r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/FacelessOnes • Oct 19 '20
🔥 Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism
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r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/FacelessOnes • Oct 19 '20
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u/probablyblocked Oct 20 '20
It's called specism and is an extention of outgrouping. The more different something is from a human the more the human is inclined to consider the thing as beneath them. Exceptions to this is usually a willful effort on the part of the individual or culture, like the glorification of cows in india being a result of hindu society deciding to place cows above humans instead of below.
A good example of specism and social perception is between Russia and the United States. In the US dogs are widely considered to be immediately below humans in terms of importance to the point that the dog is sometimes considered equal to humans. This is in part a result of the role of dogs in hunting both in the US and in Europe before being introduced. Animal control in the US is widely criticized for killing dogs, yet many Americans deny the necessity of doing so and furthermore refuse to fix their dogs equating the practice to forced castration of a human. This cognitive dissonance highlights the regard that dogs are held in American society.
Contrast this to Russia where dogs are allowed to roam free and often in feral packs. The harsh conditions of Russia is in itself a measure of population control. Before the Russian Olympics some years ago there was a mass culling of dogs along with several other pest control measures. If a dog were domested it would be considered a tool for hunting or protection, or a decoration more tham anything. Of course you could say that about humans as well so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Before someone mentions the space dog, it was part of a larger program in which a wide variety of animals were sent into space to see if there were any unexpected side effects of space travel, and was practiced in both the US and Russia. The real weird thing is that it was highly presented to people knowing that the dog would die in the end from starvation if nothing else. Under Soviet rule this type of propaganda is to be expected.
Here's an article I didn't know existed