Feel free to go live in the jungle with the other animals if civilization doesn’t suit your fancy. There is absolutely nothing stopping you.
I will continue to applaud the exploitation of this planet, since without us to use it, and appreciate it(even if we take it for granted sometimes), what point does it have?
Along the same lines, my husband and I participate in a catch and release spay/neuter program for feral cats so they don’t overpopulate the area and thus endanger themselves by producing more animals than they can feed or get hit by cars, etc. We don’t have to do this and it costs us a lot of money.
As opposed to non humans who devote their lives to helping others. Like those schnauzers who raised $59,000 for Jerry’s Kids, or that ocelot who reads to the blind on Wednesdays in Bangor, Maine.
You realize animals eat our bodies after we die too, right? We also host and sustain the lives of all manner of parasites and blood-sucking insects while we are alive. Plants desperately need the CO2 we exhale. Hell, even our waste helps fertilize the soil. I’d say we are extremely beneficial to the Earth, and the rest of the animal kingdom should be thanking us on a daily basis. They are a bunch of ungrateful bastards, if you ask me.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
That damn ocelot gets all the press, and it’s not even all day Wednesday, just from 8-12. Did you know that moose often lead the blind safely across roads? 10,000 moose in NH helping the blind, and that damn cat gets all the attention because it can read. As if that’s so great. We all know what happens when animals get book learning: they become communists, that’s what.
You wanna talk selfish? I’ll give you selfish!
It’s the prokaryotes! Little bastards have been around forever plotting against us! Sure you started the chain of life but you have no dignity, no self-respect to let the fucking eukaryote flowers bloom while your slimy-ass trunk withers, having done its job. Could you let it go? NO!
You hang around around acting like you da bad-ass but your time is over! We’ve moved on. You so old-school mother-fucker! Yeah! I said it, I mean it, now move along ya sorry protoplasmic piece of shit. Dat’s right homes! Oh, yeah, the “we at the bottom of the sea shit”? Well we got a few bombs gonna raise the temperature from 500 to 1 zillion degrees when we get 'em aimed right. And the tube worms too, you can tell their sorry asses to get up into the tidal zone where they belong, goddamnit.
And as for your “numerical superiority” well get a load of this: Every time I slap my arm I kill a couple thousand of you little free-loaders at the cost of only two or three hundred cells! Gimme a body count! I have an anti-prokaryotic BB gun to back this shit up too! It hurts to use it but has a antiseptic-per-ouch rating that is legendary.
You should see me go nuts on a ball of sourdough starter!
No it isn’t. Some people don’t have a problem with the former; others do. Abortion - often by the exposure of the newborn - has been practiced since time immemorial. And the jury is still out on global warming.
Gratuitous insults do not help your argument.
I presume you mean conceited. Wrong. I don’t see lions acting to preserve their prey animals. Or dolphins. Or sharks. We see animals fighting over mates, land, whatever all the time.
You mean like prides of lions or troupes of baboons or schools of fish or flocks of birds?
You’ve evidently not read many TMI threads.
How is abortion different from a lion or tiger killing the cubs of another male?
Rubbish. Almost every action by an animal is selfish, from gathering food to competing for mates to sacrificing itself to ensure the survival of its progeny.
We were put on Earth to destroy it? Who by?
Why shouldn’t we be selfish anyway. Every other animal is. The only reason it looks like we’re more selfish is that we have more power to exploit. If wasps could shoot lasers I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be relinquishing their weapons in the interests of altruism.
That’s a human-centric vision taken to ridiculous extremes. There was plenty of point to life before humans came along, and presumably there will be plenty of point for life that survives long after we’re gone. The point of life has always been do survive and reproduce, not make abstract judgements about value. There’s nothing particularly special about humans that makes the planet worthless without us.
Apart from worth being defined as we please. If for example, I define the worth of the Earth as the level of enjoyment and appreciation a species has living on it, I could conclude that the animals living on it aren’t appreciative enough. Thus it loses it’s worth.
But then, if there’s no humans, perhaps there’s no concept of worth anyway.
Exacly. I’d like to see someone explain how “life” is objectively better than any other configuration of subatomic particles.
I reject the assumption that everything we do benefits us and only us. There have been highway projects that have been stopped because of their impact on some obscure endangered species. There have been box culverts placed under roads for the sole purpose of allowing frogs to safely cross highways. We place limits on hunting and fishing so that wildlife isn’t exterminated. We have laws on the books to protect cruelty to animals. True, the human species mostly serves itself, but what species does not?
Well, I’ll concede that point to you
I’m not sure I reject that. When we preserve animal habitats and species, it’s usually because we find them aesthetically attractive or interesting. Is that really altruistic? It does benefit the animals, but we’re generally interested in saving animals only as far as they are of interest to us.
The OP treats that kind of selfishness as trait unique to humans, which it definitely is not. It’s sheer self-hatred and self-importance to pretend every other animal on Earth fits into a cycle of life or a biome or whatever, but humans do not. Every animal acts in its own self-interest, period, and the benefits they provide to other species and to the planet overall are unintentional. The OP admits this but he’s either not understood it or ignored it because it doesn’t fit into his upbraiding.
Save the quark! Who will think of those strange, colorful, charming quarks?
And what if our ‘humanity’ arose via a species of ancestor that only ate fruit and vegetables, and our resumption of meat eating was a step back towards barbarism, or our animal state?
I have dogs. You want to talk selfish?
To see hateful, read up on chimpanzee warfare.
Human beings are pretty good at rationalizing our instincts. We’re sophisticated, in a bad way. But our instincts include some good things & some really foolish things. We just kid ourselves about which is which.
We didn’t; we have the teeth and digestive system of an omnivore. And our ancestors left the remains of camps littered with the bones of the meat they ate. Nor is meat eating particularly barbaric, especially compared to some of the other things our ancestors did.