Tryptamine*Dreamer
Ex-Bluelighter
My view-value of non-human life & many examples of behavior often thought only human
I hope Words is the right place for this message - if not, move it or delete it. I am talking about animals doing things that most humans don't think animals can do. Especially empathy, love, altruism, sharing food happily with animals they's never seen, in some cases the animal wanting some of the food asks for it by friendly behavior and often also show some submissive behavior.
Please read, this has many examples of animal behavior that people often think of as something only humans possess. Many animal rights activists are probably not aware of a lot of it. I give my opinions on why animals do these things and tell what some experts think but all the stories are things I remember from articles, scientific papers, net videos, and TV. Some of the things I saw or read like 10 years ago and on those I mention uncertainty about my exact memory of things, just giving what info I remember. I know my writing skills really suck but I still want to share this info and my thoughts on these things.
Why is an animal's life seen as so less important than that of a human? They feel emotions and pain, this is what is important in determining how important the life is - the capacity for feeling emotions and pain. Animals feel complex emotions including empathy and love. Many don't give animals credit for feeling empathy for others but experiments show that mice will not press a lever to get food when they figure out that it is causing pain from electric shocks to mice in the next cage - the mouse will go hungry and suffer itself instead of hurting the other mice.
Some animals will share their food with animals they do not know - this has been observed quite a bit with polar bears - the polar bear wanting some of the other bear's food acts in a certain way with body language to ask in a non threatening and maybe submissive manner. It usually works from what I have read about this. Polar bears are considered very solitary and yet still show what a human would call acts of kindness or charity to others.
I could go on listing more examples but I think you get the point. Some of the things humans think of as things that make humans better than animals are not unique to humans but common in many animals. The ability to engage in advanced intellectual behavior like most humans is not what determines the value of a life. Do you consider a human who is severely retarded, maybe having a vocabulary of 50 words, 15 words, or no words but who plays, smiles, laughs, cries, and shows affection with hugs and other ways less worthy of life than an average person? I know some do, but I don't. I have seen a few people like this and it was quickly clear that they had just as much of a heart as me, though with an innocence not contaminated by the knowledge of all the horror and heartbreak that engulfs the Earth and makes suffer all animals including humans, the very knowledge that often crushes my heart and soul until I become suicidal and start self mutilating, even injecting water mixed with all kinds of gross, dirty shit into my muscles and so on.
Most of the value of a life should be measured by the heart and soul, feelings and emotions, empathy, love, compassion, and importantly sharing and helping others, something animals do indeed do. We know pets can save human lives but wild animals have been seen to save the lives of other animals, sometimes of a different species.
I saw a video on the net or tv where a lioness grabs away a wildebeest calf from the jaws of a crocodile, pulls it up to shore, then licks it, acts with what looks sure to be empathy and concern, and stays with it for a few minutes until the wildebeest herd chases her off. By then it appears the calf is dead as it is not moving and the film crew leaves. The next day they return and don't see the calf there but surprisingly they find it alive and walking around in the herd.
The lioness, an animal that normally hunts and eats this species seems to have felt compassion for this calf - this shows that at least in rare cases, predators may feel compassion and concern for the very species they eat. That is something I had prior not considered as a possibility, thinking this was truly a human only behavior (though one that is only shown by some, not all humans).
Predators probably know the animals they kill feel pain - perhaps they can feel something similar to some humans who have to hunt animals to survive because they are in a hunter-gatherer society and they are not capable of getting sufficient nutrition without meat - glad to have got the food they need to survive, which meant killing another animal, but either feel some sadness, wish they didn't have to do it, feel some kind of empathy or compassion. That may not be the case at all with non-human predators but I think it is possible.
Elephants grieve for their dead similarly to humans (it appears at least some other species do as well). They even visit the graves/bones of loved ones that have died even after many years. They also seem clearly capable of identifying the human species as an enemy in places where lots of elephants are killed by humans and take revenge. They will rampage through villages where often the people live in grass huts that the elephant can easily destroy. In some of these attacks, many people die.
Other animals may be capable of this. Hunting of brown bears in and I think around a national park in Alaska had not been allowed and nobody had been killed by a bear in that national park either in a very long time or ever. They started allowing hunting maybe 6-8 years ago and since then there have been several people killed by bears there in just a few years - I am not quite sure how many, I am thinking 6 people killed but it has been a while since I heard about that. That seems a little too odd to just be by chance, it could be that bears that saw other bears killed viewed humans as an enemy.
By contrast, there are places where mother bears will intentionally come near people to leave their cubs while they go to catch fish because the male bears usually stay away and they have learned the humans will not harm the cubs. At least a couple of people have wrote about this online and I'll try to find and post links to some of this stuff. In one case, the mother bear left her two cubs near the same person every day for about a week and the cubs came closer and closer - if I remember right, one of them made physical contact with the man and he may have been able to do the same with the cub - I don't remember but I am sure I can find this article. This is something that would really surprise most people - generally they think a mother bear is very dangerous to be near but in places where the bears and humans come close and the mother bears see the humans are not threatening, they learn their cubs get safety from adult males that sometimes kill cubs if they go with mother to catch fish where male adults will be so they leave them near the people.
Most people think bears that have been around people very much are more likely to attack but the vast majority of attacks, especially fatal ones occur in sparsely populated areas where bears never see people. Bears that are used to people actually appear to be less dangerous from much research. Fatal bear attacks are exceedingly rare anyway - in the 14 years since 2000, there have been 36 deadly attacks in North America - this averages 2.5 per year. 22 were by black bears and there are around 450,000 black bears in the USA, not counting Alaska, Idaho, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming where population is not known, well over 400,000 in Canada, and an unknown but pretty small population in Mexico. Many of the black bears live in quite densely populated areas in the NE US where there are lots of towns. Many towns will not do anything to make the bears leave the town if they are not a threat and I know one where a mother had cubs under someone's house and they were allowed to stay there as a den until they moved on. Bears don't really deserve such a bad reputation for being violent bloodthirsty killing machines that a lot of people consider them - they simply are not like that. They don't normally look at humans as prey and as you can see by the low 2.5 deaths per year that they are not normally aggressive to people.
Another story to share is about two macaws that were left in a locked garage after the people moved out of the house. One macaw was able to get around fine and there was dog food in there and there may have been water. The other one was in a box with both legs broken, unable to get out. They were eventually found several weeks later. The rescuers could not understand how the macaw in the box with both legs broken, unable to get out, was able to survive. Some time at the rescue, they found the unhurt macaw bring food to the one that was injured. This macaw had been feeding the injured macaw, probably at least partly by regurgitating a mixture of mushy food and water all the time they were locked in there, left to die. The injured macaw did receive needed medical attention and survived fine but would not have lived if the other macaw had not been feeding it the whole time. Here we have the macaw saving another's life, a great act of love and compassion after a human with no compassion abused/tortured one macaw by breaking its legs and leaving both to die. If this story was told but only names and not species were given, just say that the injured macaw was a year old human baby and it was a small child, maybe 3 years old or just a little less feeding the badly abused little baby, it would have made headline news and the kid would rightfully be considered a hero, but I don't see how that is any more heroic than what the macaw did.
Animals can show the same kind of caringness and even heroic behavior as humans. They can have a dark side as well. Chimpanzees seem to engage in something like warfare where two groups will fight and kill one another intentionally and can do this at a serious level of intensity, sometimes the groups having repeated battles until one group is wiped out. They have also been seen to commit what seems to be murder of a chimp in their own group that doesn't seem to have been due to any major provocation. The chimp even trying to escape is hunted down and killed and sometimes other chimps join in on the killing.
Many humans don't think any other animals are capable of anything like warfare, hate, or murder but it appears chimps are able to do this and I believe most animals can hate and many are quite capable of behavior that appears to be murderous, non-predatory, and the killer doesn't stop attacking when the victim is trying to escape or submit. I don't know how many species intentionally kill their own kind unprovoked for no apparent reason, not for food or anything.
I can also say I am quite sure my macaw hates my nephew although he is getting better. My nephew is 17. From the time he was 7 or 8 until 12 or so, he would always jump up and grab or slap his tail when I had him on the tree branch just in front of the house and I could not get him to stop it and the bird hated it. It seems animals have a dark side that ranges from feeling hatred to murder, war, and possibly genocide, though murder like behavior is pretty rare and chimpanzees are the only animals I know of that seem to possibly exhibit genocidal behavior by completely wiping out neighboring groups or tribes of chimps. Chimps are generally not violent, they are pretty peaceful most of the time - I don't want anyone getting the idea that they are somehow bad or evil or that I do not like them - they are actually one of the more interesting animals to me. I have no interest in research in cognitive ability or psychology of chimps as that has been done a lot though.
I want to choose a species or maybe 2, 3, or 4 that have not been researched much or have had no close up research into those aspects - working closely with some animals that nobody has done this kind of research on or only been viewed in the wild. To uncover many psychological and cognitive traits of an animal would require a researcher working with captive animals. If working with captive animals, especially large ones, I would only do it if the animal had a good amount of space and plenty of things for mental stimulation when not being worked with as I am not going to rob an animal of its happiness and a decent life to do research. I do already have research planned with my macaw (Baby) and raccoon (Lucky). It is nothing that would scare or distress them, my bird likes mirrors. Lucky has never seen a mirror. I'll first try to see if they can figure out it is their reflection.
Baby may already have done so. I think he knows it is not another bird by the way he acts. Second experiment is see if they can learn to use mirrors as tools to find where a toy or something is hidden by looking in the mirror and seeing the reflection of that. I think if they can do that, I will have found a new complex behavior by seeing something done behind them by looking at a mirror. If they could understand the mirror shows something like this, it could be a small contribution to the knowledge base of animal cognition and psychology and could help change hearts and minds of some people on non-human animals.
If Lucky, a raccoon could do these things, it could really change how they are viewed in terms of intelligence - when people think an animal is more intelligent they consider its life more valuable and hunters may decide not to hunt them if they think they are very intelligence as many/most think it is intelligence level that determines level of awareness, capacity for complex emotions that include empathy, compassion, love, grief, and altruistic behavior. Many people view raccoons as pest animals and kill them. They typically live to mid teens when well cared for as a pet but because mostly of humans intentionally killing them and accidentally hitting with cars, in most places they live on average 1.8-3.1 years in the wild. I know a guy I don't like who puts out food in various places to attract raccoons and opossums, then he shoots them dead. Before telling me about that, he was talking about his love for horses and dogs. Why no compassion for coons or possums?
I can tell you my raccoon Lucky is probably the most affectionate pet I have had, very friendly. He does bite when playing, but not hard enough to break the skin or make bruises. If his biting gets to hard, I can back away, hold my hand that he was biting, make sounds similar to what he makes when he feels pain and then he starts making his raccoon voice in a sad sounding way and he'll lick where he was biting and seemingly is showing like he is sorry for biting too hard and understands it caused me pain. He typically acts really calm and gentle for a bit afterwards, wanting to be by me and just enjoy my company.
Both of them seem to know if I am feeling really bad or sick. Baby wants to stay with me and when I go to Lucky, he will not bite, he does what he does to show affection - this includes opening my mouth with his claws and hands and sticking his mouth in mine, often licking inside. It hurts when his hands are stretching my mouth open and I have to grab his hands, but he wont take them out and forcing it causes him to grab tighter. I got so used to it that I just let him stick his mouth in mine and lick inside and it doesn't seem gross, I like it now because it is something he really likes to do to show he cares about me. Maybe some of you want to puke after reading that or think I am disgusting but I say it is just saliva and though it is not human saliva, it is made of pretty much the exact same thing and I don't consider it dirty or filthy. I am not going to stop him from doing that, just make sure he doesn't scratch my mouth. I don't want to discourage or stop him from showing his affection. Lucky is a intelligent animal as well and I am going to try to show him he can see himself in the mirror. It is tragic that an animal that would live on average to the early or mid teens if humans stopped killing them just makes an average of 1.8 years to 3.1 years.
I know this was a long read. If you read it all, I hope it was interesting and informative, not boring.
I hope Words is the right place for this message - if not, move it or delete it. I am talking about animals doing things that most humans don't think animals can do. Especially empathy, love, altruism, sharing food happily with animals they's never seen, in some cases the animal wanting some of the food asks for it by friendly behavior and often also show some submissive behavior.
Please read, this has many examples of animal behavior that people often think of as something only humans possess. Many animal rights activists are probably not aware of a lot of it. I give my opinions on why animals do these things and tell what some experts think but all the stories are things I remember from articles, scientific papers, net videos, and TV. Some of the things I saw or read like 10 years ago and on those I mention uncertainty about my exact memory of things, just giving what info I remember. I know my writing skills really suck but I still want to share this info and my thoughts on these things.
Why is an animal's life seen as so less important than that of a human? They feel emotions and pain, this is what is important in determining how important the life is - the capacity for feeling emotions and pain. Animals feel complex emotions including empathy and love. Many don't give animals credit for feeling empathy for others but experiments show that mice will not press a lever to get food when they figure out that it is causing pain from electric shocks to mice in the next cage - the mouse will go hungry and suffer itself instead of hurting the other mice.
Some animals will share their food with animals they do not know - this has been observed quite a bit with polar bears - the polar bear wanting some of the other bear's food acts in a certain way with body language to ask in a non threatening and maybe submissive manner. It usually works from what I have read about this. Polar bears are considered very solitary and yet still show what a human would call acts of kindness or charity to others.
I could go on listing more examples but I think you get the point. Some of the things humans think of as things that make humans better than animals are not unique to humans but common in many animals. The ability to engage in advanced intellectual behavior like most humans is not what determines the value of a life. Do you consider a human who is severely retarded, maybe having a vocabulary of 50 words, 15 words, or no words but who plays, smiles, laughs, cries, and shows affection with hugs and other ways less worthy of life than an average person? I know some do, but I don't. I have seen a few people like this and it was quickly clear that they had just as much of a heart as me, though with an innocence not contaminated by the knowledge of all the horror and heartbreak that engulfs the Earth and makes suffer all animals including humans, the very knowledge that often crushes my heart and soul until I become suicidal and start self mutilating, even injecting water mixed with all kinds of gross, dirty shit into my muscles and so on.
Most of the value of a life should be measured by the heart and soul, feelings and emotions, empathy, love, compassion, and importantly sharing and helping others, something animals do indeed do. We know pets can save human lives but wild animals have been seen to save the lives of other animals, sometimes of a different species.
I saw a video on the net or tv where a lioness grabs away a wildebeest calf from the jaws of a crocodile, pulls it up to shore, then licks it, acts with what looks sure to be empathy and concern, and stays with it for a few minutes until the wildebeest herd chases her off. By then it appears the calf is dead as it is not moving and the film crew leaves. The next day they return and don't see the calf there but surprisingly they find it alive and walking around in the herd.
The lioness, an animal that normally hunts and eats this species seems to have felt compassion for this calf - this shows that at least in rare cases, predators may feel compassion and concern for the very species they eat. That is something I had prior not considered as a possibility, thinking this was truly a human only behavior (though one that is only shown by some, not all humans).
Predators probably know the animals they kill feel pain - perhaps they can feel something similar to some humans who have to hunt animals to survive because they are in a hunter-gatherer society and they are not capable of getting sufficient nutrition without meat - glad to have got the food they need to survive, which meant killing another animal, but either feel some sadness, wish they didn't have to do it, feel some kind of empathy or compassion. That may not be the case at all with non-human predators but I think it is possible.
Elephants grieve for their dead similarly to humans (it appears at least some other species do as well). They even visit the graves/bones of loved ones that have died even after many years. They also seem clearly capable of identifying the human species as an enemy in places where lots of elephants are killed by humans and take revenge. They will rampage through villages where often the people live in grass huts that the elephant can easily destroy. In some of these attacks, many people die.
Other animals may be capable of this. Hunting of brown bears in and I think around a national park in Alaska had not been allowed and nobody had been killed by a bear in that national park either in a very long time or ever. They started allowing hunting maybe 6-8 years ago and since then there have been several people killed by bears there in just a few years - I am not quite sure how many, I am thinking 6 people killed but it has been a while since I heard about that. That seems a little too odd to just be by chance, it could be that bears that saw other bears killed viewed humans as an enemy.
By contrast, there are places where mother bears will intentionally come near people to leave their cubs while they go to catch fish because the male bears usually stay away and they have learned the humans will not harm the cubs. At least a couple of people have wrote about this online and I'll try to find and post links to some of this stuff. In one case, the mother bear left her two cubs near the same person every day for about a week and the cubs came closer and closer - if I remember right, one of them made physical contact with the man and he may have been able to do the same with the cub - I don't remember but I am sure I can find this article. This is something that would really surprise most people - generally they think a mother bear is very dangerous to be near but in places where the bears and humans come close and the mother bears see the humans are not threatening, they learn their cubs get safety from adult males that sometimes kill cubs if they go with mother to catch fish where male adults will be so they leave them near the people.
Most people think bears that have been around people very much are more likely to attack but the vast majority of attacks, especially fatal ones occur in sparsely populated areas where bears never see people. Bears that are used to people actually appear to be less dangerous from much research. Fatal bear attacks are exceedingly rare anyway - in the 14 years since 2000, there have been 36 deadly attacks in North America - this averages 2.5 per year. 22 were by black bears and there are around 450,000 black bears in the USA, not counting Alaska, Idaho, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming where population is not known, well over 400,000 in Canada, and an unknown but pretty small population in Mexico. Many of the black bears live in quite densely populated areas in the NE US where there are lots of towns. Many towns will not do anything to make the bears leave the town if they are not a threat and I know one where a mother had cubs under someone's house and they were allowed to stay there as a den until they moved on. Bears don't really deserve such a bad reputation for being violent bloodthirsty killing machines that a lot of people consider them - they simply are not like that. They don't normally look at humans as prey and as you can see by the low 2.5 deaths per year that they are not normally aggressive to people.
Another story to share is about two macaws that were left in a locked garage after the people moved out of the house. One macaw was able to get around fine and there was dog food in there and there may have been water. The other one was in a box with both legs broken, unable to get out. They were eventually found several weeks later. The rescuers could not understand how the macaw in the box with both legs broken, unable to get out, was able to survive. Some time at the rescue, they found the unhurt macaw bring food to the one that was injured. This macaw had been feeding the injured macaw, probably at least partly by regurgitating a mixture of mushy food and water all the time they were locked in there, left to die. The injured macaw did receive needed medical attention and survived fine but would not have lived if the other macaw had not been feeding it the whole time. Here we have the macaw saving another's life, a great act of love and compassion after a human with no compassion abused/tortured one macaw by breaking its legs and leaving both to die. If this story was told but only names and not species were given, just say that the injured macaw was a year old human baby and it was a small child, maybe 3 years old or just a little less feeding the badly abused little baby, it would have made headline news and the kid would rightfully be considered a hero, but I don't see how that is any more heroic than what the macaw did.
Animals can show the same kind of caringness and even heroic behavior as humans. They can have a dark side as well. Chimpanzees seem to engage in something like warfare where two groups will fight and kill one another intentionally and can do this at a serious level of intensity, sometimes the groups having repeated battles until one group is wiped out. They have also been seen to commit what seems to be murder of a chimp in their own group that doesn't seem to have been due to any major provocation. The chimp even trying to escape is hunted down and killed and sometimes other chimps join in on the killing.
Many humans don't think any other animals are capable of anything like warfare, hate, or murder but it appears chimps are able to do this and I believe most animals can hate and many are quite capable of behavior that appears to be murderous, non-predatory, and the killer doesn't stop attacking when the victim is trying to escape or submit. I don't know how many species intentionally kill their own kind unprovoked for no apparent reason, not for food or anything.
I can also say I am quite sure my macaw hates my nephew although he is getting better. My nephew is 17. From the time he was 7 or 8 until 12 or so, he would always jump up and grab or slap his tail when I had him on the tree branch just in front of the house and I could not get him to stop it and the bird hated it. It seems animals have a dark side that ranges from feeling hatred to murder, war, and possibly genocide, though murder like behavior is pretty rare and chimpanzees are the only animals I know of that seem to possibly exhibit genocidal behavior by completely wiping out neighboring groups or tribes of chimps. Chimps are generally not violent, they are pretty peaceful most of the time - I don't want anyone getting the idea that they are somehow bad or evil or that I do not like them - they are actually one of the more interesting animals to me. I have no interest in research in cognitive ability or psychology of chimps as that has been done a lot though.
I want to choose a species or maybe 2, 3, or 4 that have not been researched much or have had no close up research into those aspects - working closely with some animals that nobody has done this kind of research on or only been viewed in the wild. To uncover many psychological and cognitive traits of an animal would require a researcher working with captive animals. If working with captive animals, especially large ones, I would only do it if the animal had a good amount of space and plenty of things for mental stimulation when not being worked with as I am not going to rob an animal of its happiness and a decent life to do research. I do already have research planned with my macaw (Baby) and raccoon (Lucky). It is nothing that would scare or distress them, my bird likes mirrors. Lucky has never seen a mirror. I'll first try to see if they can figure out it is their reflection.
Baby may already have done so. I think he knows it is not another bird by the way he acts. Second experiment is see if they can learn to use mirrors as tools to find where a toy or something is hidden by looking in the mirror and seeing the reflection of that. I think if they can do that, I will have found a new complex behavior by seeing something done behind them by looking at a mirror. If they could understand the mirror shows something like this, it could be a small contribution to the knowledge base of animal cognition and psychology and could help change hearts and minds of some people on non-human animals.
If Lucky, a raccoon could do these things, it could really change how they are viewed in terms of intelligence - when people think an animal is more intelligent they consider its life more valuable and hunters may decide not to hunt them if they think they are very intelligence as many/most think it is intelligence level that determines level of awareness, capacity for complex emotions that include empathy, compassion, love, grief, and altruistic behavior. Many people view raccoons as pest animals and kill them. They typically live to mid teens when well cared for as a pet but because mostly of humans intentionally killing them and accidentally hitting with cars, in most places they live on average 1.8-3.1 years in the wild. I know a guy I don't like who puts out food in various places to attract raccoons and opossums, then he shoots them dead. Before telling me about that, he was talking about his love for horses and dogs. Why no compassion for coons or possums?
I can tell you my raccoon Lucky is probably the most affectionate pet I have had, very friendly. He does bite when playing, but not hard enough to break the skin or make bruises. If his biting gets to hard, I can back away, hold my hand that he was biting, make sounds similar to what he makes when he feels pain and then he starts making his raccoon voice in a sad sounding way and he'll lick where he was biting and seemingly is showing like he is sorry for biting too hard and understands it caused me pain. He typically acts really calm and gentle for a bit afterwards, wanting to be by me and just enjoy my company.
Both of them seem to know if I am feeling really bad or sick. Baby wants to stay with me and when I go to Lucky, he will not bite, he does what he does to show affection - this includes opening my mouth with his claws and hands and sticking his mouth in mine, often licking inside. It hurts when his hands are stretching my mouth open and I have to grab his hands, but he wont take them out and forcing it causes him to grab tighter. I got so used to it that I just let him stick his mouth in mine and lick inside and it doesn't seem gross, I like it now because it is something he really likes to do to show he cares about me. Maybe some of you want to puke after reading that or think I am disgusting but I say it is just saliva and though it is not human saliva, it is made of pretty much the exact same thing and I don't consider it dirty or filthy. I am not going to stop him from doing that, just make sure he doesn't scratch my mouth. I don't want to discourage or stop him from showing his affection. Lucky is a intelligent animal as well and I am going to try to show him he can see himself in the mirror. It is tragic that an animal that would live on average to the early or mid teens if humans stopped killing them just makes an average of 1.8 years to 3.1 years.
I know this was a long read. If you read it all, I hope it was interesting and informative, not boring.
dreamer
Maybe one that is easy to break/usually is broken.