So if animals are people now, does that mean that they’ll be charged with murder, rape, theft etc. ?
The trouble with people like PETA is that they trivialise real conditions, so that when actual serious animal abuse is detected alot of ordinary people have already stopped listening, thinking its just yet another stunt.
Animals could well do without these peoples “help”, as they do more harm then good.
Alas, though, the long-term modifications of domesticated animals has been negative, in some respects. Compare wild turkeys to farm-raised turkeys, or wild cattle to herd cattle. We’ve bred all the brains out of 'em!
If, in the fantasyland of PETA’s ethics, we were to release all animals back to the wilderness, we would have to first engage in a long-term project of genetic rehabilitation. Otherwise, the poor bastards (the animals, not PETA) would starve to death, or fall prey to coyotes.
Agreed. The problem of small cages, tight pens, physical near-immobility, etc. in some “factory” farms is significant. Conditions need to be improved, even if this leads to an increase in prices. There are some things you can’t morally do, even to a turkey.
(I suppose, on the other hand, we could, some day, breed meat animals truly without brains – sort of like “meat trees” – just pluck another steak off the vine – and bypass the moral issues that way. My personal prediction is that we’ll get so good at making vegetable products taste like meat that the difference will all but vanish, and raising animals for food will become as obsolete as raising animals for pulling ploughs and streetcars…in the industrialized nations, anyway…)
Trinopus
Heh, the ex feral cat we forcibly captured and took to the vet to get him shots and neutering has to be physically thrown outside to get him to go out now. We can leave the front door open while hauling groceries in and the only thing we have to do is watch out for him winding his way around our feet as a tripping hazard. Closest he likes coming to the outside is laying on a window sill with the window open and the screen in.
Or we could take a leaf from Douglas Adams and breed the equivalent of the Ameglian Major Cow, an animal that wants to be eaten and has the capability of saying so clearly and distinctly.
Fitness as food supplies by human standards. I don’t think any of these creatures could survive predation outside of human communities. We have created an environment in which they can survive, and survive only with our support. I don’t think that amounts to “reproductive fitness”, unless one considers “deliciousness” as the primary criterion.
But maybe that is an acceptable criterion…
Or All Capp’s Shmoos…
This reminds me of the moral scale that Jonathan Glover proposed in his book “What Sort of People Should There Be?” Sisyphus (Mark I) is condemned to roll a rock uphill, as punishment. Sisyphus (Mark II) does it, without punishment or reward: he’s just a sort of rock-rolling robot, rolling the rock uphill the way you or I breathe air. And Sisyphus (Mark III) enjoys it.
Is it “slavery” if the individual in question enjoys it and wants it?
Trinopus
Oh it’s actually pretty simple. The chicken was once an obscure flightless bird in what is now Vietnam. Thanks to the symbiotic relationship with humans, its numbers are vastly larger. A similar case exists for the cow and horse. Reproductive fitness = more members.
Sure, chickens couldn’t survive very well in the wild anymore. But so what? That’s hardly an unusual aspect of symbiosis. Our gut fauna wouldn’t do nearly as well out in the wild. Pollinating plants die without their pollinators – which sometimes are limited to one specie. Only a few weedy species are generalists: examples include the Norway rat and the cockroach. Most live in a fairly constrained ecological niche, one that is shaped by other organisms.
ETA: “Ants and aphids share a well-documented relationship of mutualism.” Symbiotic Ants and Aphids Have a Strong Relationship
ಠ_ಠ Really?
No. But then again, Sea Kittens. Or, for that matter, the entire history of PETA - have they *ever *done something to help their own cause ?
Do chickens reproduce ? Are there more chickens around than, say, dodos ? Strategic goals accomplished. Chickendom marches on.
ETA: with less tongue in cheek, it’s like that old cat joke: the human thinks he has a pet cat. The cat knows he’s trained a human to feed him every day on the hour and operate those pesky doors for him.
Don’t even *try *comparing domestic chickens to cats, especially in the age of factory farms. Unless you think the “strategic goal” if you’re a chicken is to spend your life in a cage with barely any space to move? Getting half your beak cut off without painkillers? Having your genes messed up so that you can be a more efficient egg-laying machine, at the cost of a ton of health problems? Having your life span reduced to just a couple of years, most of that time spent stressed and miserable? Or, if you’re a male chicken, since only a small number of roosters are of any use to the poultry industry, most likely gassed or unceremoniously chucked in a grinder when you’re a day old?
OK, as soon as all domestic chickens live on grandma’s farm, I’ll shut up (although that’s not necessarily a picnic either), but until then… there aren’t enough roll eyes in the world.
Yeah, enjoy your eggs.
“Freedom” is a human value, and PETA is trying to impose human values on animals. They should be ashamed of themselves for not respecting the animals’ culture.
Science isn’t always a morality play.
Newsflash: you actually can compare apples and oranges. They have similarities - they are both fruit. They have differences - one of them has an edible skin.
Humans have a symbiotic relationship with both cats and chickens, in that the partnership has increased the population of both. That is straightforward natural selection.
Separately, some factory farmed chickens have been placed in situations possibly detrimental to their welfare. But Kobal2 didn’t address that: his point was with regards to #3.
I don’t have much insight into chicken welfare. I do have some exposure to claims made by animal rights activists: IME they deserve heightened scrutiny given their track record. Any other stance would be immoral. The subject is amenable to scientific investigation. For example I understand that a team from the University of Oxford argues that chicken welfare is influenced more by housing conditions than by stocking density. They say that, “Legislation to limit stocking density that does not consider the environment that the birds experience could thus have major repercussions for European poultry producers without the hoped-for improvements in animal welfare.” Promoting animal welfare should be a matter of observation and investigation, not vanity and anthropomorphizing.
From a moral and anthropocentric viewpoint, yes, battery farming sometimes involves horrible and barely acceptable practices that most of us tolerate because om nom nom.
From an evolutionary, amoral (not immoral, amoral) point of view however, it’s still mission accomplished with flying colours and a high score - as Measure to Measure notes, our artificial symbiotic relationship with tasty critters has resulted in an exponential growth and spread of chicken (and cow, sheep etc…) genes and individuals. Suck on that, tigers ! Who’s the big bad apex predator now, huh ?!
Natural selection and evolutionary pressures are not in the business of being nice. Ask dung beetles how they like their niche on days where it’s all runny.
Whatever domestic chickens are, they are certainly not a product of “natural selection”.
Not necessarily. remember much of the process that turned wild species into domestic species happened in pre-history, long before humans had any understanding of selective breeding. So effectively humans were no different to any other environmental selection process that turned wild birds in domestic chickens.
It wasn’t until the agricultural revolution of the 1700s that selective breeding was really understood and taken advantage of.
Of course they are. Just because we’re involved doesn’t make it “unnatural”. Aren’t we part of nature ?
Yes, with selective breeding and genetic fuckery and so forth we did change the make-up of chickendom over time, enhanced their plumpy goodness, made them fatter, made them lay more eggs and so forth. But all that wasn’t there when the seminal “let’s keep chickens around” decision was made, was it ?
Think about it this way: we are a particularly nasty and prolific sort of monkey that kills anything it can’t eat, farms everything we can and generally run this goddamn show. The alpha chicken “adapted” to this paradigm by being tasty, easy to catch and easy to farm which prompted a symbiotic relationship with us. Even though this relationship always ends in the chicken being killed and eaten, it still gives them a definite reproductive edge over, say, ravens, because there ain’t much eatin’ on a raven and the little pricks will claw your eyes out so we’ll kill the little blighters and good riddance ; while we’ll do everything we can to have more chickens around. Ravens have found other ways around the omnicidal hairless monkey paradigm of course - but in terms of pure headcount and geographical spread, they’re far behind their smug clucking overlords.
Had the alpha chicken “opted” instead to spit deadly poison at the slightest provocation, the symbiotic relationship would not have happened and they’d probably be long extinct by now. Natural selection, see ?
Just a brief highjack, but…I’ve never liked this line of argument. By its implications, plutonium is an element “found in nature,” which, by the more common interpretations of the phrase, it ain’t.
Humans are “part of nature,” but a “part apart.” Once we started engaging in large-scale modifications of the environment (i.e., planting fields of crops) we pretty much left nature to one side.
(I’ve heard a similar argument about the asteroid impact that exterminated the dinosaurs. The comet was “part of nature,” and thus the extinction was a “natural event.” Hm… Well, yes and no… It wasn’t an “organic process” but extremely exogenous. So… Much is determined by which of us gets to play Humpty Dumpty – that’s all…)
Trinopus (has the physical shape for the role…)
And more to the point the term “Natural Selection” is defined in relation to its antonym “Artificial Selection”. To say “humans are natural” in the case is pretty nonsensical.
My point is that artificial selection implies humans intelligently selecting the traits they desire and selectively breeding organisms to produce them. This is a pretty recent development. Most of the process that turned wild birds into chickens did not involve much intelligence on our part.
I don’t really see that we did, no. Not any more than an ant colony shaping an acre or two of dirt into a towering maze of twisty little passages, all alike, is “leaving nature to one side”. Apart from the self-evident scale, what’s the difference between New York City and an ant hive ?
Hell, in the context of chicken farming, there really is none since for example some species of ants have been known to use aphids as “dairy cattle” and farm them, including taking away aphid eggs back to the hive to protect them for the winter, putting them on the right kind of plants to hatch in the spring, or even keep entire herds of them underground.
Humanity’s reshaping its environment to suit its needs does have more drastic or wider effects than most creatures because there’s so very many of us and we’ve grown so very good at it (also because we’ve learned to make our own tools instead of relying on finder’s luck like some other monkeys I could name), but really every species does it to some extent.
Certainly true. Wild turkeys are pretty darned similar to domesticated ones… And it doesn’t take a Nobel laureate to figure, “Let the fattest ones reproduce!”
The specific technologies. Fire, steel, refinement of petroleum, transmission of electricity, etc. There are no other species that do these things, and, in my opinion at least, there is a significant qualitative difference.
Add to this the transmission of information by means other than genetic coding and you have a pretty serious discontinuity. (Yes, I know that songbirds learn their songs and mama tigers teach their cubs how to hunt, but, c’mon, the bandwidth of the written word really overwhelms these fairly trivial exceptions. I only bring them up because someone else surely would’ve!)
Trinopus