Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

I do agree that animal "factories" are wrong. I think we disagree only on a minor point: I think that it's not wrong for humans to domesticate and "grow" animals if they do it in a "humane" (I don't know a better word here) way where the animals do not suffer and have ways to enjoy their lives, whatever that may be, while I believe you're saying that's also wrong and only hunting wild animals is acceptable?

We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators.

I don't know... you may see that in an environment heavily modified by humans, like National Parks or zoos... but in really wild environments, there would be a healthy population of predators that "control" the population of those animals they hunt, so it seems it's almost inevitable that if you're prey, in a real wild environment, you would need to be on your toes absolutely all the time. This is what I've observed from the little interactions I had with really wild environments.

Do you think that two angry humans killing each other over a conflict is the same thing as industrial scale genocide with labor camps?

That's a weird questions to ask, I don't see any relation whatsoever with what is being discussed.

If you think we are raping cows when they are artificially inseminated, I hope you are equally horrified by natural animal sex. Everything from penis spines to traumatic insemination, to dolphin rape gangs, and worse exist in animal sex. And the there is oven nothing resembing consent asked or given. Its humans and bonaboo and thats pretty much it that who do it nicely most of the time.

Nature is adaptation for survival. I think you're mixing up "the old ways" with "naturally beneficial ways". Your chances of survival and reproduction are much higher with access to modern toilets, delayed gratification, no unnecessary violence, and due to society asking for consent. It's perfectly natural.

You misunderstand what "natural" means. Nature doesn't care at all about those things. But as a social species, we evolved some "rules" which ensure our survival. In that sense, some of our morality has roots in nature and evolution.

So I don't agree at all that by not using violence all the time we're going against our nature.

But in the case of food, I believe we are, because evidently we require certain substances to survive, and one of the best ways to get those is to eat meat. In most regions where humans live today, without meat or foods imported from faraway regions, we couldn't survive.

Not really, farming is a clever hack that we only learned in the last ~12,000 years [1]

The evidence is that most of our existence we hunted and gathered nomadically.

[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/developmen...

Hey, good for you for asking this question despite being on the animal rights side. I wish I could say something useful as an answer. I could snipe at Jeremy Bentham for kicking it off in 1780 with shoddy reasoning: not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? he says, but this is really a side effect of an argument against slavery and contains no discussion of why reducing suffering is desirable, and he was also responsible for utilitarianism, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number", a fundamentally awkward fundamental axiom - and happiness isn't even identical with the things we tend to think are right - and then you have the problem of animals causing suffering to other animals routinely. But I can only agree that it's a good question.

Because what stands in the center of it is empathy, which is not a human only thing

Yes. This doesn't mean that morality is subjective and divorced from reality, mind you. It just means that trying to hone an objective theory of morality will make you unpopular.

What is the upside?

Generally true, although some species need way more attention than others. And 'way more' can often mean full time attention whenever they aren't sleeping.

I had an Amazon parrot that needed less attention than an African Gray or a Cockatoo.

I'd still not recommend as a pet given that their lifespans are so long. It's a decades long commitment and they may even outlast you, in which case you need to figure out what's going to happen to them.

Are you talking about the parrots?

as a parrot owner (blue fronted amazon), that's true, it's like having a child, like, really, it's not hyperbolic unlike dog/cat owners.

A friend of mine's mother used to keep parrots, and I remember the biggest and oldest one well (an African grey). I still remember the playful "clip!" sound it would make as I walked past the cage, and it would lean towards me, trying to take a chunk out of me.

Leading to something a bit like this, then? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31XFe2g98RU

Just wait until the stochastic parrots discover YouTube…

YouTube optimizing for toddlers and parrots makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it...

And that's to say nothing of the parrot ad click farms.

and the metrics start catering to them

"in order to access this functionality, you must first chew through the charging cable"

Remember, our predecessors did not pal around with apes. They paled around with the ancestors of apes.

Well, if they meant homo sapiens vs neanderthals, we have both skull sizes and genetic evidence suggesting that their brains were as capable as ours. We also have enough archeological sites of both early homo sapiens and neanderthals to have a decent understanding of the social structures we had. So it is possible to draw conclusions, even if it is never with 100% certainty.

Also, the debunking likely refers to the really old progressivist idea that any species that went extinct must have done so because it was inherently "inferior", instead of less well adapted to whatever changes the environment threw at them.

Either way, from what I understand the most recent well-supported theories of what caused neanderthal extinction is that their basal metabolic rate was so much higher compared to ours (due to adaptations to the ice age), that this simple caloric difference gave their body plan a long-term disadvantage over ours after the ice age ended[0].

And when I say "body plan" I refer to the part where apparently early humans and Neanderthals interbred so often that about 20% of Neanderthal DNA is still present in the modern human gene pool, and most humans have about 1 to 4% neanderthal DNA[1]. Similarly DNA from homo sapiens has also been found in neanderthal remains[2].

So were kind of reaching this point where Neanderthals and Denovisans seem to not quite match the definition that most people use when they say "different species". Our ancestors interbred a lot, and the genes that were advantageous stuck around. At that point using the word "extinction" without caveats becomes a bit misleading I think.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6d3uHSFxkM

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2FatwFjc-8

You are going beyond the constraints, “if our communication with a 7-year-old child were limited to the level we achieve with crows.”

We know we are able to teach children language because we have shared modes of communication through which we can observe their learning; speaking, writing, hand gestures.

You do not need to share a language to teach a language

True, but I would argue that you need to share a mutually intelligible mode of communication.

How would you teach (and know that they have understood it correctly) the concept of monetary denominations to a 7-year old child if you were limited to communicating on the level you can with a crow? I have no idea, and would probably give up. But this does not necessarily tell us anything about the intelligence or capacity for learning language in the child, it tells us only of the gap in communication that we cannot bridge.

so animals at least doesn’t have the same level of language intelligence as humans do.

This does not necessarily follow. What follows is that humans are not able to teach animals human language on the same level as they are able to teach humans.

We’ve not been able to reach any animal language at a four year old level that they can speak but I think we have taught animals language at a level that they are able to understand? Though I guess we can’t necessarily prove that understanding.

No. I am pointing out how being unable to communicate makes it very hard to determine intelligence. It is hard to determine if another human is smart without being able to speak the same language or explain the procedure and contents of the test.

Given that there is no known means to effectively communicate with animals, we are restricted to tests that do not demand shared communication to identify intelligence. These tests must be benchmarked on mutually unintelligible humans.

For instance, a grade school Chinese exam might be a good way of gauging the intelligence of Chinese children, but is a terrible way of gauging the intelligence of French children. Such a test is lousy in certain domains. We must be cognizant of such testing methodology limits in the design of animal intelligence tests.

tl;dr A test that would fail animals and speakers of a different language are not good tests. An animal intelligence test needs to at least pass all humans of comparable intelligence regardless of language to reach the bare minimum of acceptability.

That's a good time as any to learn that might makes right.

The simple solution- have one cut the food in half, but the other gets to choose their half first from the two.

They might be learn to make use of underground volcanoes and gas vents. Maybe too deep for marine mammals?

I once worked at a similar office park. A pair of geese chased secretaries and CEOs alike. Very egalitarian. No one was spared. All ran to their cars in fear.

But there was one day when they met their match. Another pair of geese appeared like magic. Just wandering around like they owned the place. The original pair were not happy. They hissed and waved their wings in anger. The new pair did the same. Uncowed. The original pair decided to charge the interlopers and chase them off. Lowered their necks. Went full speed at them. Then slammed into the glass doors because they were attacking their own reflections.

They spent the rest of the day, greatly humbled, swimming around the office park pond. Gave everyone a break for a couple of days before resuming the usual CEO & secretary hunt.

The main problem is that people get pissed if you treat a city swan like a farm swan, just punting it out of the way or throwing it by the neck.