Science and Inquiry discussion

For September 2017, we will be reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal.

Please use this thread to post questions, comments, quotes, or reviews, at any time.

I just finished reading this book. It is marvelous! I would never have read this book, if this group at goodreads.com had not voted it for September. I urge everyone to read it. The authors is a zoologist, a recognized authority on primates, and his writing is very credible. He sifts through the scientific evidence, with a high burden of proof placed on experimenters who believe that animals "think". And, in so many ways, he shows that animals really are capable of thinking, in one experiment after another. Some animals can be experiment subjects in labs, while others can only be studied in the wild. But, of course it is difficult to do controlled experiments in the wild. But a few researchers do manage to develop well thought-out, controlled experiments in the animals' natural environment.

I highly recommend this book. Here is my review.

Interesting development:

http://ewao.com/2017/09/04/new-zealan...

Betsy wrote: "Interesting development:

http://ewao.com/2017/09/04/new-zealan..."

That's wonderful. Perhaps there is a chance we will evolve into moral beings before we destroy life on this planet as we know it.

That is amazing! I wonder what it actually means, in practice.

Yes, my thoughts exactly. I haven't read the actual legislation, but I wonder what it means to the food industry. And can we justify forced sterilization of sentient creatures?

Of course, a lot of it depends on what we mean by sentience. That's one of the things that's interesting about this book.

I've always had an issue with "animal rights" both because of raising them for food myself & because giving something 'rights' without responsibilities seems dangerous. It's a blanket idea that doesn't take any of the many variables into consideration. Animal care & our responsibility toward them is a very fine line that varies in almost every case.

I hate seeing dogs neutered when they're still puppies, but I can understand why most rescues & shelters insist on it. Hormones make such a big difference in their growth, but I see how many dogs go through & how hard our local Humane Society works to place the dogs they get. The few they do have to put down seem like far too many & yet they've got one of the best placement rates around.

Economics plays a big role. It's an ugly side of owning something like a horse as a work animal. Once they're no longer useful, they're still expensive to keep properly, so something has to be done with them. Not all can be placed as pets, so many were sent to slaughter until there was a big push to get rid of horse slaughter houses in the US which created a mess. It just means the horses are penned & shipped longer until they're slaughtered outside the country where we have no way to control the conditions. The price for them went down, so all too many people just leave them in some back field until they die.

Then there are animals like sheep. Our ewes had no personality & lived only because of the lambs they gave us. When they quit producing those, they went to slaughter. Lambs are cute, but we raised them only for their sale value. Quite a few were slaughtered right on our farm by their buyers for Easter dinner. Those that weren't were raised up & sold off. They weren't very cute by that time, anyway. They smell & are dumb as rocks. If one ran off a cliff, the rest would probably follow.

Wild animals are another category. They're fine in their place, but when they get out of it, they need to go. I had to shoot a vixen one year who kept killing off my Call ducks. I'd had the ducks there for years before & after without a problem. Usually the Shetland ponies, dogs, & fence kept predators away, but she was too smart & killed off one a day for several in a row. She was probably feeding cubs which wound up starving to death. That sucks, but my ducks weren't real happy with her dining arrangements, either.

Land use, economics, watersheds, & such are a terribly complicated mess. I spent most of my life in Maryland where the Chesapeake Bay was practically destroyed before my eyes. Farmers were blamed for a lot of it, but there was no attention paid to suburban land use since it was too hot politically. For instance, laws were put in place to fence off streams from cows, but nothing was done to keep companies like Tru Green from painting lawns.

So, I'm very wary of ideas like 'animal rights'. The few people I've known who espoused it tended to be ignorant fanatics. Most folks I know really like animals & think as I do, that we have a responsibility toward the animals & they should be treated as well as possible, but they have no 'rights'. I think the word is too slippery. It becomes a matter of belief, not fact.

Guess it depends on what we mean by "rights." I think EVERY living thing has the right to be treated with a certain amount of respect, which would include causing no unnecessary suffering. If we are going to eat animals, and God knows, this is part of survival for many species, we owe it to them to raise them or hunt them in humane conditions. If some of the videos that pop up on social media are any indication, many operations do a deplorable job of that. Breeding chickens that often grow so fast they cannot hold their own weight, and running pigs through a slaughter factory so fast that occassionally one is not dead before dropped in the scalding water ... these mark our society as uncivilized. The small farmers I have known (real farmers, not Big Ag) have never fallen in these categories that I know of. It is possible to raise livestock kindly and cost-effectively for oneself (if you live in an area where land is not outrageously expensive) but factory farms, like puppy mills, seem to me a perverted abuse of animals.
As far as the affordability of meat and dairy products, most of us eat far more meat than necessary. We can buy smaller quantities of higher quality (humanely raised and not given indiscrimate amounts of antibiotics or hormones or whatever they dose them with), eat more beans, cut back on the junk food and empty calories and come out economically just as well.
As far as sterilization, I think it is totally unfeasible to eliminate this. Those who are unable to assume the responsibility for the support of their offspring do not warrant the right of indiscriminate reproduction. Wild animals are different, because Mother Nature takes care of the surplus populations, as she did with human 100,000 years ago. For those living within our own realms, though, we do not want to see 9/10 of the puppies born to starve on streets.

I pretty much agree with you, Nancy. "Rights" is too slippery. I grew up on a small family farm & have one now, although with a lot less animals.

You didn't mention eating insects in the dietary changes. It's something we should start doing, although I'm not exactly straining at the bit.

Wild animals don't always take care of surplus population in these crowded times & even when they do, it can be a very ugly process. With bear populations coming back, more are showing up in suburban areas. That's a problem. Not so much here in KY since they generally disappear quickly, but there were a couple of crazy examples in MD about a decade ago where people weren't as prepared to make the problem go away.

Your comment about the chickens that can't support their own weight is so true. Mom was given those sorts of chickens a couple of times & always had to eat them before they were 6 months old. In Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, Herzog discusses his feelings about chickens after seeing a load of them going to market & contrasting them with those raised for cock fighting. We all just KNOW cock fighting is worse, right? It was an interesting chapter.

I have that book ... I need to read it and can't remember where I put it. Pollan's "An Omnivore's Dilemma" really opened my eyes to a lot. I am not ready to start eating insects yet, though! Ideally I would like to get most of my protein from happy homegrown hens, possibly try the cow or goat thing although that is a big comittment; scallops (I don't think they are very sentient), that kind of thing. In reality when you work out of town and just grab whatever, it is hard to be principled with regard to diet.
Human population growth is the culprit for much grief regarding bears, coyotes, wolves etc. We are just taking up more than our share of the earth. I am not above killing a fox, coon or gator who threatens my small homestead; destroying the habitat of a whole ecosystem to feed humans can't be moral, though.
Suburban areas in Md and Va. have had deer problems and it always makes me scratch my head when they talk about bringing in animal control bureaucrats and such, when the obvious solution is to just shoot and eat the surplus. Free meat, less nuisance deer .... what's the problem?

Definitely dig out Herzog's book. It's excellent. He doesn't come to many conclusions save that we're all somewhat hypocritical in our treatment of animals - too many lines in shifting sand.

On eating insects there are the pros:
http://www.iflscience.com/environment...
& the cons:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eustacia...
There is always the marketing, a nightmare in some societies.

The last article mentions the unintended consequences of raising bugs in a production atmosphere & those are something that fascinate & dismay me. The push toward making biofuels took a lot of money away from wheat research, for instance. That really had some people worried. A look at our attempts to control the gypsy moths is instructive, too.

Invasive species are another big issue. Sometimes they're beneficial, like the coyotes around here, but other times they're terrible like the feral pigs. There are so many bugs & such that have permanently changed the landscape, too. I'm not sure how many species had their populations changed by the demise of the American Chestnut or what impact the Emerald Ash Borer will have. Ash used to make up 20% of my woods & they're all dead. That's certainly been a real boon to the birds. While we've always had a lot of woodpeckers & mushrooms, we're seeing a lot more now, but my woods is getting a lot more Sugar Maple. I don't know what that will do in the long run.

People object to killing Bambi, especially in their back yard when even a professional hunter can miss with really bad consequences. The efforts to do that in MD were successful, but not enough was ever allowed to really make a difference. The meat was donated too, at least in the Loch Raven area hunts. I used to drive through there every day for work & was hit 3 times in 1 year by deer. One ran into the bed of my truck above the back tire, one into my driver side door, so I was particularly interested in thinning them out. It never happened while I was there, but they were spending a lot of money fencing off places in a nearby park because the deer were destroying the 'natural' habitat. It's mind boggling.

It is! Feral pigs ... that is another mystery to me, as it seems that it would be healthier (not to speak of cheaper) to eat them than to buy meat at the grocery store.
I'm as hypocritical as anyone, I suppose, as I do eat meat, but if I had to be the one to actually kill it, I would probably eat nothing more sentient than a scallop. Except for that gator that got my dog. Him I would kill and eat with glee, and am plotting to do so.

Everyone shoots the feral pigs when they can, but they're tough to find & kill. Very smart & fast like the coyotes. Too lean & gamey according to my neighbor who got a couple a few years back. Luckily, the pigs aren't a problem around us & the coyotes don't come inside our fence, but I've spent a lot of money on those. The coyotes keep us awake occasionally as they howl around in the nearby woods & we've almost lost a dog to them. My wife galloped her horse at them & they ran, though.

Good luck with the gator. I don't blame you.

In my experience, unless a person is raised butchering animals for food, they don't take to it well. A lot of my friends wouldn't eat game they'd killed unless someone else butchered it & often not even then. Some had issues eating chicken or pigeon breasts at our house.

We used to shoot pigeons in the barns fairly often. It was a fun way to spend time with a pellet gun as a kid & the pigeon population had to be kept down since they'd crap all over everything. We never plucked them, just breasted them, which is a lot less time & blood. I generally did it since they didn't know how, but still some of my friends just couldn't handle eating them or even smelling them cook if they had shot them. If they hadn't, they generally liked them, although sometimes that would change when they found out what they were. Apparently there was a big difference between a store-bought chicken, a home-grown one, a dove, & a 'pigeon' (actually rock dove, I believe) in their minds.

I inadvertently ruined a cook out for one couple when they commented on how good the burgers were & I said it was Sara's finest hour. They turned green & were horrified we could eat an animal we'd named. I don't know why. Sara was a 3/4 Angus heifer we got out of our half-breed milk cow, Becky, & a PITA from day one. It was usually my job to bring Sara in from the field where I'd have to chase her down & generally drag her most of the way. When we'd get to the top of hill leading down to the barn, she'd take off & try to make me fall. She gave Mom fits too, so wound up going into the freezer rather than replacing her mother. I was happy to take her to the butcher's & certainly enjoyed every bite.

I have my own prejudices, though. I've tried groundhog legs (too gamey) & will eat squirrel or rabbit, but I've never even tried possum or coon. Possum supposedly tastes good, but there's something about them that just makes me nauseous. It's completely irrational.

LOL our attitudes about food are funny. I could not personally kill an animal that I've raised or been on friendly terms with. Guts are gross. My husband is thoroughly not interested in hunting or gutting anything, unfortunately. I was naive enough to name our first pigs as a young lady, and found them amusing companions, so needless to say made a big ugly scene when time came to kill them. Thereafter, all pigs and cows were NOT made pets of and I was relieved of my duties of feeding them.
I feel more guilt eating supermarket food, possibly raised in deplorable conditions, than in eating home raised or hunted food, though. No problem eating deer, rabbit, groundhog, armadillo or squirrel. Never tried possum or coon but the thought wouldn't turn my stomach. The Joy of Cooking has recipes for all that and even weirder stuff. Just somebody else has to gut it. I can take or leave gator but after the dog incident I plan to learn to like it!
I'd have to draw the line at dogs. That is almost cannibalism to me.
I was once in a nice "American" restaurant in Switzerland with some Swiss friends. It looked like a cross between an old Western saloon and the Hofbrauhaus. They got some of it right ... cowboy pictures on the walls and such. When we got our menus, one of the options was "pferdefleish" and I pitched a minor hissy fit right in the restaurant, indignantly proclaiming, "Americans do NOT eat horses!!!"
My friends had a mare of a smallish draft time, and they used her to pull a wagon, to ride, and to have foals which were usually sold as weanlings or yearlings ... with the casual understanding that they would probably wind up being eaten. Very different from our attitudes here!

I agree about the dogs & horses. We wouldn't eat them either, but both are practically family for us, too. You definitely have to read Herzog's book. You've obviously given the subject more thought than most & I'm sure you'll find even more to think about.

I am enjoying reading this month's selection, but not as much as the foregoing comments. I have always been a city kid, and it was some time before I discovered the sources of my favorite meats had been living animals. I have yet to handle a gun of any kind in my life.

I'm finding it funny how, whenever evidence comes up that compares apes favorably in intelligence to children (or sometimes humans in general!) it causes a huge ruckus. Kind of like when you comment that the planet is getting warmer, people get all political. When science and popular beliefs collide, things get interesting. Loving this book, especially the anecdotes the author recalls from working closely with primates, jackdaws and other animals.

Nancy, your point about comparing apes to children is right on the mark. It is addressed in the book quite extensively.

Link to my review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

: )