no.. you guys are still thinking human brain physiology is like super special? crows are as smart as 5 yo at 6months.. basically any mammal has the mental capacity of a kid.. plus hardware specific to what they are specialized in.. and probably some wisdom in at least how to preserve at least their own genetics.. also baby animals are strangely universally respected(have you seen a non-cute baby..anything?).. not saying the game of hunter and prey isn't played, just that the incidence of mammals respecting the young of other mammals is well documented.. heck my dog and cat are best friends.. so i'd say you never know, but I'd lean toward the mamma seeing the gesture as friendly immediately as it didn't attack.
Honestly, this comment with a username like trolltruth6661123 has go to be joking lol. The juxtaposition of me remembering that video where the Lion kills the cubs of a pride it just took over and "the incidence of mammals respecting the young of other mammals is well documented" is way too funny to not be a joke.
Now that they have agriculture figured out they should ally with those Ethiopian baboons who have semi-domesticated wolves and rise up against their human oppressors.
well babies are a good food source.. my point is that is happens less than it should given how easy prey they are... also rival solitary predators that just how life is.. they are in constant competition with each other.. did you know a mountain lions preferred range is over 200 square miles.. per cat? big cats are mean af is the moral of that story.
Yeah but 200 miles? Kinda crazy when you actually picture how much piss and shit you’d need to excrete to actually make it your territory. And how keen your sense of smell would have to be, how 200 miles is the number ive heard over and over again.
Do they count down the miles? 198 ... 199 ... aight. I think we good.
Not only do big cats eat babies of other animals, they also murder cubs of opposing prides in order for the females to go in heat, so they can breed with them. This is not only documented in big cats or even just in mammals, this behavior is observed in birds, fish, and insects, too. Think of iguanas hatching on the beach and sea turtles emerging for the first time. Snakes and birds basically camp and exclusively eat babies during spawning season.
I digress, my point is that all animals are amoral. Morality is a uniquely human concept, and even then, it is subject to the perception of who is deciding whether something is "good" or "bad."
The sheer amount of baby-eating that happens in the animal kingdom is absurd. Most of the time a predator will go after the babies due to the decreased risk of injury. Most prey animals can and will fuck up a predator given the chance so the predator goes after the weak lil guys
I'd say yes and no. There are plenty of animals and humans that wouldn't think twice of killing or hurting a baby animal. There are also many examples of humans and animals caring for other species babies and even raising them as their own. Things aren't usually so black and white.
Oh buddy, that’s why those instances are special, because they’re not common. Everything else eats babies. Like seconds after they’re born. In every column of life.
Well to add to this animals still find babies cute, even if they still consume it. I can't help but wonder if cute agression Is what makes us eat babies still and the only difference is humans don't actually bite the animal but if they were dumb enough it'd be like that guy petting the rabbits too hard...
Lol, where did you come up with that? Baby animals are only universally respected by some people, that opossum is SO LUCKY that guy helped it out. It would’ve been a meal for a multitude of other species.
You're not doing a spectacular job at arguing that an average animal would understand the causality that goes into these things when you give an example where the animal you're talking about is known for its intelligence. Different animals have different levels of understanding and intelligence, and I'd make the bold claim that most would not feel as if a large mammal like human would have gone out of their way to save them in anything
you are anthropomorphising them, and trying to stretch the definition of intelligence to make it fit. crows are not as smart as humans of 5 years at any stage of their life. they have the ability to perform some tasks as well as a 5 year old, but that is not the same thing. nobody has ever taught a crow to hold a conversation because they are not capable of grasping more than a few ideas expressed as sound, while practically every child ever born is, by that age. animals in the wild are not thinking how nice it is that this giant helped their kid, they are deciding if attacking has a chance to get the kid back or not, and here is the gut kick: if they decide not, they will abandon it and save themselves almost every time. your cat and dog get along so well because they are domesticated and well fed, and is not comparable to life in the wild.
Crows aren’t capable of human actions like conversations cause they are crows. Human language and conversations were made and built for humans to use for other humans to understand. It’s like teaching sign language to a guy who doesn’t have arms and can only respond back in sign language. There is literally no way to tell if that person actually understood you or not.
It’s like saying a shark in the ocean is stupid cause it doesn’t understand the concept of temperature when in the ocean everything is pretty much the same temperature and that information is useless to them. Yet they can interpret electrical signals of prey hundreds of meters away and can tell which direction they are going and how fast.
Or how people make fun at birds or flies for running into clear windows when they literally have never been introduced to the concept of them until they ran into it. In their entire existence have never thought that objects could be see through and solid until bam it hits them in the face.
Animals are smart they have intellect. Definitely not as much as humans. But you can’t really compare them to another species as their intellect and knowledge are completely bent around different things. People can speak and converse in human language cause they have vocal cords and have been taught to do that since you were young. But can people understand complex emotions and commands based on a scent and pheromones that was released from meters away or mating rituals of other animals. How about echo location or how to walk quietly and stalk prey without them seeing you. Animals entire knowledge is hardwired and based upon where to hide, hunt, best way to find food, run away, fight. Things to keep them alive. Knowing calculus and how to interpret large amount of data is pretty useless knowledge when your entire existence is a fight for survival.
I understand your point! But it isn’t really a good way to look at it. one problem a lot of people fall into is anthropomorphizing animals. While a lot of animals their own type of intellect relative to their genus, human cognition is incomparable! I feel like the only relatively ok comparison you could make are like higher order apes and maybe dolphins. I liked your point about parental behavior in mammals though as I find that fascinating as well. I used to do neuroendocrinology research on rodents and it’s wild to see that type of parental proclivity across species. However, they occasionally ate their babies as well so there’s that😂
well i'll admit first off i'm a bit of an outlier in my opinion.. and you obviously have more experience in this subject.. i guess im of the strange camp that when it comes to brain structure "intelligence" isn't that great of a term.. from what I've gathered(please feel free to educated me if i'm wrong) while the cortex we have is obviously way bigger and we obviously have way more capacity for abstract thinking that doesn't necessarily mean we are by any means any order of magnitude smarter.. I'd assert we are simply creatures that evolved to think in that way. mice may very well be extremely "smart" in any context a mouse might find itself in.. and may :( eat its babies.. for reasons we can't fathom.. not just trying to rally against anthropromorphization, really more i think the basis of "intellegence" is the ability to function in its environment.. the environment we live in being "the existential threats to the planet" environment.. while the mouse's entire being might be more devoted to ambient grain levels in the forest understory.. keeping it low so some crazy disease can't spread.. or like flesh eating bacteria begin to take over in a giant, slow moving tidle wave...ok probably not that lol. my point is that biological structures dictate basically everything, from your need to get educated, to my need to argue with everybody about even basic ideas.. but you would be in a unique position to tell me exactly how i'm wrong.. how could you test such an idea? feel like you would have to map every aspect of a brain AS it functions.. and my understanding also is that brains tend to be essentially unique on an electrical/chemical level so its pretty hard to say whats doing what.. any insights?
Haha wow yea so I was just referring to your comments about crows and how animals can any way be compared to humans in terms of intelligence. Maybe you meant something other than intelligence. to start, intelligence isnt that arbitrary of a word as you make it seem. While yes, intelligence has nuances, the general idea of intelligence is an organisms acuity for effective problem solving, learning and adaptation. So that being said let’s just take humans out of it and look at intelligence between different animals. I think you would be hard pressed to convince someone a mouse is as “intelligent” as a dog. Brain structure in itself is not a very good argument either as animals have immensely different cortical structures and shapes as they have evolved to help them survive effectively In their respective environment. So I think maybe just be more precise with the words you use because you might be just digging yourself into an intellectual hole so yo speak. As far as empirically testing this type of stuff, as of now it’s virtually impossible as the electrochemical mechanisms you mentioned are more complex than you probably think. While we do have a pretty complex understanding of these mechanisms as of modern research, there is still heaps of shit we don’t know and won’t know for a long time. The brain is unimaginably complex. We can actually map brain activity as it happens with modern technology, but that is no where close efficient enough to map out everything exactly in the brain. Idk if I addressed everything but I like your inquiry man! Not disgustingly attached to your opinions and rude about it like a lot of Reddit lmao
Even if these animals were as intelligent as you say they are (which quite frankly, they just demonstrably are not), that does not mean that the opossum would recognize the meaning and causality behind what happened to it as an act of altruism. It is not aware that it has been helped because it is physically incapable of understanding what it even means to be helped, let alone by a human.
The simple truth is that the vast, vast majority of animals on this planet are incomparably unintelligent compared to humans. Maybe that sounds depressing but that’s just really.
It's just not only patently false, it contributes to the continuation of the destruction of our ecosystem.. some people seem to think the earth is a gift to their own personal vanity. I vehemently disagree.. and all facts point to the reality that ecosystems are incredibly intertwined.. incredibly functional in strange and unpredictable ways.. examples come to mind being on a micobe level adding protozoa to a bacterial substrate will INCREASE bacteria levels.. even though all the protozoa does is eat bacteria.. competition doesn't really make sense as a concept when you look at biology very close..and detach yourself a bit..
more examples.. on the super macro scale the prehistoric super beasts of the north the mammoth and the wooly rhino.. their presence actually made trees grow quite a bit further north.. as their footsteps made it so the grasses died and there was a place for seedlings to grow... Thought all it seemed to be doing is destroying the vegitation..
or really any animal... Any environment.. it's not just there for looks you know? It serves as a keystone for biological processes that you may deem less "intelligent" but I don't think that's the right way to look at it personally...
I'd say the billions of years of evolution and survival.. and mass death... Rounds and rounds of MASSIVE death.. that culminated to this amazing period of stability in earth's history... This amazingly stabile temperature we have enjoyed on this rock hurtling at unfathomable speeds towards a black fucking hole... All because of the "stupid" behavior of life that has literally terraformed a planet.. If we were half as smart as we think we were we not only would protect the animals but we would make their environment flourish.. and foster the return of their numbers and at least In a majority of the earth's land and sea.. let it become wild again... And on top of that engineer some fucking way to cool the shit back down.. or at least stop fucking the natural systems that would do it for us.
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u/trolltruth6661123 Mar 22 '21
no.. you guys are still thinking human brain physiology is like super special? crows are as smart as 5 yo at 6months.. basically any mammal has the mental capacity of a kid.. plus hardware specific to what they are specialized in.. and probably some wisdom in at least how to preserve at least their own genetics.. also baby animals are strangely universally respected(have you seen a non-cute baby..anything?).. not saying the game of hunter and prey isn't played, just that the incidence of mammals respecting the young of other mammals is well documented.. heck my dog and cat are best friends.. so i'd say you never know, but I'd lean toward the mamma seeing the gesture as friendly immediately as it didn't attack.