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Posted by: WesternWomen
« on: November 11, 2023, 03:47:42 pm »

Posted by: le pen
« on: September 22, 2023, 07:28:06 pm »

https://news.sky.com/story/pack-of-crocodiles-save-dog-stranded-in-river-instead-of-eating-it-12967211

Crocodiles save dog stranded in river instead of eating it - in possible case of 'emotional empathy'

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The giant reptiles have a reputation for being "opportunistic predators" - but chose to nudge the dog to safety, in what scientists say may be "sentient behaviour suggestive of cross-species empathy".

A report published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa outlines how a young dog was observed being chased by a pack of feral dogs and entered the shallow waters of the Savitri River, in India's Maharashtra.

The dog had not spotted the three mugger crocodiles floating nearby, which began edging closer to what appeared to be certain prey.

The adult reptiles - described by the Wildlife Institute of India as "opportunistic predators" - instead pushed the dog to safety using their snouts.

They even guided him to an area of the riverbank that wasn't occupied by the feral pack, allowing the dog to make a safe escape on land.

It was an action the journal said may have been down to "sentient behaviour suggestive of cross-species empathy".

The "curious" incident was uncharacteristic of the crocodiles.

capacity of one species to experience the emotional feelings of another species merits recognition.



Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: August 13, 2023, 09:30:38 pm »

Crocodiles >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> humans:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/crocodiles-were-played-sound-human-090031238.html

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Nile crocodiles were found to react to the cries of baby bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans — and they appear to be able to detect degrees of distress, research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Royal Society's main biological-research journal, found.

Researchers played the crocodiles audio recordings of infants crying and discovered they were drawn to those that seemed the most distressed.
...
The researchers compared the findings to another study in which researchers played the same cries for a group of humans. The study found that humans and crocodiles use different criteria to judge distress in other species and that humans' judgment tends to be less accurate.

While humans primarily responded to the pitch of the cries, crocodiles responded based on levels of "deterministic chaos, harmonicity, and spectral prominences."

The authors noted that crocodiles could recognize the distress levels of species very distantly related to them.

This is consistent with my theory that language use reduces empathy.
Posted by: $@#! Lawn mower!
« on: March 11, 2023, 05:17:42 pm »

What Plants Are Saying About Us
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Your brain is not the root of cognition.
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...
“Who knew plants do stuff?” I marveled. Suddenly plants seemed more interesting. When the pandemic hit, I brought more of them home, just to add some life to the place, and then there were more, and more still, until the ratio of plants to household surfaces bordered on deranged. Bushwhacking through my apartment, I worried whether the plants were getting enough water, or too much water, or the right kind of light—or, in the case of a giant carnivorous pitcher plant hanging from the ceiling, whether I was leaving enough fish food in its traps. But what never occurred to me, not even once, was to wonder what the plants were thinking.
...
To understand how human minds work, he started with plants.

I was, according to Paco Calvo, guilty of “plant blindness.” Calvo, who runs the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain where he studies plant behavior, says that to be plant blind is to fail to see plants for what they really are: cognitive organisms endowed with memories, perceptions, and feelings, capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future, able to sense and experience the world.

It’s easy to dismiss such claims because they fly in the face of our leading theory of cognitive science. That theory goes by names like “cognitivism,” “computationalism,” or “representational theory of mind.” It says, in short, the mind is in the head. Cognition boils down to the firings of neurons in our brains.

And plants don’t have brains.

“When I open up a plant, where could intelligence reside?” Calvo says. “That’s framing the problem from the wrong perspective. Maybe that’s not how our intelligence works, either. Maybe it’s not in our heads. If the stuff that plants do deserves the label ‘cognitive,’ then so be it. Let’s rethink our whole theoretical framework.”
...
But Calvo wasn’t convinced. Computers are good at logic, at carrying out long, precise calculations—not exactly humanity’s shining skill. Humans are good at something else: noticing patterns, intuiting, functioning in the face of ambiguity, error, and noise. While a computer’s reasoning is only as good as the data you feed it, a human can intuit a lot from just a few vague hints—a skill that surely helped on the savannah when we had to recognize a tiger hiding in the bushes from just a few broken stripes. “My hunch was that there was something really wrong, something deeply distorted about the very idea that cognition had to do with manipulating symbols or following rules,” Calvo says.
...
Plants can distinguish self from non-self, stranger from kin.
Plants’ abilities to sense and respond to their surroundings lead to what seems like intelligent behavior. Their roots can avoid obstacles. They can distinguish self from non-self, stranger from kin. If a plant finds itself in a crowd, it will invest resources in vertical growth to remain in light; if nutrients are on the decline, it will opt for root expansion instead. Leaves munched on by insects send electrochemical signals to warn the rest of the foliage,2 and they’re quicker to react to threats if they’ve encountered them in the past. Plants chat among themselves and with other species. They release volatile organic compounds with a lexicon, Calvo says, of more than 1,700 “words”—allowing them to shout things that a human might translate as “caterpillar incoming” or “*$@#, lawn mower!”

Their behavior isn’t merely reactive—plants anticipate, too. They can turn their leaves in the direction of the sun before it rises, and accurately trace its location in the sky even when they’re kept in the dark. They can predict, based on prior experience, when pollinators are most likely to show up and time their pollen production accordingly. A plant’s form is a record of its history. Its cells—shaped by experience—remember.

Chat? Anticipate? Remember? It’s tempting to tame all those words with scare quotes, as if they can’t mean for plants what they mean for us. For plants, we say, it’s biochemistry, just physiology and brute mechanics—as if that’s not true for us, too.

Besides, Calvo says, plant behavior can’t be reduced to mere reflexes. Plants don’t react to stimuli in predetermined ways—they’d never have made it this far, evolutionarily speaking, if they did. Having to deal with a changing environment while being rooted to one spot means having to set priorities, strike compromises, change course on the fly...
Entire article: https://nautil.us/what-plants-are-saying-about-us-264593/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Posted by: Guess88
« on: October 24, 2022, 09:26:34 pm »

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Freeganism is just another term for scavenging

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Predation is part of canine food procurement but dogs are mostly scavengers by nature. Long dead, rotting, putrefied and, of course, revolting carrion has always been the fast food of canine cuisine. An abundance of nutritious dog food in your home can't trump instinct.
https://www.abqjournal.com/789269/dogs-are-natural-scavengers-food-seekers.html



Good chance that if you enjoy Vodka 'nobility' is lost upon your essence for all of time and your true spirit is just Turanian! :) (Although, the same cannot be said for all potato consumers obviously!).
Posted by: guest78
« on: July 13, 2022, 12:53:16 pm »

Consider the octopus
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Octopuses are smart in ways humans are only beginning to understand – just as companies are about to farm ranching them for food on a much larger scale
Entire article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-octopus-eating-meat-ethics/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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The octopus has already challenged our theories on evolution, intelligence and consciousness. It has proven itself smarter, more playful, more feeling than we ever imagined. You can devote decades to studying how and where the octopus lives and, as Dr. Mather will attest, still be surprised by what you learn.

Here is a creature, marvellously cunning and elegant, living in a space so vast and deep, so foreign to human experience, that we still mostly peer into the dark and wonder. Surely, such a creature is worthy of careful consideration?

“Yes, yes!” Dr. Mather says. “A thousand times, yes.”

And yet, no. We have plowed ahead, trying to tame the wildness of the octopus for our own ends. In many countries, including the United States (though not Canada, thanks to a small, prescient committee, including Dr. Mather, who advocated early for its welfare), the octopus can be used in experiments without standards and procedures to ensure its care. A Spanish company is pushing forward with plans to open the first commercial octopus farm in the Canary Islands; research continues apace in places such as Japan and Mexico to raise and domesticate the animal for profit.
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Never mind that a loud and angry chorus of scientists, environmentalists and philosophers say that octopus farming ranching can’t ethically – or humanely – be done. Last November, a London School of Economics study, funded by the British government, concluded that “high-welfare octopus farming is impossible.” A campaign to stop octopus farming continues in the European Union. Animal-welfare advocates in countries such as Britain and Canada are calling for a pre-emptive ban on the import of farmed octopus, to close the market doors before they open.
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This was another example of us failing, yet again, to adopt the precautionary principle, to put the interests of an animal above our own, to avoid causing harm to a life we don’t fully understand.

The existence of the octopus makes you think differently, not just about eating and farming ranching animals, but our relationship to them, our assumptions about them, and what this all says about us, the humans, languishing so pridefully on our animal kingdom throne.
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Much like Abbott and Costello, what we learn from the octopus, our resident earthly alien, is really a warning to change our ways.
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Humans have a long-standing bias for “cuddlies,” to use Dr. Mather’s nomenclature. We see furry mammals as smarter and cuter than slimy sea creatures, feel more morally responsible for their care, and apply more rules to their welfare. This doesn’t stop us from eating the cuddlies, of course. Or ignoring the fact that the pork chops and chicken drumsticks we buy in the grocery store begin with animals raised in often terrible conditions – a self-serving myopia that psychologists call the “meat paradox.”

But pretending that juicy steak wasn’t once a doe-eyed cow is, for many of us, a tolerable mind game. You’d probably be horrified, however, to boil a rabbit alive on the kitchen stove, the way we do lobsters. Or turn a pig inside out to kill it, which is how fished octopuses are sometimes dispatched.

That’s because, despite growing evidence to the contrary, it’s been convenient to assume that aquatic invertebrates aren’t sentient – that they don’t feel. An animal that doesn’t feel can’t experience pain. It doesn’t care if you hang it in the air and let it suffocate – another way that octopuses are sometimes killed. To paraphrase Kristin Andrews, a philosophy professor at York University and York Research Chair in Animal Minds, feelings in animals make the moral world more complicated.
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: June 22, 2022, 08:51:40 pm »

Rittenhouse reasoning strikes again:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hunters-shoot-kill-grizzly-bear-173138614.html

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Hunters shoot, kill grizzly bear. Idaho Fish and Game says it was in self-defense
...
Hunters in North Idaho shot and killed a grizzly bear earlier this month in self-defense, according to an Idaho Department of Fish and Game news release.

Fish and Game said the hunters were pursuing black bears in the Ruby Creek area southwest of Bonners Ferry on June 8. The hunters shot a black bear and were retrieving it when a grizzly came out of the brush nearby.

The hunters reportedly backed away from the bear and yelled at it, but it continued approaching them. One of the hunters then shot the bear at close range, killing it.
Afterward, one of the hunters called Boundary County emergency dispatch to report the incident. An ensuing Fish and Game investigation found the hunters acted in self-defense.
Posted by: guest55
« on: September 18, 2021, 12:58:58 pm »

What animals think of death
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Having a concept of death, far from being a uniquely human feat, is a fairly common trait in the animal kingdom
https://aeon.co/essays/animals-wrestle-with-the-concept-of-death-and-mortality?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Posted by: guest55
« on: August 31, 2021, 09:36:06 pm »

What Slime Knows
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There is no hierarchy in the web of life
https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-slime-knows/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Posted by: guest55
« on: August 26, 2021, 02:17:19 pm »

Another Westerner obsessed with intelligence and "big brains". Go figure....

Smartest Fish on Earth, Mormyridae, Seem To Talk Just Like Us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI6hGYFiIk4

"Oh look, that fish is somewhat like us, it must be a little special then?".
Posted by: guest55
« on: August 12, 2021, 08:33:14 pm »

Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?
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Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.
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The intelligence of corvids like ravens and crows is well known. Recently, crows were even shown to have a numerical ability seen in few other species so far: a grasp of the concept of the empty set — the numerosity zero.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/animals-can-count-and-use-zero-how-far-does-their-number-sense-go-20210809/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

So, Crows do sit in trees watching humans saying among themselves: "Yip, see that one over there? Just another zero....".  ;)

Posted by: guest55
« on: July 29, 2021, 10:44:05 pm »

Plants Feel Pain and Might Even See
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It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things.

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In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der Welt (published in English as The Life of Plants). I was happy to say yes.

The German title of Coccia’s book translates as “The Roots of the World,” and the book really does cover this. It upends our view of the living world, putting plants at the top of the hierarchy with humans down at the bottom. I had been giving a great deal of thought to this myself. Ranking the natural world and scoring species according to their importance or their superiority seemed to me outdated. It distorts our view of nature and makes all the other species around us seem more primitive and somehow unfinished. For some time now, I have not been comfortable with viewing humans as the crown of creation, separating animals into higher and lower life-forms, and treating plants as something on the side, definitively banished to a lower level.
Entire article: https://nautil.us/issue/104/harmony/plants-feel-pain-and-might-even-see?utm_source=pocket-newtab

See also: https://trueleft.createaforum.com/ancient-world/antropocentricism-the-most-dangerous-ideology-in-the-world/

If human-beings have proven anything since hunter-gatherers perverted the Neolithic Revolution it is the fact that they belong at the bottom!
Posted by: guest55
« on: July 25, 2021, 11:12:32 am »

The Human Neocortex Isn’t as Special as We Thought
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxPQ9bFfEP0

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9Tensai9
2 days ago (edited)
Humans: Ah yes, our neocortex. THIS, this is what makes humans so great and unique!!
*Humans discover that the neocortex isn't special at all*
Ah yes, the crebellum. So filled with neurons. THIS, this is what makes us humans so great and unique!!
Posted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: June 21, 2021, 10:31:59 pm »

Anthropocentrism also corrupts Gnosticism:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tiny-minority-iraqis-follows-ancient-121827458.html

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the Mandaeans. Also called Sabians, they are followers of the last Gnostic religion to survive continuously from ancient times down to the present day.

Gnostic religions view the material world as the product of a mistake in the heavenly realm, the creation of one or more inferior divine beings rather than the supreme God. Gnosticism also emphasizes that human beings can become aware of this and prepare their souls to escape from under the influence of the malevolent spiritual forces that created and rule this realm, so that when they die they can ascend to the good realm that lies beyond them.

If you truly believe the material world is evil, how can you exclude non-humans from escaping? If you believe the Demiurge created the material world in order to allow humans to enjoy oppressing non-humans, either you accept the Demiurge's plan and hence do not seek to escape at all, or reject the Demiurge's plan and hence understand that non-humans also need to escape. These are the only two intellectually consistent positions (though only the latter is ethical). But to want to escape yet then think that escaping is for humans only doesn't even make sense.
Posted by: rp
« on: May 22, 2021, 04:56:34 am »

Thiruvalluvar day: Chennai Corporation announces ban on meat sale on Jan 15

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/thiruvalluvar-day-chennai-corporation-announces-ban-on-meat-sale-on-jan-15/articleshow/56480641.cms
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CHENNAI: The Greater Chennai Corporation has announced a ban on sale of meat, including processed meat, on January 15, on account of Thiruvalluvar day.

In a statement on Wednesday, the local body said slaughterhouses operated by the corporation's health department at Pulianthope, Villivakam and Saidapet would not function on Sunday.

The corporation added that the ban on meat sale would extend to supermarkets and commercial complexes retailing processed meat.

Background on Thiruvalluvar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiruvalluvar#Religion

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Valluvar is generally thought to have belonged to either Jainism or Hinduism.[54][55][56] Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism were the three religions that flourished in the Indian subcontinent during the time of Valluvar.[57] Early 19th-century writers proposed that Valluvar may have been a Jain. The 1819 translation by Francis Whyte Ellis mentions that the Tamil community debates whether Valluvar was a Jain or Hindu.[58] If Valluvar was indeed a Jain, it raises questions about the source of the traditional Valluvar legends and the mainstream colonial debate about his birth.[58]

Kamil Zvelebil believes that the ethics of the Tirukkuṟaḷ reflects the Jain moral code, particularly moral vegetarianism (couplets 251–260), and ahimsa, that is, "abstention from killing" (couplets 321–333). Zvelebil states that the text contains epithets for God that reflect Jain ideology:[59]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism#Historical_background

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According to the famous Tamil classic, Tirukkuṛaḷ, which is also considered a Jain work by some scholars:

If the world did not purchase and consume meat, no one would slaughter and offer meat for sale. (Kural 256)[68]
(The line in bold is a good rebuttal to the "Buddhist" mentioned in the previous post)

But unfortunately, the very next year:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/chennai-corporation-seizes-431-meat-on-thiruvalluvar-day/articleshow/62524600.cms
Chennai Corporation seizes 431 meat on Thiruvalluvar Day
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CHENNAI: The Greater Chennai Corporation on Monday seized meat from vendors who had illegally sold the item despite a prohibitory order issued by the civic body. The city corporation prohibited sale and processing of meat on Monday, January 15, on account of Thiruvalluvar Day.

Sigh....

As they say, you can lead a non-Aryan to the water...:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/uneducable-gentiles/msg6550/#msg6550
(Also the meat sellers don't have an excuse of "not letting the food go to waste" as they were already made aware of the restriction the previous year. Therefore the onus is on them to adjust their supply accordingly. What do you think?)

Speaking of which, I have seen many secular-humanist types in the Dravidian-speaking states who purport to be anti-casteist (rightfully) herald Thiruvalluvar as an anti-Vedic poet and as an icon for Dravidian peoples. But when it comes to actually following his teachings, particularly in regards to meat-eating, these people go silent, instead advocating eating beef to "oppose" Brahmanism. If they really were intent on fighting Brahmanism for its double standard on beef-eating, why not embrace the anti-Brahmanic vegetarianism of the Jain Thiruvalluvar? Goes to show that these non-Aryans are probably not even intent on fighting Brahmanism in the first place.

These are the same degenerates who probably would have sided with the Vedics back in the day! All they would have had to do was give up beef-eating (while still eating other meats), and they could ascend in the Vedic hierarchy. It would have fit perfectly with their prior lifestyle, and indeed would have been an improvement to them insofar as they would have found the Aryan Suryavanshi worldview too restrictive.