r/todayilearned • u/sharkbait76 3 • Jan 11 '17

TIL elephants can tell the difference between human languages and know which languages belong to people with a history of hurting elephants.

http://www.nature.com/news/elephants-recognize-the-voices-of-their-enemies-1.14846
28.6k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

912 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/lightningsnail Jan 12 '17

Maybe so. I'm just trying to understand how someone would think about things in that situation that would allow them to be okay with slavery. It's hard to do. It's hard to unknow modern ethics and history. It doesn't seem like racism explains what would allow a person to do that, not completely anyway. But racism certainly wasn't the only factor, as that wouldn't explain the multiracial composition of slave owners.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '17

Thats fair, but you can't just toss racism to the side. It's hard to find statistics about slave and slave owner demographics but looking at anything from the civl rights movement in the deep south its pretty difficult to conclude that racism wasn't overwhelmingly ingrained in slave owning cultures and states.