Sure, let me put you on a cage and whip you to do silly and stupid tricks in front of an audience, whatever you want it or not.
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Ok.
-The fact is, if the animal doesn't mind(and a non-abused trained one really generally doesn't mind), why is it a bad thing?
How can you tell if they mind or not, can you talk to animals? No? Oh well.
-Is training a dog to fetch is bad? What about training a horse to be ridden? A chicken to play tic tac toe?
That's different, is a form of affection, you are not using it to gain money.
-Also if "living beings should never entertain" is true, then what about humans? Is a dude doing non offensive stand-up comedy a bad thing?
It's not a bad thing as long as they are not forced to do it.
Because cats and dogs have evolved alongside humans since the dawn of our species and we've evolved to understand their body language and vocalizations insofar as them liking things and not liking things. Is there parity? No. But we're pretty good, as good as you'd expect really considering dogs and cats don't have human level intelligence and thus talking to them when they're not able to process the world like us is a really difficult task on its face.
I know when my dog likes something. I know when it doesn't like something. It's as simple as a tail wag as opposed to it barking and running away. Like it does to the vacuum. You know my dog really likes? Treats. If it does a task and gets a treat, it's happy. It enjoys that. I know because of those body language things I mentioned. Guess how many treats it gets if it does it and earns me money? All the treats. My dog gets all the treats if it's a major method of me getting money. Not just treats but a huge back yard to run around in and other dog friends to play with. It reaps the benefits of our agreement. Better than me honestly, the dog can't book it's own shows or manage its career.
No kidding. Which is what Togath is asking about.
So if the animals enjoy performing and they're treated ethically there's no problem?
No, because, first they can't decide for themselves and second you are profiting by the exploration of this animals who have no say if they want to spend their entire life doing tricks to amuse a bunch of humans. But nothing that I say will change your mind or opinion about me so why bother?
I think that's pretty judgmental of you. Are you saying animals are incapable of making choices? Because my dog makes choices all the time. It's not exploitation if the animal is enjoying it.
What are you talking about? I don't have an opinion about you...like at all...and even if I did what would that have to do with what you're saying? Don't you also think it's rather dishonest, when confronted with someone who disagrees with you, to immediately throw up your hands and act like the other party is being unreasonable? Because I sure think it is. If the facts are on your side, I'll change my mind. I already don't approve of the circus abusing animals. So I clearly am almost at your level.
Sure I bet your dog is a great source of empirical information. :p
I bet he choose his owner, the lifestyle he has and the place he lives.:smallamused:
Well no, it's anecdotal but I didn't think we were holding ourselves in academic rigor here. Least of all because you've not given empirical data either.
He chose as much as I chose who my parents were. His lifestyle is FAR FAR better than it would be were he in the wild. Even with playing fetch and all the other things. He has a nice warm apartment to live in. He's not hunted by other wild animals. When he's sick he gets taken to the vet instead of suffering and probably dying. He gets to eat far far better than he would in the wild. On a consistent basis no less. Not only does he not have to worry about being hunted, he doesn't have to worry about hunting. Of course that's not EVERY dog but you acting like a domesticated animal is somehow worse off than their undomesticated peers just because they have to jump through some hoops is rather absurd.
The reason I don't agree with you isn't because I'm just stubborn and obstinate. I don't agree with you because you're making terrible points and using terrible arguments to back them up. For the record.
Yeah, my dog is neutered. It was done when he was a puppy? He has no memory of the event, no mental scarring, no nothing. You know what's the best part about my dog being neutered? Why I chose a dog who was over one who wasn't? The best part is he's not making puppies that don't need to be in this world. Because dogs are, sadly, not smart enough to not bone every available female they can. We have a massive problem with stray dogs and cats in the country I live in. I imagine you do too.
I'd rather clip my dog than have thirty puppies who may or may not be able to find a home. And the ones who don't be put into shelters where they may or may not find a home. And if they can't do either of those things, they get killed. You're starting to sound less and less like someone who actually cares about animals and more and more like someone who just thinks humans are out to abuse them. Which you're fundamentally doing if you're serious about spaying and neutering your pets.
Yeah, pretty much everything he's saying.
Just wanted to point out that, unnecessary snark aside, we can actually communicate with animals pretty well. There have been studies ([[REDACTED]]) that show that interspecies communication is totally a thing; dogs can recognize a ticked-off cat and will react differently to the same command given in different tones of voice, rats make a sound that is recognizably laughter -- once pitched down enough that we can hear it -- when you tickle them, cats do know we want them to do things and just don't care, and the list goes on and on. Heck, we can tell when elephants are mourning their dead and watch their family relationships evolve.
So yes, actually, we can talk to animals. Not precisely enough to discuss philosophy, perhaps, but if you're going to argue that we should stop working with animals altogether because nobody can tell what they're feeling, you are demonstrably wrong. You might not be able to talk to animals (although if you can't, how do you know they don't like being abused?), but people better-informed about animal behavior can certainly tell the difference between a happy animal having fun performing tricks and one that's been abused into doing things and there's no real reason to immediately discount people's intuition on the matter given the studies I described above.
As it happens, I don't like the use of animals in circus-type performances, let alone at places like Seaworld; it is absolutely the case that the economics trumps the animals' welfare way too often. I don't think that means that it's never okay to train them, though, even to perform tricks -- and I'm hopeful that as our ability to communicate with animals becomes more sophisticated, we can find more equitable ways of interacting with them, and perhaps there will be something like a circus again.
Dogs have body language: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4494300/
Dogs understand tones of voice: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6303/1030
Tickled rats laugh: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6313/757
Elephants mourn: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1617198/
Dogs recognize faces: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0143047
Cats recognize faces: http://link.springer.com/article/10....071-015-0927-4
Sad baboons, just because: https://news.upenn.edu/news/baboons-...-among-friends
Also, cats learn how to meow to get their owners, specifically, to do stuff: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12735363
I'm away from my citations right now and this is totally not my field, but I hope my slapdash Googling has provided some indication of the kind of studies I mean: saying we can't talk to animals and therefore have no insight into their emotional state flies in the face of a growing body of scholarship.
[[REDACTED BY REQUEST]]
That quote...makes my head hurt. Glad I'm a cool human and can communicate that pain in text. Sure does explain a whole heck of a lot though.
I'm not trying to explain anything except why I'm trying to use scientific papers (and a news article, apparently. eugh.) to refute the claims of someone who presumably wouldn't consider that a valid means of argumentation, because some people on these boards read the entirety of a post containing a quote of theirs as a response to them alone, they respond accordingly, and then the threads get hard for people to follow.
My point remains, though: whatever value you assign to it, the science is there to suggest that animals can communicate emotions in ways we can recognize, and if you go look at the figures it's surprising how well our intuition about what a distressed animal looks like correlates with how animals communicate distress. In other words, if a dog looks happy to jump through some hoops, they're probably happy -- so I'm reluctant to say that all trained animals are miserable just because I can't get them to say how happy they are in English.
There's also the fact that modern ethical animal training follows the carrot approach rather than the stick approach. So if the animal really doesn't want to do the trick, it can presumably not perform the trick. It's just that it earns an extra reward for performing the desired trick.
I should also clarify... I am against abusing animals. I just view training(as long as it's stuff like what WarKitty described, where the training causes no harm*) as a perfectly fine acceptable thing to do. Especially because it is possible to tell if an animal is unhappy.
*though harm in the form of something like "brief mild harmless zap from an electrically charged fence used to keep large animals(cattle, elephants) in/out of an area" is more okay since it's very brief mild thing that's much safer than the alternatives.
Everything of value that could be said about this topic has already been said. If I'm wrong, do let me know, but this tends to be the point where the thread just devolves into endless back-and-forth arguments of escalating pedantry and self-justification, and every important point is made until everyone is blue in the face.
I believe that animals do have rights. Well very limited ones but they do have rights.
I think the biggest problem with "Oh they are happy so is fine" is that they have no frame of reference. They don't know what life is like without being slaves so they can't complain.
Of curse you going to to be happy, you don't know any better.
HER actual point. The venus symbol is also the female sign.
Question, do you have sufficient frame of reference to compare being raised as a neolithic hunter-gatherer to whatever upbringing you had? Can you say you're happier in your current life than you'd be in that one? Is it then fair to say that you're just a slave to modernity, because you lack the ability to make a meaningful comparison?
So many people here whould be ok with being pets to the more advanced alien overlords if they ever show up. :smallbiggrin:
Probably. I mean given how easily the human brain is kept occupied with the various forms of entertainment we've already come up with, it's arguable we're essentially our own pets as it is. If the Zargons are smart, they won't bother fighting humanity for control of Earth, they'll just offer free hypernet access. Once the direct neural stimulation packages come online, nobody's throwing a war even if they wanted to. "Sorry sir, we were gonna show up for that whole battle thing, but the new season of Interactive Sex Gods just dropped, so everybody was, uh, in their bunks."
Well...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._poster300.jpg
The 1988 film "They Live" had the ruling class actually being aliens in disguise.
Also:
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/wp-co...5/10/Kodos.jpg