I dunno, but I’m still waiting for Andy Kaufmann to make a surprise re-appearance on David Letterman.
DHR
Maybe it was my imagination, but I saw a cat run under the wheels of a moving car. It looked to me like the cat was aimimg for the wheels and changed course when the car tried to swerve to avoid hitting it.
Gee, your own argument helps support serious consideration that other animals may at times consciously decide to end their lives and calculate their own expeditions or executions of suicide. Many people find it most difficult to believe that other animals can do anything without people dictating or understanding the intelligent details of it. Let’s remember that the first civilizations on the planet were made millions of years before human civilizations----by ants! Maybe the stressful workweek and suicides were also first accomplished by ants. With so much sense going in that direction, why not posit it, instead of bypassing it!
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Originally posted by ASPA:
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And whop say they don’t. May there be at least a few drivers (out of the many) who hit animals on the road who HONESTLY claim that the animal threw itself in front of the traffic. Also, just last year my neighbor’s cat curled up under a tree and “died.” Was the fatality involuntary depression or involuntary poisoning, or may it just as probably have been voluntary poisoning to end depression. One concl;usion seems no more probable than the other. It depends largely on whether we accept that human beings are not the only one’s who may act with ‘conscious will.’ And not all people think HUMANS do that, either.
Quote:
Do they know yet why whales beach themselves? Some have suggested that it’s a form of suicide.
I think I remember reading somewhere that the reason whales beach themselves is because they can’t stand the sound of human-made underwater equipment (i.e. military submarines’ sonar, underwater explosions from bomb testing, that kind of thing). Because whales have much greater ranges in their ability to produce and hear sounds, it does seem plausible that what might be tolerable to a human in a submarine might drive a whale within hearing distance insane, or even cause enough pain that they try to get out of the water to escape the sound (because we can’t hear the higher pitches of the noise, like with dog whistles). And, additionally, it makes for an interesting hypothesis as to why even after towing a beached whale out into the ocean, they often swim right back and beach themselves all over again…if the sound was repellent enough to make them do it in the first place, it’s easy to see why they might do it again.
Dogs and cats do that…
and not all of them do
Sorry, I have to ask. Just what would the penalty be if someone DID kill themselves?
used to be execution by hanging, in one of the states in New England. I can’t recall which state it was, at the moment.
I have heard stories of whales in captivity who have exercised themselves into exhaustion and sunk to the bottom of the holding tank in an apparently deliberate suicide attempt. I have no idea if these stories are true, but it seems suspciciously like animal rights propaganda, so take it FWIW.