For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By FlarePath
#1690631
In that case human babies have no rights until...what age do you suggest?

Are you saying that those with limited mental capacity, certain physical disabilities or illnesses that incapacitates them should have no rights?

Per another thread - how about the rights of those with severe dementia or mental illness?


Sorry but that is a pointless piece of nonsense, all humans irresepective of their age, or mental cognicence have rights automatically granted by the fact they are humans by us other humans.
By PaulB
#1690632
Korenwolf wrote:One has the sofa and the other one my nice swivel lounge chair...ever since we adopted them :)


Cats are different.... you have the concept of ownership and adoption the wrong way round. Remember, dogs have owners, whereas cats have servants!
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By Sooty25
#1690642
lobstaboy wrote:
Sooty25 wrote:
lobstaboy wrote:. Do they all need rights? Where do we draw the line? What about parasites like intestinal worms - they are animals.

..


The difference is, the only intestinal worm you are likely to come across, is one thats got inside you and is doing harm. To kill and get rid of it is self defence. This elephant isn't harming anybody, quite the opposite.


Well, yes, that's why I gave that example.
So it seems that an animals rights are still dependent on the interests of humans; they aren't absolute or inalienable. Not rights at all in fact.
What if the elephant went rogue and started to hurt people? It wouldn't have any rights then, I guess.


What if the elephant has an intestinal worm.? If it was capable of unilaterally getting rid of the worm, would that still be a breach of the trespassing worms rights? How would those rights be further affected if a human acting in the best interest of the elephant, administered a treatment to clear the worm, possibly without the elephants consent!
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By JAFO
#1690666
FlarePath wrote:
In that case human babies have no rights until...what age do you suggest?

Are you saying that those with limited mental capacity, certain physical disabilities or illnesses that incapacitates them should have no rights?

Per another thread - how about the rights of those with severe dementia or mental illness?


Sorry but that is a pointless piece of nonsense, all humans irresepective of their age, or mental cognicence have rights automatically granted by the fact they are humans by us other humans.


You said "rights infer/require responsibilities" and now you say they don't, which would you like to choose?
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By eltonioni
#1690682
Rights and responsibilities are well established within individual species. Not so much for other species. Humans might have broken the programming to some extent but only in respect of what's good for our species. Individual altruism is usually pretty selfish at it's root.

All assuming that there's such a thing as free will, but that's another topic :D
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By lobstaboy
#1690688
PaulB wrote:...dogs have owners, whereas cats have servants!


As a long time keeper of both species I can tell you that this is a myth propagated by cat owners in self justification for the way they lavish attention and comforts on their ungrateful pet. Humans are servants to dogs also - but the dog is wiser than a cat and knows it is in its interest to treat it's servants well and to reward them with a smile and a wag of the tail...
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By JAFO
#1690695
It probably makes little sense to speak of the rights of animals, and less to think of responsibilities, because such things are a human construct. What we are talking about is how we should treat them. Someone once said that a society should be judged not on how humans treat one another but on how they treat the non-human animals they share their world with.

I suppose, to some extent, how we believe we should treat creatures depends a great deal on how we believe they perceive their world. Do they have feelings? Do they know what it is to be lonely? To enjoy companionship? To love? To be happy and sad? Although these are our labels that does not make them our emotions. There is a great deal to suggest that, at the very least, many mammals share many of our emotions. There are many similarities between the architecture of their brains and ours so why would that not be the case?

I attempt to treat animals in a way which acknowledges this.
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By Paul_Sengupta
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1690701
PaulB wrote:
Bill McCarthy wrote:I wondered if the rhino I saw, up to his knees in mud, was dreaming of the dusty plains of Africa.


You’d be lucky to see a rhino in the dusty plains of Africa, and if you did it would probably be hornless (the horn having been removed to reduce the risk of the animal’s killing by poachers.)


Oh, we did. We came round a corner in a car and there was a rhino sleeping across the road. We woke it up. There was a tense moment as we wondered if the rhino would be a bit grumpy having been woken up. It still had its horn. It wasn't grumpy. It looked at us and stood up. Looked at us again and moved off the road to the side to let us pass, turned to look at us and just stopped there. We drove past very slowly with the rhino a foot or two to the side. We took lots of photos! :D
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By Flyin'Dutch'
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1690702
One major difference between animals and humans is that animals live in the here and now. They have no concept of yesterday, tomorrow, next year.

The immense anthropomorphisation that has taken place over the last few decades makes me wonder what some people are looking for, which emotional voids need filling and whether the outcome does animals more harm than good.

As humans we have a moral (and sometimes legal) obligation to ensure animals are well looked after (including protecting their habitat etc) but taking out insurance to ensure that moggie kan go to the veterinary specialist a few hundred miles away to get their diabetes managed optimally with daily jabs is in my books not congruous with doing 'what is best' for the animal.
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By lobstaboy
#1690709
Flyin'Dutch' wrote:One major difference between animals and humans is that animals live in the here and now. They have no concept of yesterday, tomorrow, next year.


Humans live in the here and now. What else is there?
Animals have memory, just as humans do.
Animals probably lack the detailed mathematical sense of time that modern humans have (but there is very little science on this as far as I can tell) - and its interesting that we are fairly certain that ancient, primitive man had a very different sense of time to the one we have.
Interestingly there is some evidence that some animals can plan for the future. here's an example that I found quickly, but I remember reading others:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... ne.0074896
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By eltonioni
#1690754
My dog has high value treats buried all around the garden, and one or two places inside too. Animals can definitely plan for the future, whether it's concious or not.
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By lobstaboy
#1690757
eltonioni wrote:...concious or not.


And that's the key I think. Somehow because humans have a sensation of consciousness and we assume that animals don't, then we believe that they are not the same as us and we can do what we like with them. It's not an argument that I accept.

But:
1. What is consciousness? What is it for? What was it's survival value when it first evolved?
2. Why does being conscious set us apart ethically from (non - conscious) animals?
3. How do we know that some animals are not conscious, or maybe some have a rudimentary form?

Recent studies into consciousness seem to suggest that it's not the top level thought process that it appears - it's more of a fiction generated help us as highly social animals to have a story about what we and our peers are doing - it enables us to have a theory of mind. It's not real at all and makes stuff up. Deeper, subconscious thought processes filter loads of stuff out and only present to our consciousness things that seem interesting or different.

Enough of me rambling. It's worth reading Daniel Dennett on this stuff.
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