I don’t know if reptiles and insects enjoy their lives but is it obvious to me that mammals and birds do. Ever watch a fawn playing in a field, or your cat or dog playing when you aren’t around? They are enjoying themselves. They don’t know what is coming next. Might be a violent death, might be starvation, might be abandonment in old age, they don’t know what their end will be.
And nether to you.
Huh? Life is long, but dying because you’re getting eaten is a matter of seconds, minutes at most. Sounds like a reasonable deal.
Except for cattle in the meat industry and caterpillars infested by parasite wasps.
I’m guessing that even if animals have feelings resembling ours, their life is just all they know so it’s not as distressing to them as you’d think.
I’ve also have the silly thought that hell is being reincarnated as some lower animal.
I’m not convinced that animals suffer the emotional trauma that people do, some animals sure, if you beat a dog every day it has some psychological impact.
Animals that are maimed or disfigured or dismembered in some way don’t seem to harp on it like a human would.
I stumbled on a video on YouTube one day where a hunter, using a knife castrated a wild boar, which I guess makes them get fatter, and more palatable to eat. The boar sort of shrieked in pain but once it was over it stopped immediately and seemed fine, I don’t think many human males would get over something that traumatic so fast. I think animals avoid something they’ve learned will cause them pain but they don’t ruminate over past pain the way humans do and they don’t have enough introspection to analyze what had happened to them. If they did they couldn’t possibly survive in the wild very long .
I’m just LOL’ing over here at the image of a scientist crawling around a beach somewhere and GIVING MORPHINE TO CRABS as one does.
You haven’t seen my cat kill a mouse. It’s an hours long process of total torture and terror. :eek:
On a BBC Frozen Planet episode several years ago I watched footage of several killer whales cooperating to catch a seal. The seal was on top of a small chunk of ice, too far from shore to make a break for it. The whales formed a line and swam rapidly toward the ice chunk and then under it,creating a big wave that washed over it and dragged the seal into the water. The seal quickly scrambled to get back up onto the ice. A few more wave attacks, a few more recoveries by the seal. The ice breaks into a smaller piece, and now the seal is having a harder and harder time getting back aboard and keeping all of his parts away from the edges. Eventually the seal realizes he is screwed; he’s getting tired, there is nothing he can do to escape this, and the whales will not relent. Eventually he stops fighting, and you can see him staring at the camera while a whale gently pops his mouth above the water, grabs the seal by the tail, and gingerly pulls him into the water.
This is apparently not an uncommon hunting strategy. In this video (this is not the one I saw), tourists on a boat watched as whales tried for two goddam hours to catch a seal using this method. Imagine the feeling of being in mortal peril for two hours.
Mother Nature is a stone cold bitch.