I’ve always assumed they laugh like Eddie Murphy.
Can you show me a cite for that? On YouTube, I did see elephants making (variations on) the same picture, as well as elephants “free styling”. I also saw trainers dipping paintbrushes in paint and handing them to the elephant. But I never saw a trainer holding or guiding the trunk. In fact there are many video’s taken by tourists (and trhere are hundreds of tourists present at those demontrations, as that is kind of their point) showing that the elephant holds and guides the paintbrush himself.
I read a few articles when it first started the rounds a year or two ago. Here’s what I can find now.
Some first hand account buried in a site from a charity event
Wait, you’re to have me believe animals have fundamental emotion and intelligence similar to humans because you found a clip of a chihuahua masturbating?
Dude, he can lick it. That’s not smarter?
I completely don’t comprehend this sort of reasoning. If I had to explain how I know that dogs have lesser intelligence and emotional capability than humans, my beloved pet dog would be exhibit A. After fourteen years, he has still not figured out that there is no benefit to fetching a ragged, saliva-covered tennis ball 40-50 times a day. He will eat absolutely anything that has a remote resemblance to food, even if it’s filthy, foul-smelling garbage that’s been lying in a ditch for several weeks. He is easily bribed into doing anything for a tiny little beef-flavored treat.
As for videos of animals posted on Youtube, just ask yourself this. What species took the video? What species posted it on Youtube? What species wrote the code for Youtube? When an elephant writes the code for Trunktube, then I’ll be impressed.
Can you build a beehive?
Yes, using a layering process I can build it one micron at a time.
Oh, he has. So, I guess you don’t play an amateur sport like soccer or tennis?
And you see no parallel with human behavior, for instance drinking grapejuice that has gone bad and calling it wine, or eating milk that has gone bad and calling it cheese?
Some book, I think The Language Instinct, begins a chapter by extolling the virtues of an elephant’s trunk: it’s incredibly flexible, can perform incredibly delicate operations, is extraordinarily strong, etc. It’s unique in the world: no other creature has a facial organ quite as versatile as an elephant’s trunk. It goes on to point out how absurd it would be for someone, based on some sort of idea of equality, to try to suggest that a human nose was as powerful and useful as an elephant’s trunk: it simply isn’t. It suggests that there are thousands of other unique traits held by other creatures–and suggests that one of those unique traits is the ability to generate novel ordered language according to an established grammar, a trait held exclusively by human beings.
It’s not arrogance to suggest this is a unique human trait: it’s supported by the evidence. Yes, African Grey parrots can learn a remarkable number of words and can use them in novel ways. Koko the gorilla learned some sign language and may have been able to lie with it. But no African Grey ever has said something as complex as when my three-year-old nephew says, “We went to the ZOO, and we saw OTTERS there!”
Language is a tremendous tool we have. Our heads appear to be uniquely wired to use it to its fullest extent (i.e., to create novel ordered/inflected sets of words that follow a grammar). It allows us to think about the past and future, to think about abstract ideas, in a way that other animals cannot, to the best of our knowledge.
And that doesn’t confer any special rights on us as a species. It’s just the thing that makes us unique. We have the same emotions as other creatures, similar desires, similar fears. Our bodies work in mostly the same way. Among members of our own species, we don’t confer any special rights to those who can think in the most abstract ways, nor do we remove rights from those who, for whatever reason, lack language.
These videos are cool, but I do not think they ought to influence whether we grant rights to other animals.
Sure there’s a benefit. You, the master, want him to fetch the tennis ball. If he does this, you’re pleased and happy with him. This makes him happy.
Plus, it can be like prey that he’s retrieving for his master.
No, I don’t. Humans can call wine “wine” and cheese “cheese”. Dogs can’t call food anything at all. Human beings make decisions about what to eat based on weighing a lot of criteria: taste, sanitation, health benefits, propriety, social values, and others. Dogs, on the other hand, will eat anything that you throw at them as long as it’s vaguely food-like. (And believe me, with regards to my dog I do mean anything.)
Don’t think that I’m making a case against animal rights. I’m very much in favor of treating animals with the right amount of dignity and I only eat meat that comes from animals raised humanely. But I thing that the best chance for animals comes from people who appreciate them as animals, not from people who anthropomorphize them. If I love a dog for being a dog, then I’ll continue to love him after he chews up the furniture, steals a roast from the kitchen counter, or does his business on the sidewalk. But if I love a dog for supposed equality to humans, then how can I react when he does things that a proper human being would never do?
I think you’re defining your terms in a way that you don’t necessarily agree with. A proper human being would, presumably, use the toilet for defecation, and not smear feces all over their room. A proper human child would, presumably, play with a hula hoop by twirling around in it, not chewing into pieces. But the fact that a nonverbal autistic child does these things does not lead to loving the child any less–nor does it lead to calls for giving the autistic child fewer rights*.
Anthropomorphism is certainly an intellectual danger when considering animals. However, I believe the term is overused: it is not anthropomorphism to consider either the intelligence nor the reasoning capacities of nonhuman animals.
- With the possible exception of rights directly related to the ability to exercise them, e.g., the right to vote.
I have seen (/heard/read) it asserted than animals do not THINK.
I have seen (/heard/read) it asserted that animals do not FEEL (in the emotional sense).
I have even seen (/heard/read) it asserted that animals do not experience SENSATIONS (such as pain) as we do.
Yeesh, what DO they think animals experience?
I myself am inclined to believe that our own species is unusual in the possession of (or at least the complexity of) LANGUAGE which enables us to construct really complex edifices of thought, with thoughts about thoughts and then thoughts about thoughts about thoughts until we get to the point that we are thinking about exactly how to phrase an argument that we are posting about Poster X’s critique of Weber’s response to Marx who was himself writing about the consciousness of the masses with regards to the idea of ownership, which itself is an abstraction, etc…
I don’t think the ‘realness’ of thinking or of feeling is any less for not having the complexities of language available to hold onto complex thoughts “as a noun” and then “think about them”. Our brains may be far better wired to do language acquisition but I think that the fundamental process of pattern-recognition and awareness of familiarity that is “thinking” to us is not dependent on that, and wired-for-it or not, we would not be able to acquire this or that individual language if “thinking” could not exist apart from language. (FYI, for those of you NOT in or previously in academia in social sciences and philosophy or language theory departments: this is actually a rather controversial or disruptive claim)
I cannot surmise what is experienced by an ant. I am not prepared to draw any lines and say “on this side” versus “on that side”. Honestly, I think cognition is ultimately a characteristic of the undifferentiated universe and happens to manifest quite well in us, and I’m not ready to say that the earth’s crust is entirely unaware. Also, there are all those complex questions about “free will” (which you have no doubt seen in thread titles in GD from time to time): what does it mean, what could it possibly mean, to say that we “are intelligent and cognizant and have REAL feelings, sensations, emotions, and thoughts” if at the same time it can be asserted that every bit of what we sense, feel, and think is no more than a response to the stimulus composed of prior events and immediate context? The argument that an ant “does not feel or think” is composed largely of the notion that all of its observable behavior is just a complex chemical reaction, a causal response to stimuli. Right? Yet we are FAR from a consensus on this board that we can claim otherwise for ourselves. And yet we EXPERIENCE ourselves as thinking feeling sensing creatures. For whatever THAT is worth, it may be something that is experienced, also, by the ant. Perhaps the bacterium, and the star and the gravitational field as well, are not strangers to it either. To argue otherwise, you would have to define some terms.
Debates on this topic frequently lead to someone asserting that animals have the same mental abilities as the mentally ill, or babies, or the severely retarded, or the senile. To me, however, that only proves the point that I’m trying to make. We know that babies should eventually grow up and we know that mental illness, retardation, and senility are problems that we would cure if we could. So the bottom line is that at their highest, animals have the mentality that we don’t want a person to have. Likewise in specific examples. A person in desperate circumstances may be forced to eat garbage to survive. A dog, on the other hand, is never happier than when it finds some rotting meat in the garbage can.
The problem I have with animal rights or animal equality as demanded by various groups is that animals are inadequate for those things. We can liberate an animal, but the animal would never know that it’s been liberated. We can knock down a fence and tell the cows on the other side that they’re free, but they would never know that they are free. We can pass a law saying that apes are equal to humans but the apes would never know that the law has been passed.
In reality, if we want animals to be treated well, we need to keep in mind that they are animals. In the last generation so, many people have started thinking that there’s no real difference between animals and humans, but that hasn’t improved the actual treatment of animals at all. Instead we’ve gotten a type of animal capitalism. Some animals get extreme luxury, such as pets, zoo animals, and lab chimps. For the majority of animals on farms, treatment has gotten worse, as evidence by crowding more animals into smaller cages or using acid to burn off cattle horns. To get back to proper treatment, we need to get back to proper perspective.