We just need to get over ourselves first.
Jennifer Szalai is a book critic for The New York Times. She was previously a columnist and editor for the Book Review. Her work has also appeared in Slate, New York, The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine, where she was a senior editor until 2010.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/book ... 778d3e6de3
Ed Yong’s book urges readers to break outside their “sensory bubble” to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings.
AN IMMENSE WORLD
How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
By Ed Yong
Illustrated. 449 pages. Random House. $30.
A dolphin that echolocates a human in water can perceive not only the human’s outer shape but also what’s inside, including skeleton and lungs. Tree frog embryos — ensconced inside their unhatched eggs — can detect the vibrations of an attacking predator and release an enzyme from their faces that dissolves the casings that house them, allowing them to exit and escape.
That I found myself surprised at so many moments while reading “An Immense World,” Ed Yong’s new book about animal senses, speaks to his exceptional gifts as a storyteller — though perhaps it also says something regrettable about me. I was marveling at those details because I found them weird; but it turns out, if I try to expand my perspective just a bit, they aren’t so weird after all. One of Yong’s themes is that much of what we think of as “extrasensory” is “simply sensory.” A term like “ultrasound” is “an anthropocentric affectation.” The upper frequency limit for the average human ear may be a measly 20 kilohertz, but most mammals can hear well into the ultrasound range.
Yong offers these facts in a generous spirit, clearly aware that part of what will enthrall readers is discovering just how few of these facts many of us have known. I would have called the book “illuminating,” but Yong made me realize how much bias is baked into an adjective like this; humans, as a species, are “so relentlessly visual” that light for us has “come to symbolize safety, progress, knowledge, hope and good” — and so we have illuminated the planet to make it a more comfortable place for us, while making it less inhabitable for others. Artificial lights have been a fatal attraction for sea turtle hatchlings, migrating songbirds and some insects, steering them toward predators or disorienting them to the point of exhaustion.
Understanding this requires us to stretch the boundaries of our own “unique sensory bubble” in order to glean what we can of how other species experience their surroundings. Yong’s book is funny and elegantly written, mercifully restrained when it comes to jargon, though he does introduce a helpful German word that he uses throughout: Umwelt. It means “environment,” but a little more than a century ago the Baltic German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll used it to refer more specifically to that sensory bubble — an animal’s perceptual world.
The animals in Yong’s book are mostly nonhuman, but scientists are necessarily part of his story too. “A scientist’s explanations about other animals are dictated by the data she collects, which are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses,” Yong writes. The human Umwelt will necessarily shape how we apprehend other Umwelten. “An Immense World” inevitably refers to the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s foundational essay on this struggle, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
But some humans might be more open-minded than others. A number of the sensory biologists Yong meets are perceptually divergent, seeing color differently or having difficulty remembering familiar faces: “Perhaps people who experience the world in ways that are considered atypical,” he writes, “have an intuitive feeling for the limits of typicality.”
Ed Yong, whose new book is “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.”
Credit...Urszula Soltys
“An Immense World” is organized by stimuli and their corresponding senses, beginning with smell and taste and extending to the ability of some animals — birds, bumblebees — to detect Earth’s magnetic field. When it comes to sight, there’s a trade-off between sensitivity and resolution; humans tend to have extraordinary visual acuity during the day but have a much harder time seeing at night, while animals with better night vision don’t register the crisp images at a distance that we do. “Senses always come at a cost,” Yong writes. “No animal can sense everything well.” The world inundates us with stimuli. Registering some of it is taxing enough; fully processing the continuous deluge of it would be overwhelming.
Still, an animal will use the various senses it has at its disposal to make sense of the world around it. A mosquito is attracted to the heat of warm-blooded hosts, but it will only attack if it first smells carbon dioxide — the sensation of heat without carbon dioxide isn’t a meal for a mosquito but a sign of possible danger. A researcher tells Yong that protecting humans from mosquitoes is a complicated undertaking, requiring her to consider multiple senses at once; the tiny insect has “a plan B at every point.”
Exchanges like this are an outlier in the book. Yong isn’t all that interested in the familiar question of how to exploit the senses of animals for human benefit; he wants us to try to understand how animals experience the world so that we can understand how animals experience the world. A mouse’s whiskers are for whisking, allowing it to scan the space around its head; what looks like a fly’s chaotic flight path turns out to reflect the finely attuned thermometers of its antennae, which steer it toward more comfortable temperatures. “Animals are not just stand-ins for humans or fodder for brainstorming sessions,” Yong writes. “They have worth in themselves.”
If there is a benefit to trying to imagine ourselves into the experiences of others, maybe it lies in the enormous difficulty of doing so; the limits of every species’ sensory bubble should serve as a reminder that each one of us has purchase on only a sliver of reality. Yong’s previous book, “I Contain Multitudes,” was an exploration of microbes and microbiomes; his writing for The Atlantic on the Covid-19 pandemic has frequently shown how the response to the crisis has been limited by our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Yong would like us to think more expansively — something that humans are, it turns out, equipped to do.
Thinking expansively would help us realize that nature’s true wonders aren’t limited to a remote wilderness or other sublime landscape — what Yong calls “otherworldly magnificence.” There is as much grandeur in the soil of a backyard garden as there is in the canyons of Zion. Recognizing the breadth of this immense world should spur in us a sense of humility. We just need to get over ourselves first.
Jennifer Szalai is a book critic for The New York Times. She was previously a columnist and editor for the Book Review. Her work has also appeared in Slate, New York, The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine, where she was a senior editor until 2010.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/book ... 778d3e6de3
Re: pets
BBC
Pakistan goat: Long-eared kid becomes star
Leo Sands - BBC News
Thu, July 7, 2022 at 10:22 AM
Image shows goat with long ears being held up
Simba's ears being held up by his proud owner - Pakistani goat breeder Mohammad Hasan Narejo
Everyone has heard of Dumbo: the cartoon elephant whose ears were so huge he was ridiculed by his peers and forced to perform cruel circus stunts.
He is no longer the only animal to achieve fame for sporting lengthy lugs.
Meet Simba - the kid goat from Karachi, Pakistan whose two ears measure 54cm (21in) each.
And times appear to have changed. Instead of ridicule, he has become a global star: winning beauty contests and living out a pampered existence.
Simba's breeder, Mohammad Hasan Narejo, told AFP news agency that he had even approached the Guinness World Records to register the animal as the world's "Greatest of All Time" goat.
No category currently appears to exist for "longest-eared goat," so it is unclear whether Simba's ears are indeed record-breaking.
Longest in the world or not, the kid goat has already become a social media celebrity in Pakistan after pictures of his striking ears began to circulate.
But as well as propelling Simba to stardom, being born with such lengthy features presents unique challenges of its own.
Image shows goat with long ears running
Sometimes Simba trips on his own ears, forcing his owner to be creative with solutions
For instance, the fact that they are a trip hazard. To prevent an accident, Mr Narejo has resorted to folding Simba's ears around his back, and he has also designed a wearable harness to do the same job.
Another fear is rival breeders, whose unwanted attention is a source of concern for Mr Narejo. He has turned to prayer and traditional rites to stave off any potential ill-will from others.
"We recite Koranic verses and blow on him to cast away the evil eye," he told AFP.
Ultimately, however, his plans are more ambitious. He wants to raise Simba to promote Pakistan's image as a world-leader in goat breeding.
"Simba's Pakistan name must roam the whole world."
Image shows goat with long ears being held up
Simba's ears continue to grow, including by a further 6cm (2.4in) in the past three weeks
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/pa ... 51971.html
Pakistan goat: Long-eared kid becomes star
Leo Sands - BBC News
Thu, July 7, 2022 at 10:22 AM
Image shows goat with long ears being held up
Simba's ears being held up by his proud owner - Pakistani goat breeder Mohammad Hasan Narejo
Everyone has heard of Dumbo: the cartoon elephant whose ears were so huge he was ridiculed by his peers and forced to perform cruel circus stunts.
He is no longer the only animal to achieve fame for sporting lengthy lugs.
Meet Simba - the kid goat from Karachi, Pakistan whose two ears measure 54cm (21in) each.
And times appear to have changed. Instead of ridicule, he has become a global star: winning beauty contests and living out a pampered existence.
Simba's breeder, Mohammad Hasan Narejo, told AFP news agency that he had even approached the Guinness World Records to register the animal as the world's "Greatest of All Time" goat.
No category currently appears to exist for "longest-eared goat," so it is unclear whether Simba's ears are indeed record-breaking.
Longest in the world or not, the kid goat has already become a social media celebrity in Pakistan after pictures of his striking ears began to circulate.
But as well as propelling Simba to stardom, being born with such lengthy features presents unique challenges of its own.
Image shows goat with long ears running
Sometimes Simba trips on his own ears, forcing his owner to be creative with solutions
For instance, the fact that they are a trip hazard. To prevent an accident, Mr Narejo has resorted to folding Simba's ears around his back, and he has also designed a wearable harness to do the same job.
Another fear is rival breeders, whose unwanted attention is a source of concern for Mr Narejo. He has turned to prayer and traditional rites to stave off any potential ill-will from others.
"We recite Koranic verses and blow on him to cast away the evil eye," he told AFP.
Ultimately, however, his plans are more ambitious. He wants to raise Simba to promote Pakistan's image as a world-leader in goat breeding.
"Simba's Pakistan name must roam the whole world."
Image shows goat with long ears being held up
Simba's ears continue to grow, including by a further 6cm (2.4in) in the past three weeks
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/pa ... 51971.html
