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How do you feel about animals and nature?

dannymac said:
So how about bedbugs? They will bite the hell out of you all night, make you afraid to go to sleep, and practically ruin your life after you deal with it long enough.. But calling in the exterminator to kill them all, is that wrong? They're animals just doing what nature has designed them to do, drink your blood.
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Thats the type of situation where you're forced to call the exterminator.
 
^^ Exactly like my situation that I explained earlier with the poisonous spiders at our house.
 
I think that there needs to be a paradigm shift away from the idea that life is somehow special or precious.
All species of life have the right to continue to exist. I agree with that. But on an individual basis, a life is worth nothing. Life is common. Life is easy to create. We have derived the idea that lives are worth something (in particular, us individually) from the basic principle that our genes have evolved us and most animals in order for said genes to continue existing as much and for as long as possible, and from this, our bodies are basically designed to reproduce and to live as much as possible.
 
we're all part of the same system, so why treat animals and nature with anything but the same respect you show yourself?

then again, most people don't respect themselves in the first place...
 
This is a very broad question. Nature is separable from life; the Sun and Moon are entirely natural, as are mountains, lakes, volcanoes, and seas. These are things I enjoy unequivocally. Life is something I'm a lot more ambivalent on. I absolutely love plants and greenery of all kinds, and thus feel very strongly about things like deforestation and paving over meadows for subdivisions. I also love almost anything that lives in the water, and have always had a soft spot for reptiles. Everything else I take on a case-by-case basis, which is how I think it should be.

For instance, I very rarely kill spiders, but if I have even a suspicion that it's dangerous and indoors, it's dead. II destroy any fire ant mound I see in my yard; the little bastards aren't even native here. I scare grackles out of my tree because I can't sleep or read with their infernal racket, I dislike dogs (stray or domestic--God help me, my whole life), and run feral cats out of my yard for the crap and piss they leave everywhere. I smash roaches, swat houseflies, spray wasp nests outside my door, and if I'm ever threatened by a furry beast whilst armed I'm taking it with me, because the world is not a romantic place, and respect for life will only get you so far. That said, I abhor actual cruelty to animals, and the things people regularly to do our fellow fauna sicken me. If that makes me a packet of contradictions, so be it...
 
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I feel that nature is such a part of me, or rather, that I am such a part of nature that it is the reason I am here on this earth. I don't follow any specific religion, but if I had to summarize my spirituality, I would undoubtedly say that nature is my God. I'm still not 100% sure of my life's actual purpose, but I can't help but feel my body naturally shifting away from 'the grid' and craving the exploration and understanding of the beauty of nature. The simplicity of it. The awe of it. The purity of it. The intricate wisdom of it. There are moments when I've stumbled upon the vast beauty of nature and I am so overcome with feeling... with immense gratitude.... with overwhelming sense of euphoria, that tears form in my eyes. I feel a sensation in my chest that feels like mdma. I cannot feel calm surrounded by people, I cannot feel calm surrounded by buildings, cars, trash, things. The only time that I truly feel at peace is when I am 100% alone, surrounded by mother earth, with little to distract me besides the simplicity of breathing, surviving, exploring, understanding. When I am in nature, everything just makes sense. Not many people understand this part of me. In fact, it's something I hardly ever talk to anyone about. People really don't understand why I flee the chaos of the city at every chance I get. My job is there, and I often question why. Is it something that I should change? I don't know.


Animals are nearly the same way for me. Specifically pets, or just ones that I have a more personal relationship with. I do care very much for all animals and feel a sense of respect toward them. I am not a vegetarian. I believe that humans are a part of the food chain, and like other carnivorous animals we must eat meat to survive. I do not believe in killing something that won't be used for food. Since I'm just a person who cannot hunt on my own, I consider it moral to purchase meats from local sustainable farms. Pets.... I feel soo strongly about pets. This is another thing I feel like I can't ever truly express to another person. I don't think I fully realized this until one day years ago I was tripping on LSD and laying in bed staring at the ceiling, enjoying drifting away in my thoughts. Then my cat at the time, (RIP Flip Smiley) jumped up on the bed next to me, and began acting very different than usual. He was purring like MAD, and curling up to me, playing with me, responding to my conversation in ways that only a kindred spirit could do. I felt such a deep love for this cat, such a deep mutual understanding, I simply could not put it into words. Ever since then, probably before as well, any pets I have taken in have been such a huge part of my life. They are equal to children to me. Best friends. Some of my best memories are of my pets. I talk to them. I give them voices. I tease them. I spoil the fuck out of them. Animals are something I need very much in my life to feel complete. Moreso, I'm starting to believe, than having my own children. We'll see if that changes someday ;)
 
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anybody who doesnt love animals and nature is genetically inferior. I think a lot of people love animals and nature, but for some reason they wont come out of the closet about it.

^and I like what you said a lot. Surrounded by trees and sunshine I feel better than I do surrounded by a room full of random people. There are people out there who make me feel just as comfortable as nature does. I remember all the times I used to fall asleep with my dog on the lawn. Or the time I roasted a bowl of hash with a magnifying glass, then curled up in the grass in a grove of trees and had the best sleep of my life.
 
i think everything is just borrowed nature. eventually the universe is gonna want it back, that selfish bitch.
 
I respecft animal life as much as I respect human life. And that is not at all. Neither have any intrinsic value.
 
I've been reading some Professor Gary L Francione,
And wanted to add this website http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/ to the philosophy forum, Didn't know whether to start a new thread or not, seems relevant to this one.

The website has a fuck tonn of content, but decided to quote this little exert in post, so if you were interested you could check out more.
The Six Principles of the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights
1. The abolitionist approach to animal rights maintains that all sentient beings, humans or nonhumans, have one right: the basic right not to be treated as the property of others.

2. Our recognition of the one basic right means that we must abolish, and not merely regulate, institutionalized animal exploitation—because it assumes that animals are the property of humans.

3. Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

4. We recognize that we will not abolish overnight the property status of nonhumans, but we will support only those campaigns and positions that explicitly promote the abolitionist agenda. We will not support positions that call for supposedly “improved” regulation of animal exploitation. We reject any campaign that promotes sexism, racism, heterosexism or other forms of discrimination against humans.

5. We recognize that the most important step that any of us can take toward abolition is to adopt the vegan lifestyle and to educate others about veganism. Veganism is the principle of abolition applied to one’s personal life and the consumption of any meat, fowl, fish, or dairy product, or the wearing or use of animal products, is inconsistent with the abolitionist perspective.

6. We recognize the principle of nonviolence as the guiding principle of the animal rights movement. Violence is the problem; it is not any part of the solution.
**********

A Note: In order to embrace the abolitionist approach to animal rights, it is not necessary to be spiritual or religious, or to be an atheist. You can be a spiritual or religious person, or you can be an atheist, or anything in between. It does not matter.

What does matter is:

(1) that you have moral concern about animals and that you want to do right by animals. That moral concern/moral impulse can come from any source, spiritual or non-spiritual; and

(2) that you regard as valid the logical arguments that our moral concern should not be limited to some nonhumans but should extend to all sentient beings and that we should abolish, and not regulate, animal exploitation.
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My reasons for recently becoming vegan were health based, but having learned what I perceive the health benefits of veganism, my prior justification for eating animal products on a moral basis (that it was necessary for my own health and survival, and it is not morally wrong to me to fight for survival) is now negated, and the issues surrounding animal rights and abolition are making alot of sense to me.
 
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Scientists find that being Vegan is unhealthy just as they find being not is.

I respect animals a lot, but pretty much insofar as I connect with them I like them. I'm not going to devote them a conscience or whatever that I don't sense, but I respect them as living beings.

I love eating meat. I don't feel particularly bad when I see an animal I don't know die on television for instance.

On the Equality<----->Totally Expendable continuum i'm probably about 40% toward the right.
 
If animals have the same rights as humans, then we should be able to arrest animals for murder, theft, and drug possession and put them in prison.
 
I respecft animal life as much as I respect human life. And that is not at all. Neither have any intrinsic value.
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This statement may be quite true, but the sentiment that it connotes is disturbing, to say the least. Do you consider yourself to be a psychopath? Murdered anyone lately?

That moral judgments seem more closely related to aesthetic evaluations than strictly logical ones does not prima facie invalidate moral claims, nor cheapen their human significance. Morality isn't an arbitrary construct devised by religious simpletons and tiresome pedants. The roots of morality are psychologically complex and multifarious, and the various schools of thought that they produce and inform should not, in my opinion, be glossed over so readily and casually as they so often are by my peers. To do so is folly: Glib dismissal of our better nature impoverishes the intellect, and - dare I say it - the soul.

I've found that those who adopt and make a show of the kind of nihilistic attitude on display above are most often trying to compensate for and/or justify something, and rarely have anything meaningful to offer to any serious conversation of morality/ethics.
 
Portillo said:
If animals have the same rights as humans, then we should be able to arrest animals for murder, theft, and drug possession and put them in prison.
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Non-human animals are "arrested" all the time, death penalty if a dog bites a child for example. Though most of the time they are imprisoned for no crime what-so-ever, we just want to exploit them. We want to subject them to vivisection, we want to take products of their bodies while they live out their sentance, when it suits we will take the flesh off their bones, their skin/fur, even boil up the remaining bits of their corpse, skim off the top for cosmetics and everything that falls to the bottom we will feed to other non-human animals we have selectively bred/manipulated to become our "pets". We want to turn the sentient into commodity, we produce them, we trade them, we profit off of them. In short we enslave them, they are our prisoners.

Some believe we are justified in the ways we imprison non-human animals, some believe we are justified in the way we imprison humans who have committed what we've defined as "crimes".

Some believe these "justifications" are more excuses or sometimes outright lies propagated merely to create the societal climate in which we can get away with it.

And more still do not care to consider the issue and allow others to think for them.

chinup said:
the conclusion that some people were less conscious than others is an ugly conclusion and one that obviously arises once we treat animals on the same scale as us, and that scale as a continuum. if we don't attach any value to cognitive capacities, it doesn't matter, but here we are, so it does matter. its also a continuum for individuals, i think its stupid to think that i'm more valuable after a cup of tea in the morning than before. so there must be more to 'worth' than cognitive capacity, but what that might be is quite mysterious to me.
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It's no mystery who should be included in ethical considerations. The distinction you seek = All sentient beings.
The question is not Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

What you seem to be relaying in this "continuum of consciousness" as the basis for determining a beings entitlement to moral consideration is the sentience quotient which is different to the standard usage of the word sentient. A high SQ is not grounds for moral consideration, it may not even be living. And us Humans are not so super intelligent as we like to think we are on this scale!

A human neuron has an average mass of about 10-10 kg and one neuron can process 1000-3000 bits/sec. earning us an SQ rating of +13. What is most interesting here is not the obvious fact that there's a great deal of room for improvement (there is!), but rather that all "neuronal sentience" SQs, from insects to mammals, cluster within several points of the human value. From the cosmic point of view, rotifers, honeybees, and humans all have brainpower with roughly equivalent efficiencies. Note that we are still way ahead of the computers, with an Apple II at SQ +5 and even the mighty Cray I only about +9. the fundamental upper limit to brain efficiency is imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics: all information, to be acted upon, must be represented physically and be carried by matter-energy "markers." According to the Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics, the lower limit for the accuracy with which energy can be measured—the minimum measurable energy level for a marker carrying one bit–is given by Planck's constant h divided by T, the duration of the measurement. If one energy level is used to represent one bit, then the maximum bit rate of a brain is equal to the total energy available E ( = mc02) for representing information, divided by the minimum measurable energy per bit (h/T) divided by the minimum time required for readout (T): mc02/h = 1050 (bit/s)/kg. Hence the maximum possible SQ is +50.

How about intelligences greater than human? Astronomer Robert Jastrow and others have speculated that silicon-based computer brains may represent the next and ultimate stage in our evolution. This is valid, but only in a very limited sense. Superconducting Josephson junction electronic gates weigh 10-12 kg and can process 1011 bits/sec, so "electronic sentiences" made of these components could have and SQ of +23 – ten orders beyond man. But even such fantastically advanced systems fall short of the maximum of +50. Somewhere in the universe may lurk beings almost incomprehensible to us, who think by manipulating atomic energy levels and are mentally as far beyond our best future computers as those computers will surpass the Venus flytrap.

Just as consciousness is an emergent of neuronal sentience, perhaps some broader mode of thinking–call it communalness–is an emergent of electronic sentience. If this is true, it might help to explain why (noncommunal) human beings have such great difficulty comprehending the intricate workings of the societies, governments, and economies they create, and require the continual and increasing assistance of computers to juggle the thousands of variables needed for successful management and planning. Perhaps future computers with communalness may develop the same intimate awareness of complex organizations as people have consciousness of their own bodies. And how many additional levels of emergent higher awareness might a creature with SQ +50 display?

The possible existence of ultrahuman SQ levels may affect our ability, and the desirability, of communicating with extraterrestrial beings. Sometimes it is rhetorically asked what we could possibly have to say to a dog or to an insect, if such could speak, that would be of interest to both parties? From our perspective of Sentience Quotients, we can see that the problem is actually far, far worse than this, more akin to asking people to discuss Shakespeare with trees or rocks. It may be that there is a minimum SQ "communication gap," an intellectual distance beyond which no two entities can meaningfully converse.

At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach is our "communication" with vegetation when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful.

What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
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