- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.
Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.
Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.”
Veronika is far from making even misshapen tools, but her prowess in using them has impressed nonetheless. Over seven sessions of 10 trials, the researchers witnessed 76 instances of tool use as she grabbed the broom to scratch otherwise unreachable regions. Using both ends of the brush counts as multi-purpose tool use, the scientists say, which is extraordinarily rare. Beyond humans, it has only been shown convincingly in chimpanzees.
Any other case where you cause unnecessary harm to someone while “respecting” them? And if so, then what’s that respect worth?
Unnecessary harm means housing hundreds or thousands of animals and birds in massive barns without access to the outside environment. It’s no different than having pets, where you care for them, feed them and take them for walks. It doesn’t mean you can never kill them for food if needed.
That’s what respect means.
That’s the point, we don’t need to kill them for food, which makes it unnecesary harm.
I disagree but to each their own.
How do you “disagree”? We can disagree with opinions but weather or not humans need to eat animals to be healthy is a fact.
you don’t know what anyone else needs
I do actually. We need nutrients to survive, all of which can be obtained without hurting animals.
people need more than nutrients.
For example?
So you can’t even name one thing? Dork.
Are the hundreds of millions of people who live without eating animals secretly reptiloid, or how do you make sense of that?
We don’t need to kill plants for food either.
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In that case you are either on the defending side, in which case the harm is not unnecessary or you are on the attacking side, which I can see no respect in.
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I really don’t understand the argument of saying plants are sentient in some way because they emit chemicals when harmed or recoil. My knee jumps up if I tap it with a hammer, my brain pulls my hand away from a hot stove before I can even register any pain, neither of those are “sentient” actions, that’s just how the cells respond to stimulus, and that automatic response is because of natural selection, not sentient choices or sensations. It’s like saying an auto-closing door is sentient and we ought not try to open it because whenever you try to open it it closes itself, so it “dislikes” being open.
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I can’t read this as anything but solipsism or maybe good old-fashioned intellectual dishonesty. We know that animals are capable of pain and suffering and we know that plants lack the prerequisites like a nervous system, as well as any evolutionary benefit of pain, because they cannot remove themselves from danger.
The position that causing pain or not causing pain is equal is just morally bankrupt.
Oh and even if killing an animal vs. killing a plant was morally analogous, it would still be better to eat the plants directly, since many more plants are harvested to raise a single animal than it would take to feed a human.
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cows mostly graze, but they’re also fed things like corncobs and stalks. people can’t eat those.
Weather that is true or not aside: The point was that the other person doesn’t see a moral difference between cutting a pigs neck open or plucking an apple from a tree.
most people don’t