People - while moralizing down at others - make up all sorts of false crap to defend their outright hypocrisy: Fish intelligence is "...the resultant of the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills"[1] as it applies to fish. According to Culum Brown from Macquarie University, "Fish are more intelligent than they appear. In many areas, such as memory, their cognitive powers match or exceed those of ‘higher’ vertebrates including non-human primates."[2] Fish hold records for the relative brain weights of vertebrates. Most vertebrate species have similar brain-to-body mass ratios. The deep sea bathypelagic bony-eared assfish,[3] has the smallest ratio of all known vertebrates.[4] At the other extreme, the electrogenic elephantnose fish, an African freshwater fish, has one of the largest brain-to-body weight ratios of all known vertebrates (slightly higher than humans) and the highest brain-to-body oxygen consumption ratio of all known vertebrates (three times that for humans).[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_intelligence
It's an interesting exercise to look at where philosophical vegans (as opposed to 'health' vegans) actually live. Almost every one I know lives in the inner city. They hate suburbia, and they like country towns even less. They will visit hipster-approved natural places on vacations, but invariably have zero interest in the reality of such places.
I stand corrected. There are many exceptions but most of the animal kingdom must kill and eat other members of the animal kingdom until they themselves die or become the food that is alive, fleeing to try and survive (Jack London). There is no life without death. Man also sometimes becomes the food that is alive, but can't flee very well.
Most PETA types live in concrete worlds as anti-nature as it gets. To them, protecting nature is feeding stray cats, which are decimating wildlife.
When a fish can play fetch or make friends, let me know. Having highly developed aspects of the brain doesn't imply sentience.
Life on earth is a non-stop system of slaughter, a billion trillion murders a day when you add micro-organisms - then just follow it up the ladder. Even mindless plants have numerous ways to try to eliminate other plants such as blocking their light, altering the PH factor of the soil, and even such as killing and eating insects. Probably 99.9+% of all life doesn't survive the first hour of its existence due to being murdered/killed.
You make my point. PETA thinking really is about pets, not nature at all. Then, disgustingly, they try to humanize them - and think they are being good to them by locking them in an apartment or fenced yard - often alone - though many are pack animals and it is torture. Go make friends and play fetch with a wild boar. Get back to me on it.
Remember when the furs became intolerable? It has had horrific effects on some species such as beaver and others. Generally, farmers and ranchers love wild animals - but to an economic point as they will grow in numbers and problems devastating their farm or ranch. They would allow trappers to keep the population down in the sense of trapping problem critters - but also could profit by not eliminating them by selling their furs. When this ended, the farmers just slaughtered them as they were nothing but money lost.
I'm not a hunter but I totally disagree with your view on this. Probably because I don't consider human beings and animals equal. That is truely destructive...to equalize your children to chicks. I will say that my area is over run with deer. Hunting season does manage the population. And I'm glad we don't have big predators around killing the deer and putting my children in danger.
Balto, except for a small minority of people, we all eat meat. The fish you like get jerked or netted out of their habitat and suffocate. Ever think about that? I agree with the comment on this thread that raising chickens, turkeys, cows, and sheep and then slaughtering them is just commercialized hunting for food. The hunted animal has lived a natural life in the wild, unlike our farm-raised meat, and the object of the hunter is to make a quick, clean kill. Deer and elk meat is free of man-made chemicals and hormones and god knows what that is put into our commercially produced meat (including fish, for that matter). I hunt primarily wild game birds like pheasant, chukar, and quail. Anything I kill gets eaten, and it is by far better tasting than pen-raised chicken. By far better! I killed a feral pig one time, and we ate that too. Tasted just like pork. I hunt for a number of reasons ... Getting out in nature, the challenge, the comaraderie of friends. The great meals are a bonus. It is not for a joy of killing something. Ha! I fish too, but it's almost always for sport, and 99.9% of all fish I catch get released. You, on the other hand, are eating fish that don't get released 100% of the time. How can you live with yourself, you heartless killer? Me, on my boat, with a chukar I killed and later ate. Seth
Hunting is basically the male instinct to chase things... like a dog chases a ball or cat a toy, pounce and shred... no one really understands it, we call it hunting to try and make it sound civilised.
Car and Deer Collisions Cause 200 Deaths, Cost $4 Billion a Year An estimated 1.23 million deer-vehicle collisions occurred in the U.S. between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2012, costing more than $4 billion in vehicle damage, according to State Farm, the nation’s leading auto insurer. https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2012/10/24/267786.htm Deer around here are small. When I drove thru Iowa and the Dakotas? THEY ARE HUGE! Went thru a town and if was full of deer herds in people's yards. Never saw anything like that. They were everywhere.
The mule deer aren't overrunning us but they are very plentiful. The black bear population is up 4X in 20 years.
There is a myth pushed by PETA types that animals won't harm you if you just leave them alone. The alligator really didn't mean to rip off your arm and the shark deeply regrets eating your leg. This is Florida and some tourists from up East can not really grasp that are creatures large and small - from micro organisms to ticks, spiders, snakes, alligators and sharks - all see them as a tasty potential meal or just don't like people in general. Some real tragedies result, leading to "There should have been signs warning there are alligators in the water!" But there is a big sign that warns of this right on the highway as you enter this state. It reads: "WELCOME TO FLORIDA."
Gators will study you looking for weakness and opportunity. Most people never see them. That's how that little guy died at Disney.
In a part of India, they have convinced villagers that they just have to let the tigers eat some of their children now and then. But their Hindu so it intermixes with their religion. That is not really a viable selling point in the USA. But again, your message is nonsense. For example, every effort has been made to repopulate panthers here and it doesn't work. Panthers are extremely territorial and each demands a massive territory. They put trackers on the panthers and it one stops moving for a couple days, they go find out the cause of death. Nearly always it was another Panther. There is no longer enough land for the natural predator/prey system. Wildlife has to be managed in most of the USA for the eco-system to be viable and healthy. You apparently don't realize that nearly all species that fall into the prey category have extremely high birth rates - as do pests that are not even natural to the area such as wild hogs. Unchecked, wild hogs can literally double their population every month. "Double a penny for 30 days and you have over a million dollars." Same with wild hogs. So, your answer is what? 200,000 black bears living in people's garages?
Gators are very low intelligence, very simple creatures. They are ambush hunters. The problem at Disney is they had fire crew members who were feeding the gators there. Gators are super simple. You feed a gator and from that moment onward human= food. It is not "human = friend." Any gator known to have been fed by a human MUST be destroyed. That's how it works here. Serious business too. A tour guide taking people on gator sighting tours was seriously fined for feeding a gator. What had he fed the gator? A chicken leg - and his hand that was holding it. Didn't matter that he lost his hand. Fined anyway - BIG fine. Gator had to be hunted down and destroyed because it now wants more hands to eat. Nearly all attacks are from dusk until dawn. Few daytime attacks. They don't like clear water, only murky water. Had the Disney fire crew not had been feeding the gators during the day the attack would not have happened. I bet Disney quick settled for millions - as they should have.
When you get further toward coastal regions into the pine savannah you might encounter a gator, enough risk to keep the eyes open. When you see the marsh and the swamp, see saw grass and palmettos, there isn't any doubt.
You wont find healthier meat than roaming free in the woods as it was meant to. I can sympathize- the need to kill is a bit unnerving, even of those that do it lawfully and waste nothing. Im just getting into hunting myself, but purely so I can fill up a freezer with quality meat. The killing part is not appealing. On the other hand, killing for food has been a necessity for human survival since forever. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that those who enjoy it would be better at it, be more successful at survival, breed more, and spread their kill-loving genes.
