I think the horrifying thing about humans is we do understand what we’re doing and choose to do it anyways. Spiders kill things to eat them to survive. Humans do it for much more complicated or arbitrary reasons.
I can't speak for spiders but there are plenty of animals that do horrible things for reasons other than eating and surviving. Seals come to mind (with what they do to penguins). Also cats.
At the very least, mammals will kill for sport and for status. The biggest difference with humans is scale.
Attention isn’t binary. Stubbing your toe is a great way to pay a lot of attention to something you normally ignore, but conversely we are paying attention to the lack of pain without it diverting any effort.
Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can start to assume that’s just how things are.
Oh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem.
Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No.
Find me an animal who went vegan because of empathy.
oh my cat don't even eat the animals it brings back inside the house. Birds, baby rabbits (these ones survives for it can catch them but not kill them), lizards by the metric ton, spiders, mice...
It brings them back to me and let them in the living room.
Sometimes I get two animals a day.
I don't know: maybe the cat understood we do the cooking and somehow thinks we're going to cook all it brings back.
I remember an old blog where some coder who also had a relentless cat (I'd say at least 10 years ago) set up face a webcam and face recognition for its cat inside the pet door and wouldn't let the door open if the cat had something in its mouse.
> I remember an old blog where some coder who also had a relentless cat (I'd say at least 10 years ago) set up face a webcam and face recognition for its cat inside the pet door and wouldn't let the door open if the cat had something in its mouse.
I've got to find that blog post! Luckily my cats don't bring back half a dozen animals a day anymore but I'm still tired of chasing squirrels and mice around my house once a week.
> Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem.
Not every animal is like this. Most spider never kill animals they can't eat if they're not a threat to them. If one such creature falls into their web, they just release it.
>Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out
How else are they gonna eat? They don't have teeth with which to chew their food like we do.
>Cats play with their food.
Many cats can be sadistic selfish assholes, but somehow many humans love them to death because they're cute and fluffy.
Human industrial slaughter where animals are trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) would beg to differ. Or how about male chicks being liquefied and fed back to the chickens?
Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter.
This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridiculous as stating that all animals lack behaviors that we may label as empathy.
When I was a kid, one day my dad took me to the nearby "meat shop" where they use to slaughter goats in a nearby room of the shop. My dad's aim was to prepare me to go to the meat shop on my own in the near future. What I saw had a very deep impact on me and I decided to not eat meat and fish after that. It took me one and a half years to stop eating meat and fish. What I saw in that shop that day was chilling. Two goat kids were slaughtered in front of their mother(the goat). The goat kids had by now realised that going inside the room meant death, so when the shop owner tried to take the first goat kid into the room the goat kid refused to enter the room and the owner kept pushing and forcing the goat kid inside the room. Seeing this the customers gathered around the shop started laughing. And the goat(the mother of the goat kid) couldn't look at her kid being taken to the slaughter room and was crying for help looking at the laughing customers(I had never heard a goat make such loud and chilling noises)! The same repeated for here second kid. And finally the goat herself was slaughtered after sometime.
Experiencing this horror, I decided there and then that I will not eat meat and fish again to satisfy my tastebuds. It has been years since I left eating meat and fish. But even now when I see non-vegetarian dishes(at home or other places) I have urge to eat non-veg. It is very difficult to leave eating non-veg; it is like addiction. But everytime I have that urge to eat non-veg, that scene from the meat shop plays in front of my eyes. It is very painful.
Another scene that I regularly see in my local area every morning is when cattles are transported in a truck to a near-by mass slaughter house. The trucks are enclosed from all sides with just a slit open for the cattles to look outside so that they do not panic in the metal enclosure. Looking at their eyes one can easily see that they are trying to understand where they are and what is happening. And everytime I see that I say to myself, these unsuspecting defenceless animals are going to face a gruesome death within an hour just to satisfy the appetite of some humans!
>trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures)
There is absolutely push/incentive to monitor and correct for failures in stunning. The stress response it entails in the animal makes for poor quality meat, or even inedible meat that would have to thrown out.
Also, stunning is followed by slaughtering and draining. There is no situation in industrial production in which an animal would be dismembered and skinned alive.
Painlessly slaughtering cattle isn't trivial. You want to destroy their brains as close to instantly as possible, but their brains are tiny and their skulls are large, so it really requires care to make sure the animal is instantaneously killed.
I would completely support requiring direct expert supervision of every single animal slaughtered. This is the norm at the smaller operations, but something like 80% of US cattle are slaughtered at giant Chinese owned factory stockyards.
Forget the actual slaughter. They live their entire life in a torture cage, smeared in excrement, ears filled with the screams of their suffering family.
Exactly, they don't have empathy. We have conscience yet we all these. So who is lacking empathy emotion tell me. We do much worse than any animal can do. Again go watch the docu to see completely to know what we do before replying. Humans are worst thing in universe because we do all these having conscience.
http://www.nationearth.com/