I was watching one of those Discovery Channel shows, with fish eating each other up (even their baby fish) and thought, “gosh, I’m glad I’m not a fish or a wildebeast or one of those furry little things always being squeezed to death by pythons.”
Then I started thinking, because it was 9:00 and I had nothing else to do. What’s more awful: nature or human beings?
On the nature downside, nature is heartless: billions of creatures die horribly, painfully, every day. Many never make it beyond babyhood. Some are killed by their own parents.
On the nature upside, they don’t do it out of perverseness; that’s just they way they’re programmed: they have to screw and eat and survive. “No hard feelings.”
On the people downside: well, I don’t have to remind you of war, murder, destruction of the environment and animals, failing to send thank-you notes.
But on the people upside, we do sometimes selflessly help others and create great works of art.
Nature can not be cruel for the reasons you stated. There is no malice and no love. It just is.
While humans are capable of selfless acts and create great works of art, far too often we use our creative gifts to knowingly harm others. To me, it’s the ability to decide what action to take that is the difference.
We had a tank full of tropical fish once. Neon Tetras. Black Mollies. Swordtails. And Guppies. Inside a couple of months, we had a tank full of guppies.
The problem isn’t that guppy mommies eat their young. It’s that they don’t do it enough.
I don’t know if I agree that animals lack the ability to be “cruel”. Certainly we can’t know their motivation, until someone finds the human/jaguar Rosetta Stone, but I don’t see why we should be so unique.
My cat keeps a mouse alive, heart ready to burst with fear, a limb or two crushed, for hours on end before she finally kills it. Is she being cruel? Who knows? Maybe she’s just “playing” and doesn’t understand that she’s hurting the mouse. Maybe she’s working off simple stimulus/response and she has no choice but to extend her paw and bat at a little darting movement. Maybe she’s waiting for me to get down on all fours and let her teach me how to hunt, already! Or maybe she gets off on the mouse’s pain and fear just like some humans do. I don’t see any way to know.
The more and more we learn about animals, the more we realize they aren’t so different from us. When I was a kid, it was tools that separated us from the animals. Then we found otters using rocks to open seashells. So then it was “created tools” - materials that were purposefully changed to make them better tools. But then we found chimps creating tools out of twigs to eat termites. So then it became “problem solving”, but of course everything from octopuses to ravens to rats can solve problems. We keep moving the bar to try and find something that makes us unique, and we keep failing. (Personally, I think it might be abstract language, but even that may be proven wrong someday. Grey parrots have at least made us consider the matter more closely.) We used to say only humans killed our own kind (outside of territorial disputes) or could commit rape. We now know that animals murder, rape, beat their mates, have “racial” prejudice and commit acts of war. They’re not so different from us.
What’s crueler? I don’t know. Until we can conclusively understand the motivations behind the behaviors we witness, I don’t know how we can know.
Certainly nature appears to be cruel, and no doubt lots of life in nature is harder than any life I want to live, but all those scenes of blood-and-guts and abandonment is a natural culling of the herd, so to speak.
Greed motivates the human animal. We throw off the balance to Get More Stuff. It’s true, our brains are able to create beautiful things and it makes our time on the planet richer. But there’s a spoiled little brat in there somewhere that always has to have more than his share of the pie. We steamroll over man and beast to get it. We tip the scales for a temporary gain, knowing full well we’re creating more trouble for ourselves down the road. We’re smarter than the critters, but we’re none too bright. I think humanoids are crueler than the rest of the critters.
A story naturalist Niko Tinbergen (IIRC) told was about raising water shrews, something very difficult to do, but it had interesting results in that he got to study water shrew behavior up close. He found that the water shrews would capture and eat a frog while it was still alive, and leave it partially eaten but living, coming back to it later for another bite. Even as a naturalist, he found this wrenching. But the fact is that they had no need to kill the frog to eat it, whereas, say, a lion does have to kill the antelope it eats first. It may look humane that the lion kills quickly, but it’s mainly efficiency.
Come to think of it, snakes and frogs often swallow their prey alive, too.
Nature may have cruel (to us) results, but it’s not planned cruelty, just efficiency (why waste effort killing your prey if you don’t have to? It’ll be dead soon, anyway). And certainly there’s nothing to derive perverse pleasure from the suffering.
I’m going to say that people are more cruel, but most because I didn’t go to Junior High with Nature.
I think before the debate is resolved, we have to both understand the nature of cruelty and the nature of, well, nature, better. Does the cat understand the pain it causes when it plays with its food? Can we then say that something is “cruel” if it can’t even comprehend the consequences of its action?
Have you ever fed two dogs, or two cats? Some of them get along and share the resources just fine, but many of them will push the submissive one away from the dish and let it go hungry, getting too fat for it’s own health in the meantime.
You may be onto something in your assertion that only humans “[know] full well we’re creating more trouble for ourselves down the road.” Again, I don’t know how we can know if you’re right, but we can pretend for the moment you are. But this may simply be evidence of how strong our “animal instincts”, including greed, really are. We know we shouldn’t, but we still act like dogs at a feeding dish.
What level of “nature” are we talking about? A fish eating another fish may not be “cruel” because it’s basic programming, but a higher-level primate or mammal can and will deliberately do things out of malice.
Other animals can be as greedy as humans. We even refer to the worst humans as having “animal greed”. A hummingbird perches in the tree outside my window and harasses others who dare come to “his” feeder. You might call this programming. I’d say human greed is a result of same mechanisms. (The fact that many humans work to suppress this programming might tilt the scales in favor of humans being less cruel. But I’m not sure I really buy that.)
Yes, animals can be greedy when it comes to food, but to me, that translates to survival. I’ve never seen an animal with too much “bling.” I saw a thing on Mardi Gras beads being manufactured in China. It highlights a whole 'nuther level of “ugly” in humans. Perfectly sane people clamoring for crap that will be thrown away.
You should watch Sir David Attenborough’s excellent show on bowerbirds. These creatures collect bling to decorate their bowers in order to attract mates. They often steel bling from other bowerbirds.
Yes, animals can be greedy when it comes to food, but to me, that translates to survival. I’ve never seen an animal with too much “bling.” >> Kalhoun
I have known many dogs to steal items and not destroy them. I placed one pup in a home where he would steal all kinds of things- socks, watches, toys, towels, etc… he would never tear anything up- he would sneak it off and place it in his “stash” under his bed. No one even saw him playing with these things, he just accumulated them.
Yeah, I guess I’ve heard of crows doing the bling thing too. I still think humans are worse. We have higher reasoning powers and continue to act like single celled life forms.
Why are people or animals cruel? Probablly becasue of natural instinct or maybe out of boredom. Maybe nature has been cruel to them, so as they say, crap rolls down hill, and if that huge force that we call nature is cruel to us, then we find something we are stronger than, and take it out on that…
The difference is that man is conscious of his cruelty…(and those who beleive in God must also believe that god is conscious of the cruelty he is responsible for) but if you dont believe in god, then you have to ask yourself: “is nature conscious of its cruelty?”