From: Steele, Kirk A (SteeleKA@nafm.misawa.af.mil)
Date: Tue Feb 26 2002 - 06:51:48 MST
Ok folks what's at issue here?
Well, what is not at issue is the anthropomophication of animals sensations
and perceptions as projections of our own insecurities and personal issues.
Do animals have tactile sensory perception that has come to represent
physical injury? Do animals have the cognitive ability to discriminate
temporally with regard to their current tactile sensations of pain and the
significantly previous temporal aspect of the physical act that caused their
injury? Do animals become behaviourally opperantly conditioned to conjoined
sensory stimuli, one of which merely represents the tactation of pain?
Now for some really sticky questions.
Do people project their insecurities onto the most salient examples of the
act of predation?
Do people regard carnivorous behavior as an ulmimate expression of
aggression? And if so, do they have a coloured behavioural conditioning
schema in their life which perforce causes them to react negatively to this
"act of aggression"?
Many issues are in the pot of a bunch of people who would prefer to
oversimplify so as to reduce their anxieties to a simple black or white
polaroid picture, so that they can go out and ask their McDoc to prescribe a
McRemedy.
AmeriKaners are killing themselves and the environment with their egoistic
projections of instant gratification onto their surrounding environment.
They want all the gluttony their farms, ranches, and car manufacturers can
provide. Let someone else do the work (mexico & asia) let some one else
supply the raw energy (middle east) and let some one else deal with our
waste products (our grand children). Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.
Let's all learn to think diacritically about the issues we bring in here.
First, we needs must, in the fashion of Cartesian Reductionism, quantify and
normalise the degree to which the different species of commodity animals
exhibit the following traits: cognition, emotion, perception, and sensation.
Then let's consider quantifying need, our need of these commodity animals to
sustain our society.
Now we must think a little abstractly. How do we pit need against those
intrinsic qualities of our commodity animals?
Quantify those intrinsics. Quantify needs versus wants. Quietly amongst
yourselves. And then lets get to the meat of the matter. :)
Kirk
p.s. Sebastian, what's with the run on construction? Looks like you had one
long vowel movement.
-----Original Message-----
From: Dr Sebby [mailto:drsebby@hotmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 7:07 PM
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: intensity of pain & animals...
....dammit jake, im still looking. i used to hold this idea as just an
obvious and logical truth after witnessing dozens or hundreds of occasions
where various species of animals just seemed to shrug off or barely even
feel various injuries(eg. cows curiously and comfortably trying to walk on
and/or support themselves using a broken leg whose compound fracture was
sticking out a good 8inches..and this being 5 or more hours after the actual
injury....combined with the realization that if their central nervous system
were relatively simplistic, so must to their nervous system as a whole be on
par. but i could never really argue the point with any scientific
evidence...nor could i imagine how the requisite objective viewpoint be
managed since we can never truly be in another creatures(or man's) skin.
and then one day in a very simple psychology class, the textbook explained
matter-of-factly how this IS true and the simple experiment which proved it
beyond a doubt. i've hunted for this lost morsel several times and cant
seem to find it again....all i remember unfortunately is how immensely
clever and simple the experiment was...and how ABSOLUTE it's conclusions
were...so simple and perfect was the approach that i truly marvelled at the
fact that even the most staunch opponent of such ideas would absolutely
NEVER be able to argue against it...it was that clever! and yet for the
life of me i cant seem to pull it up!!....even searching the internet, i can
find such a simple and completely obvious and undeniable demostration. i
only have the memory of how amazing and simple the method was...at the time
i felt like a fool for not having thought of it before. and only now do i
feel more foolish for not being able to find it again....thinking at the
time "oh, i know it's in this book...i merely have to reference it in the
future" and now i cant seem to locate it. im either using a different
textbook or it's out of the index order. it frustrates me to no small
degree!...and not just with THIS discussion...i've looked for it before.
not seriously enough apparently....i suppose i will now have to go through
page by page the whole fuckiing textbook. all i can be sure of is that i
DID read it...and it resolved the issue SOOOOOo completely and undeniably,
that no one could honestly refute the conclusions. i'll keep looking very
soon again. sorry.
drsebby.
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