Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.
Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.
Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.”
Veronika is far from making even misshapen tools, but her prowess in using them has impressed nonetheless. Over seven sessions of 10 trials, the researchers witnessed 76 instances of tool use as she grabbed the broom to scratch otherwise unreachable regions. Using both ends of the brush counts as multi-purpose tool use, the scientists say, which is extraordinarily rare. Beyond humans, it has only been shown convincingly in chimpanzees.
Lacking photosynthesis, we have to kill to eat. The fact that plants don’t have faces and lack any common means of communication with us does not make them any less evolved than any other creature.
It is easy to think of them as inert objects that lack any sense of the world around them, but we already know that not to be the case. I think that understanding that makes it impossible to distinguish killing a plant or an animal. The best we can do is hold the lives we have to take in high regard by being humane, including to plants, and to avoid waste and frivolous killing.
I can’t read this as anything but solipsism or maybe good old-fashioned intellectual dishonesty. We know that animals are capable of pain and suffering and we know that plants lack the prerequisites like a nervous system, as well as any evolutionary benefit of pain, because they cannot remove themselves from danger.
The position that causing pain or not causing pain is equal is just morally bankrupt.
Oh and even if killing an animal vs. killing a plant was morally analogous, it would still be better to eat the plants directly, since many more plants are harvested to raise a single animal than it would take to feed a human.
cows mostly graze, but they’re also fed things like corncobs and stalks. people can’t eat those.
Weather that is true or not aside: The point was that the other person doesn’t see a moral difference between cutting a pigs neck open or plucking an apple from a tree.
most people don’t
I really don’t understand the argument of saying plants are sentient in some way because they emit chemicals when harmed or recoil. My knee jumps up if I tap it with a hammer, my brain pulls my hand away from a hot stove before I can even register any pain, neither of those are “sentient” actions, that’s just how the cells respond to stimulus, and that automatic response is because of natural selection, not sentient choices or sensations. It’s like saying an auto-closing door is sentient and we ought not try to open it because whenever you try to open it it closes itself, so it “dislikes” being open.
I am not saying they are sentient. I am more saying that it is impossible to establish an objective valuation scale for the lives of creatures. You can choose whatever subjective one you want, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that it is just our own, and even getting an army of like minded people doesn’t make you any more objectively right or wrong.
The one I choose for myself is to do what I can to minimize the suffering of any living thing I can, and avoid excess consumption. Some others are more absolute, choosing to abstain entirely from any part of the meat industry until every part of it has its act together. Others refuse to eat anything but beans and leaves, leaving the most minimal environmental impact possible. All of those and any that avoid waste and needless suffering seem valid to me and not worth the division.