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i wonder if humans ponder the pain that they cause to animals??? like the hundred million sharks killed and stripped of their fins, and who's living carcasses are tossed back into the sea every year,>> for shark fin soup..
The last time I ate shark-fin soup was.... never.
But I'll be damned if I stop eating meat because it hurts the animals.
OF COURSE IT DOES!!!! We are still living in nature, not above it; untill we acquire alien technology everything we do is still "natural".
Nature made us hungry hairless bipedal apes that rather like to kill and eat other animals in between grubbing for roots and berries...it's our nature.
I do NOT support killing, wasting or torturing an animal for the sake of entertainment though.
I'm pretty sure.....wait a minute.....oh, yep, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
all that means is that the author thinks that animals without the pre-frontal cortex are not self-aware and thus cannot meditate upon or control their feelings. It means that if they are in pain, they can't pretend they aren't. I think he is halve right.
I'm pretty sure.....wait a minute.....oh, yep, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
True. The prefrontal cortex is not exclusive to primates and is not missing in dogs, cats, horses and many other animals. It is missing in most lower life forms, however.
Interestingly enough, one of the tests used to determine whether or not an animal is self-aware is by allowing it to see itself in a mirror. If it recognizes itself in the mirror as being an image of itself, that shows evidence of self-awareness. I'm sure that's not the only test, but it's one of them.
You mean... OMG! That's ME in there? Aaaagghhhhhhh......
As for animals feeling anything, I'm pretty sure that much of how humans announce their painful condition (whining, whimpering, yowling, crying out or moaning) is simply a means of communication, and/or a plea for help and commiseration from their mommy, doctor or others. It's obviously used by many who are otherwise lonely as a means of getting that attention (as my rather over-reactive hypochondriac mother did...). Because, by comparison, those who are not unfamiliar with pain, or have lived with extremes of it on their own, do not complain. In fact, they label others who do make a big fuss "whiners" or cry-babies.
I do know from my veterinarian friend that he has tended to cats who he knows must be in serious pain (where they, for instance, have had a hind leg traumatically crushed by an impact accident with a car), but they lay there and purr when he tends to them. Doesn't stop them from limping or even yelping when they try to move.
I also once tried to rescue a cat that had been hit by a car, and it was laying there, stunned, in a rain-filled gutter, but it snarled at me as I tried to talk to it and help it. It expired right there before me about 5 minuted later, all while in obvious and serious pain. Very sad, frankly.
My 20 year old pet Dottie The Wonder Cat (she's in my photos here on C-D) recently walked up and sniffed at a dazed yellow-jacket wasp that was on our kitchen flooor, and as soon as she sniffed it, she immediately recoiled and trotted away quickly. She obviously knew what a painful encounter with one of those guys felt like!
I think the self-awareness argument fails; rather, in animals it's a case of a lack of interest or hereditary experience in communicating their pain to others as something they possibly instinctively see as their own problem to deal with. After all, evolutionarily, (and with the possible exceptions of dolphins, primates and elephants) they have not learned to go to others in the herd or troop for help; they're pretty much on their own.
I suppose this does little to bolster the commonly held misconception of most Christians that we're so much higher and better than the lesser beasts, by "design". <sigh... the utter arrogance of it all>
Religion is definitely a social phenom, based on the desire for mutuality of some actual or imagined events or experiences.
Location: planet octupulous is nearing earths atmosphere
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Chango
The last time I ate shark-fin soup was.... never.
But I'll be damned if I stop eating meat because it hurts the animals.
OF COURSE IT DOES!!!! We are still living in nature, not above it; untill we acquire alien technology everything we do is still "natural".
Nature made us hungry hairless bipedal apes that rather like to kill and eat other animals in between grubbing for roots and berries...it's our nature.
I do NOT support killing, wasting or torturing an animal for the sake of entertainment though.
i wasn't saying you ate shark fin soup,, just that the way your post sounded made it look like animals were tormenting humans, my point is>> that what ever bad things animals do to humans<> is a tiny fraction of the pain and suffering we inflict on the animals.. shark fin soup was just one example..
world wide i could count all the people on me fingers and toes that were killed by sharks each year. but we kill like a hundred million of them, and 90 percent of the shark is thrown back alive to die in the sea...
out time is coming for a rude awakening..
we are the only species of animal that threaten all other species of animals including ourselves, if it crawls, walks ,squrms ,wiggles, jumps, swims,or flys we kill it.. not even bacteria is safe from us..
LuminousTruth:I know for a fact that cats, in a sense, do "pretend they are not in pain" when they are. They are quite stoic about it and accept it.
Mystic says cats do have a pre-frontal cortex; so acording to the study it makes sense that they are aware of and in control over their own pain. If the cats are missing the pre-frontal, then maybe it just isn't in pain because its body habituated. another possibility is that the study was completely butchered or actually inconclusive, yet the researcher wanted to present something so he lied/was mistaken.
here is a quote from the O.P. so either the book, or the O.P is mistaken.
Quote:
the pre-frontal cortex of the brain—a section of the brain which is missing in all animals except for the humanoid primates.
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