Human beings are worth more than Gorillas

In My Humble Opinion
1

I would think this would be an uncontroversial statement, they are a higher primate, but we are higher still. The loss of one of us is an even greater loss than one of them. But a lot of the sentiment and commentary surrounding the zoo incident where a Gorilla was shot seems to gloss over this basic reality.
Why?

A tranq would not have been instantaneous, the Gorilla is hundreds of pounds and dragging the kid by the leg, even if it did not intend any harm that was dangerous. The safest course of action once the kid was near the Gorilla was to take it out. This is not a feel good story, it IS tragic that such a creature was taken out, but that was a superior course of action to other less definitive tactics. Disagree? Why?
Some people are attacking the parent for having too many kids at the zoo, as if kids that are not leashed like dogs don’t EVER get loose even when they are solo. I even saw some comments (and UPVOTES) to the effect that since Gorillas are endangered, 1 of their lives was worth 70k of ours (apparently trying to normalize the relative population sizes of gorillas and human beings).

But this is all part of a larger poisoning of the mind where people treat animals as if they have just as much worth as a human being. They do not. Some get closer, dolphins, dogs, horses, great apes - either through greater intelligence of being cuter, others are further away either because of a less developed self awareness, or being grotesqueries like the sea lamprey, but to be AS valuable as a human being, you need to be on the same level as a human being.

ET would get just as much protection from me, because that is a fully sentient being at least as much as a human being if not moreso. But right now, we are the gold standard.

Who disagrees with this? And on what basis?
EDIT: To the last bit, there was an idea floated that part of the worth of a creature is tied to his level of sentience, this is a dangerous standard because we might come across a species in the cosmos that dwarfs our own sentience, are we then nothing more than an insect to be crushed in terms of our worth compared to them?

The way out of this problem is to set some threshold of sentience. This is an arbitrary line, some people might set it at the level of insects like some radical peta types, but I don’t have a solid argument about where to set this line/standard.

2

I’m not sure what “sentience” has to do with it. Usually “value” is based on the supply versus the demand. On that basis, a gorilla is worth far more than a human. Baby gorillas apparently go for $50,000 or so on the black market. More than a million human children are up for adoption in the US right now and no one wants them even though they are free.

3

I don’t know. China charges zoos a million dollars a year to rent pandas. Nobody is paying me a million dollars a year. I’m human. What’s my value compared to a panda?

4

How much is that in bananas?

5

Like a human fetus, a gorilla is not a person.

The majority of Americans don’t find killing fetuses a moral calamity; so the majority of Americans shouldn’t have a problem killing a non-person in the form of a gorilla.

6

A fetus isn’t even an “entity,” but a gorilla is.

Humans aren’t endangered. Gorillas are.

Very few people go to visit the human enclosure at the zoo. (Some zoos have actually had these, but they weren’t very successful. The chimpanzee tea party is much more popular.)

7

Perfect screen name/post combo.

8

People don’t go to a concert to watch a movie either.

9

You do realize you are not buying a human being when you adopt them, right?

10

spamforbrains, you did not mean to do it, but this example is a PERFECT example that letting the market be the sole determination of value in the universe is a TERRIBLE model to judge worth on its own. It is a rebuke to pure libertarianism if there ever was one… /sidebar

11

You can buy a slave from ISIS. Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Seems like gorillas and cattle are worth more.

12

Well, some do.

13

The value of a given human is kind of inconstant. I mean, if Ayman al-Zawahiri (current leader of al Qaeda) fell into the enclosure, how would people feel about killing an endangered gorilla to save him?

14

According to the law, yes but that does not make it so. But just because humans are more intelligent than gorillas does not make them “worth” more. And the world has far too many gorillas and far too few, criminally too few gorillas, as well as any other animal.

Humans see themselves as more important and worthy than animals but that does not make it so. Gorillas are rare, humans are not rare.

15

Hence why they mentioned “free”. Now granted many people do want to see gorillas but that does not mean they want to raise one. So the whole going to zoo vs. adoption is not comparable at all.

16

I have a proposal…

Stranger

17

It is simple to obtain the dollar value of the 4 year old. Change the scenario by letting the gorilla live and it kills the kid. The lawsuit would determine the child’s worth.

I think there must be something wrong with my wiring. I don’t find it easy to choose between the kid and an endangered animal. It seems that I view the extinction of a species as such a tragedy that I am willing to pay the penalty in some lawsuit. But I don’t have any objective reason to believe the extinction of a species, particularly some gorilla, is really anything harmful. It’s just a preference really. Which means I am willing to sacrifice a kid over some preference. Which seems fucked up.

18

Well, out with it. Don’t be modest.

19

How exactly is this relevant? Not that I want to delve further into the stupidity of this argument, but comparing a black market sale of something the law treats as property (generally speaking) to the adoption of a human being is really, really, really flawed (and insulting).

First, adoptions are rarely free. Second, that has nothing to do with my comment. The point is that equating adoption to a black market purchase makes no sense.

20

Value, morality, and ethics are all human constructs. And they are arbitrary at best.

This is why we have things like dolphin safe tuna.

It doesn’t make sense to apply logic to these things. We humans are emotional creatures. And our emotions are what guide our decisions when it comes to things like tuna vs dolphin or kid vs gorilla.

And frankly, logical or not, I agree that killing a gorilla to save a child is the right thing to do. Hell, I’d kill 20 gorillas to save a single child.