When your moral level is at the soles of your feet.
Ever see the movoe Mousehunt with Nathan Lane?
Yes, and yes, I was on the side of the mouse.
I’ve posted this on several occasions, but it appears that people who fight for animal rights have a very low opinion of humans. Before thinking about animals, how often do these people help the homeless, give money to battered women’s shelters, or would even consider sponsoring a child in a third world country? The amount of human suffering in the world dwarfs animal suffering (if only by the definition of “suffering” being partly communicative and thus definitive only for humans,) so pardon me if I don’t shed a tear for a mouse in a glue trap vs 150k people killed in an earthquake in Turkey.
humans4life
Other than the relocating of those 150,000 before they died, there was nothing that could be done about that. It’s one of those “natural” things. Unlike that of a mouse stepping onto a board covered in glue, and then being thrown in a bin to die of starvation, or stress.
So you personally killed all the people in Turkey? Because you did, in this thought experiment, trap the mouse yourself and just not bother to give it a humane death. You’d have more responsibility to the Turkish people if you yourself were involved in their deaths as well.
Look, you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat the animals they come into contact with in their daily lives.
Your first mistake was assuming that people who have empathy for animals outweigh their empathy for humans.
There are many more charities for the homeless than there are for animals - a significantly higher amount of money is used to help humans rather than animals, so I don’t think that argument holds any merit.
Finally, you are suggesting that worse disasters/events absolve smaller ones (which they don’t, otherwise I wouldn’t worry about my dog simply because there starving children in Africa).
Gavin B
Well, that’s a relief. I can now go back to a world in which I don’t have to worry about causing insects pain.
Superhal
What a crock. I care a great deal about human suffering. I just donated a bunch of food to Philabundance this past week. However, I don’t have complete power over other humans. I do have completer power over a mouse caught in a trap.
Your local animal shelter also has something that could be used to control mouse and rat populations in your house. And their solution doesn’t involve wasting good beverages.
One of the Neville kitties caught a mouse in the house once. I suspect it was quicker and less painful than a glue trap for the mouse, at least. I’ve also heard that mice can smell the cats before they come into a house, and tend to avoid houses with cats. I suspect that the mouse that came into our house was probably not too bright, as mice go.
I didn’t cause the murder and death of people overseas. That glue trap though, is directly laid at my door. I think it’s horrible, leaving the poor little things to starve to death. I put out snaptraps and we get mice every year. They die. I am OK with this - they invaded my house, this is what they get. But I make sure they are dead.
Starting off by putting aside whether or not I’ve murdered people (and good luck proving I haven’t), I don’t care a whit about any animal’s pain except for humans’. I do not go out and seek to cause them pain, but any statement that animal and human pain can be considered comparable fails on the outset as far as I’m concerned.
If that makes me morally shallow, then so be it. I enjoy violent video games so I’m a puddle regardless of whatever else I may do.
Comparable? That depends.
The pain of my dog is more important than the pain of, say, a terrorist who murdered thousands of innocent people intentionally and with malice.
I do not understand why people keep on bringing up the brain-dead notion of having empathy for animal’s pain means that you’re putting them level or above humans.
Maybe not morally shallow, but you do sound like a heartless a-hole.
Violent video games are fictional, inflicting pain on animals is not. To compare pixels with real-life flesh is laughable.
You guys do realize that empathy is not a zero sum game, right? You can have empathy for an animal and empathy for a Haitian baby! Try it! It’s fun!
Precisely. And implying that trapping a mouse and then letting it die a slow miserable death in my wastebasket is somehow morally comparable to not flying to Haiti leaves me wondering whether you’re that vile or just that stupid.
They have to be on the level of things that merit empathy.
You should listen to the bastards disregarding the suffering of bugs and plants.
Oh wait, you say that those things are only organic automatons? So are mice, dogs, monkeys, and humans. Which is why I use humanity rather than organic-automaton-ness as my critera for this sort of thing.
I’d actually be willing to debate this - though the first step would be to note that the digital automatons backing the video game characters 1) are comparably real, but 2) probably more comparable in complexity to a fly than a cat, much less a human.
Just kill the mouse quickly if you can. What’s the big deal?
Nobody said “organic automatons”, only you did. Some people differentiated between being able to sense pain and not being able to sense pain. I agree with that classification. If I could find a reliable measure I would also differentiate between things that perceive pain and things that don’t, but since I can’t, sensing pain is enough for me.
You are probably wrong in saying that “digital automatons” show more complexity than anything living. Even the lowly Drosphila fly and Sea Snail are capable of learning. I can’t even remember the last game I played where AI behavior was anything but patterned and in many cases, just dumb.
I’ve seen cats torture mice and birds for hours, keeping them at the brink of death, while toying with them. Are cats immoral?
Cats are amoral. You, on the other hand, have a responsibility. You know better.
After reading this thread, and making one post, it was time for a cigarette break. So I went out to the driveway to smoke. As I’m standing there, I see a gigantic ant. One of the big, scary looking ones, you only see down here in the south. It was like the size of my thumb. He was just sort of milling about, and looked like he might have been trying to chow on a drop of tree sap.
Now I’m basically a “live and let live, just don’t fuck with me” type of guy. I love animals, I don’t hunt, I don’t use glue traps, and I don’t pull the wings off of mice. But the “insects don’t feel pain” thing, just didn’t ring right in my ear, so I decided to conduct an experiment with the unwitting assistance from Mr. Badass Looking Ant.
First, I found a small twig and gently touched his butt, or thorax, or whatever. Startled, he ran a few inches away, but came back to the sap drop. Conclusion: he definitely felt something. Next, I took my cig and burnt him. He definitely felt that. He ran away really, really fast, and seemed panicked and confused. A far different, immediate, and sustained reaction than he had brushing him with the twig.
I can only conclude that he felt something, and what he felt was intensely unpleasant. In my book, that equals pain. Maybe not pain as you and I know it, but definitely pain as ants know it.