I just watched National Geographic's Prehistoric Predators, the entelodont episode and it was interesting because the entelodont was essentially a predatory species of pig. Like my mythical starfers, it was a hooved predator and that's fascinating, particularly when you consider how a predator with hooves would have to hunt, being unable to grip its prey with its claws. To me, entelodonts are even kind of beautiful with the way they looked, though they're described as ugly 'pigs from hell' and 'terminator pigs' for their rather badass anatomy. These were some really unique predators, not unlike us for their originality in existence! However, watching this and hearing the theory of this fascinating animal's demise, there is a clear moral and that is that in order to survive extinctions, animals must evolve in new ways. The entelodont attempted to survive by making itself get bigger, but that did not work, because evolution threw them the wild card of the bear dog, a species that while smaller, could do everything an entelodont could do and do it better. Bear dogs were also smarter than entelodonts and faster runners, able to hunt in packs, so when push came to shove, they were the end of the world for the entelodonts.
To say it clear, the moral of the story is is that evolution is an arms race and if your arms aren't the best, you're dead but also, if your food source is removed, you will also die. I believe that we humans need to pay attention to this; yes, we are omnivores and we can eat anything, but if our conciousness does not shift soon, if we do not evolve, we will not survive to the next era. I think what we need to do, is shake off the mantle of instinct; it controls so much of what we do, from giving us the impulse to be curious about babies when we previously disliked them as adolescents to the male desire to mate, and mate a lot. The problem with humans mating, is that we're nearly as prolific as rabbits and there's already too damn many of us on this planet for it to support us. We need to stop being selfish about our rampant reproducing and we need to educate ourselves as well as our neighbours more strongly about the effects we have on the environment. We need to evolve. We need to be thoughtful.
Showing posts with label ecology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecology. Show all posts
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Wolf Studies - Confusion!
Having just finished re-watching 'Living with Wolves,' the account of Jim and Jamie Dutcher's Sawtooth Pack, and thinking about Shaun Ellis' book, 'Spirit of the Wolf' I find myself thinking that science, in particular biology and the study of wild animals is rather flawed. Here, in these two accounts we see two different sets of naturalists intimately studying wolves, living with them and seeing how they live, yet we see different things in each. In the Dutcher's wolf project, they felt sorrow for the omega Lakota for being at the bottom of the pack pecking order, but in 'Spirit of the Wolf' it would seem that while an omega is the diffuser of tension, they are still so important, but maybe, maybe it's the same. Perhaps Motzi in the Dutcher's study is the beta male in Shaun Ellis' study who protects the omega and keeps good meat for them. The Dutchers certainly never stuck their face in a kill like Mr. Ellis did to find out what each rank of wolf is eating. So, today I'm confused; who is right? I Know I'm not explaining very well at all what I am thinking about, so here:
Dutcher: Omega wolves are scapegoats, important members of the pack but scapegoats nonetheless. (Classic interpretation of an omega.)
Ellis: Omega wolves are not scapegoats, but are 'well paid' for their services by the betas, who save them some of the best meat from a kill, even though the omegas must still wait.
So, who's right? Or are they both right? I certainly cannot say that the Dutcher interpretation of wolf society as patriarchal sounds right, because no matter what, their wolves were still fenced in and were not hunting for themselves during their study, so the crucial element of hunting was missing significantly from their study. In Ellis' studies, we see that it is the alpha female, not the alpha male who leads the pack on hunts and decides what they hunt, so she is, in essence, the real leader, making wolf society matriarchal. Further, the Dutcher's wolves were raised by them, humans, not by other wild wolves, so the behaviour of their wolves cannot be trusted to be accurate and while Ellis' wolves were raised by him as well, he had also studied wild ones, but he had mimicked wolf behaviour by raising his wolves, soo.... I'm confused. I still have not actually read or watched the documentary of Ellis' study, I've only read the book 'Spirit of the Wolf' which he wrote with photographer Monty Sloan, which entails that the alpha female is boss and that wolf society is tremendously more complicated than most people believe.
Soo... confused. I guess I need to go watch Mr. Ellis' documentary - perhaps that will clear up some of my confusion!
I love science, and I love wolves... watching the Dutcher's excellent documentary, I remembered why I'm so head over heels in love with them and why they are so dear to my spirit (besides that one is one of my guides.) They are such tremendous movers, gliding through the forest without effort, with something in them that is just indescribable, from their large, beautiful paws to their round, curving ears and the feathery way their many coloured fur looks on their necks. Wolves are beautiful and I love them with all of my heart. It was so nice revisiting the Dutcher's documentary again and seeing these magnificent creatures once more. They are spectacular and I pity the wolves on Grouse Mountain who are stuck in a tiny little pen - that's no life for a wolf, a creature that so loves to lope - only the wide open wild is good enough for them.
I'm not sure if I will ever be able to accurately write these creatures. I'm pretty sure that no one can. Every book, every study, every documentary is regardless from a human's perspective on how these animals think... so how can we know if we are even coming close? We can't. I don't believe we ever can.
Wolves. <3
Saturday, June 4, 2011
The Human Species is Selfish
According to most people and probably the holy bible, being overly selfish is a form of sin - so, why is it, does modern society and several high profile, well known religions, preach that humans are better than animals, that they were created to serve us and that we are 'higher beings?'
You know what that sounds like to me?
Once upon a time, there was a boy in Austria who liked to draw swastikas on the outer wall of his school. He grew up, ran for power in a neighboring country and eventually got it. His name was Adolf Hitler. Because of him, millions of other humans were quite literally slaughtered in one of the most obscenely vile crimes ever committed against humanity, the Holocaust and one of the things Hitler preached was that there was a 'master race.'
Now, doesn't that sound familiar?
In general 'modern' humans are constantly preaching that they are better than animals, that we are a 'master species' - when in fact, despite science, I do not believe that we can truly say that we know how animals think. We simply can not. Why? Well, that's simple. Think of different species as different countries, with different beliefs and religions. A person in so-called '1st World' Florida living in a mansion cannot possibly even begin to relate to the poor, impoverished '3rd World' farmer in Tibet. In the same manner, a human cannot possibly begin to relate with a dog, because a dog's way of thinking is even further removed from the way the farmer thinks in comparison to the rich guy who lives in Florida who has five cars. Why? Because dogs and humans are entirely different things and thus, we have entirely different ways of thinking from each other.
Let's start with primary senses.
As you know, reading this, a human's primary sense is sight. We perceive our world with our eyes; in fact, in a natural situation - aka, primitive cave men circumstances - and we remain unchanged from our nomadic 'cave man' ancestors by the way, we are the same species - it would be almost impossible for a human to survive while blind without technology. Why? Think about it - while it has been proven that at the loss of one sense others will improve, a blind human still can't see that random tree coming up that his or her walking stick didn't tap or they wouldn't see the cougar sitting silently in said tree overhead of them. Mind you, sighted humans probably wouldn't even see the cougar, but the fact remains - in an environment of uneven terrain and shrubbery, where you cannot see much less smell or hear the food that you are attempting to forage for, you as a wild human would most certainly die without the help of sighted humans.
Of course, this is the main reason why humans hunt in packs. Indeed, we have an obsessive instinct to protect our frail, which may actually prove to be a detriment to the DNA of our species as a whole, because as much as I probably sound like Hitler saying this, there's very little natural selection going on in modern human society. Everybody is getting laid. It doesn't matter what you look like - there's so many damn many of us that if you're a human who really wants to reproduce, you can do it - in fact, you don't even need a mate for the act of reproduction anymore! See? No natural selection.
Okay, that was off topic - back to dogs and humans.
While humans are animals which obviously depend on their eyesight, dogs are an entirely different pot of coffee. No, really. Forget all your anthropomorphic ideas that dogs and other animals think in exactly the same way that we humans do - they don't. Think of different species as having different operating systems - humans, being so flawed, would be Windows. Animals would be something more like Macs. Oldschool, bullet proof macs. Why?
Dogs, you see, do not see the world persay. They smell it. A dog's nose is thousands of times more powerful than a human's - in fact, a wolf can smell a single drop of human sweat for up to a month. (Wolves are also a great deal smarter than Fido, but let's not get into that right now.) In any case, a dog's sense of smell and a wolf's is pretty much the same ball of wax. Dogs can detect minute amounts of drugs, food odours in luggage and even cancer, because they, unlike us, can actually smell what is happening inside a living body - how do you think a wolf can pick out a weak specimen in a herd without it showing any outward ague? Impressed yet by dogs and wolves? You should be. Now, think - if a dog is 'seeing' everything with her nose, then she is detecting probably millions of things in her world that we as humans are completely and utterly blind to. When a dog walks into the forest or even a pet food store, you might have noticed that it'll usually get pretty excited - that's because it's experiancing something of a sensory overload. While we humans walk the stagnant, dusty halls of the pet supply store, just seeing colours and symbols on bags, Fido is detecting the ingredients in every single bag. Fido is recognizing a plethora of smells he knows - and perhaps a larger plethora of smells he doesn't. He wants to find out what they all are - but will he get to? Doubtful. Fido isn't a wolf in the wild who can.
As a greater example, there is a test frequently employed by scientists to determine how self-aware an animal is. An adult human can usually always recognize them self in the mirror, because adult humans have a fully developed sense of sight and can deduct via their sense of space that that ugly bloke or handsome devil (depending on how they see themselves) staring back at them is themselves. However, human babies aren't so intelligent. In fact, they're pretty stupid until about the age of two and border collies (yes, a breed of dog) are smarter (by human standards) than most human toddlers. But, babies are babies. They aren't self aware - they have an excuse!
So what am I getting at?
The fact is, the mirror trick is obsolete when it comes to animals whose primary sense is not sight. Dogs have good eyesight - they can even see in muted colour - but when faced with a mirror, most dogs won't recognize their own reflection. Why? Are they stupid? Are we superior to them because we can?
Absolutely not!
A dog's primary sense, as before explained, is smell! Most people who have owned a dog or studied them out of curiousity can agree that dogs can recognize their own scent. In fact, most animals are scent driven and greet each other by politely breathing into each other's faces - 'sniffing noses.' They might think that another dog looks familiar, but the only way they'll know for sure is if they smell the other dog's breath. When an animal sniffs another animal's exhalations, they are smelling air that has passed through the other animal's lungs, close to its blood which is a baffling chemical stew of cells, nutrients, various biological chemicals and hormones. They can tell the other animal's age, sex, state of health and even emotional state. Further, because they are in a sense smelling another animal's blood, they're quite likely also able to smell subtle differences in its chemical make up that make it Charlie and pooch #2 Fido.
In short, you can't judge the intelligence of an animal by how it reacts to a mirror, because chances are sight isn't its primary sense and it's also probably not even paying attention because there's a bunch of freakish two-legged animals surrounding it with cameras, staring at it.
Staring is aggressive body language. If I was a dog being stared at by some stranger, I very likely would not be very interested in all in the stupid shiny thing in front of me. And the dogs who bark at their reflection? Well; remember - this is an animal that works by scent. He's probably freaked out by the strange dog that is copying him and apparently has no smell. If he could smell that strange dog, he'd relax, but he can't.
For the sake of the record, there are scent-orientated animals who are smart enough to recognize their own reflection. Dolphins navigate by echolocation, so sight is certainly not their favoured sense, seeing as they are often swimming through extremely murky water, but they can still recognize their own reflection - and so can some dogs in fact.
Yet, for the record, if you put the average joe human in a room and asked him to consciously recognize his own scent from many others, he probably wouldn't. In fact, he probably wouldn't even want to smell any of them, because we humans often seem to dislike the natural smell of our own species. It's often only through the use of various perfumes that we can consciously recognize specific humans. No human wants to smell anyone else's scent glands - armpits, breath, anus, feet - because we're as a general rule, just not scent orientated animals. Yes, there are humans with a stupendous sense of smell (for a human) but these are the exception, not the rule. Extraordinary humans like these are usually found in the food industry. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that while I am undoubtedly a strange example of humanity, I am extremely normal in the fact that my sense of smell is nigh non-existent and in fact, I don't like eating in the dark because I simply have to be able to see my food. See? I'm an animal that depends on eyesight for survival - I need to be able to see my food to make sure that nothing has contaminated it, that it's safe. It's the same reason most humans are not keen on sticking their arms down a dirty hole after a ring - because they can't see what else might be in that hole. It's survival instinct, hardwired around humanity's dependency on its eyes. Most humans become anxious if we cannot see a perceived threat to ourselves, just like the freaked out dog that barks at its reflection in confusion because it cannot smell it.
"So?" you ask - "Dogs don't have language. Animals don't talk to each other. Humans must be superior, because we can."
Such a selfish, human-like way to think - you have to put yourself outside of the human perspective! Forget that you're a human. Seriously. Do it. Mentally remove yourself from your human perceptions. Think outside the 'box,' if you will!
The statement that animals do not have language or culture is grotesquely wrong. Think about it - humans, from a sensory perspective, are rather pathetic creatures. Yes, it's true - we are. We have pretty good eyes - but we can't see in the dark, we have a great sense of touch - but pretty much all mammals have that, we have okay hearing - but we can only hear within a certain range of decibels - whereas most animals can hear a far wider scope and as a whole as a species, our sense of smell positively sucks. We're lucky if we can smell dinner cooking in another room. No seriously. We are. There's lots of humans who have no sense of smell at all, or who have lost it. This is pretty much unheard of in animals and because humans have such bad whiffers, there isn't even a common term for a human who can't smell. Blind in the nose? Deaf in the nose? What?!
As a species, a human's secondary sense for perceiving the world around them is most definitely hearing and because we have such a poor sense of smell, we depend on watching each other's body language combined with each other's vocalizations to communicate - truthfully, humans really don't make that many sounds either.
"What?!" you ask, "But what about our vast dictionaries? We make loads of sounds!"
Actually, we don't.
While different languages often have different sounds (making the learning of some near to impossible for outsiders, who will lack the ability to hear some sounds in languages that are very foreign to theirs) the truth is, in any human language there aren't many of these sounds. Each word that we make is really a conglomeration of a very small group of sounds, a group that is smaller than the 26 characters in the modern English alphabet. For example:
'K' makes a 'kuh' sound - but so does 'C' and 'Q' without a 'U.'
'S' makes a 'sss' sound - yet so can 'C!' (In fact, 'C' is a rather useless letter if you ask me.)
So, here are the actual sounds of an english speaking human:
'Ah' 'Beh' 'Deh' 'Ee' 'Fff' 'Geh' 'Hah' 'Ih' 'Jeh' 'Kuh' 'Ell' 'Mmm' 'Nnn' 'Ooo' 'Peh' 'Rrr' 'Sss' 'Teh' 'Veh' 'Wuh' 'Zzz'
Notice... some letters are missing. There's only about 21 distinct sounds made by the characters in the English Alphabet which we mix together to create words, adding in tonal inflections as the flavour to convey our points across better. Dogs only have about five distinct barks, but they also have growls and oh, yes, they can howl! So, they might seem to have less distinct sounds than us, but there's several things we humans have to take into account when judging other creatures for lingual skills:
1. Most animals can make sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.
2. Most animals can hear sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.
Personally, I think that dependency on body language in human societies versus animal societies is probably about equal and the amazing thing is, is that most humans - and animals - can read body language across special barriers - one has only to watch recent documentaries on dogs to know this fact. Further, domestic cats do this too and is it really that far of a stretch to say that wild animals do it with each other as well? Body language is fairly universal - perhaps another fact of thousands which supports evolution. Humans and all other animals share a common ancestor - somewhere way back in antiquity. But I'm not going to obsessively argue evolution right now. No. Don't even try it with me!
So, in short, animals have language. This is pretty much accepted in scientists studying cetaceans such as dolphins and whales - but I'd say that it's present in most other animal species too; after all, it's not how big your brain is that counts - it's how you use it and the typical human uses very little of its brain! What's not to say that animals don't use more eh? We can't firmly say, even with science what an animal thinks, because we are humans! We are a different species from a dog, a cat, a bison, a horse - granted, there are likely animals who do just survive off of simple instinct, like ants perhaps, but it is my theory that most animals are in fact very smart, just as smart as humans, just in a different way!
As for the question of if animals have culture? I believe that's a stupid thing to even ask. Of course they do - that's like saying that people in Britain don't have a different culture from people in a traditional Indian town. Frankly, it's racist of humans to propose that animals don't have culture - how do we know that they do not? How do we know that they do? Well, actually in some species there's some pretty good evidence for the latter; dogs and wolves are the same species after all - look how differently they live. Wolves in the desert and wolves in the forest also would have different cultures, as would a mustang opposed to a racehorse. Is animal culture rich? Hell yes it is. Want an example? Wolves mourn their dead. After her mother died, my cat Smokey searched and cried for her for days - clearly she was in mourning. When babies of any mammal species are taken from their dams they cry and the mothers get depressed - they want their baby back! Doesn't this denote intelligence? Doesn't this denote culture? An alpha female wolf will show her family what she wants them all to hunt by parading in front of them a piece of the targeted prey, like a cached leg. Hell, pretty much all pack animals use strategy when they hunt - is a leopard's ambushing spring from a tree upon an impala really that different from a human hunter loosing an arrow at a favoured buck? No!
Humans are animals, yet we like to pretend that we stand on a pinnacle above the rest of our earthly brethren, pretending that we are better. "We are the master race, because we can use tools! This is what makes us smarter than everyone else!" we say. "We have gods, so we are smarter!"
Um, really? No. We are not. Sorry human kind - but we're no more stupid or intelligent than Fido. We're a great deal more dangerous, but that does not make us better. That makes us worse - given a choice and removal from humans, dogs go feral. Natural selection takes place - they become wild things again, like the dingos of Australia. Who says dolphins don't have gods? Who says that deer don't? A human will go feral just the same as a dog if placed in 'the wild' for long enough.
So, why are humans selfish? We frequently run screw with the environment for our own 'self gain' - thus shooting ourselves in the foot. We breed incessantly and we are far worse than rabbits, because rabbits can't blow shit up with napalm, or worse, do things ala Hiroshima the nuclear way. Despite all our great technology, we humans are usually too stupid to realize until after the fact that doing certain things, like filling in wetlands or mowing down miles of pristine forests might be very bad. Also, despite our great technology, humans, an omnivorous species whose only claim to being able to eat other animals is the pepsin in our stomachs, are still eating meat, despite how unsustainable meat is. The fact is, we as omnivores-ranging-more-on-the-herbivorous side of the spectrum have a choice - we can survive perfectly fine without meat or we can eat it and wonder why things are getting so polluted. Meat eaters are selfish - we eat meat because we see it as a status symbol. 'Oh, we're better than the other herbivores, because look what we can do.' If we were better, we would recognize several facts:
1. We do not have digestive tracts that are tailored towards the digestion of meat. If we did, our intestines would be extremely short (carnivores digest things very fast), our stomachs would be far more acidic than they are (cats and dogs have a stomach acid acidity rating of 1-2 molars - the purpose of it is to fry harmful parasites and bacteria; thus true carnivores have the ability to eat carrion, aka rotten meat, which humans cannot - carrion would be extremely dangerous to us) and we do not have the proper teeth for eating meat. If we did, our canine teeth would be an inch long and the rest of our teeth would be a lot pointier! Carnivore teeth act like scissors and stabbing knives.
2. Anatomically, we are geared towards eating a chiefly herbivorous diet. In fact, of all the primates, humans probably have the shittiest teeth for meat consumption. Our teeth are like a cows - morter-and-pestle molars combined with scissoring, snipping incisors at the front. Our canines are pretty much non-existent. Further, we have a small stomach (carnivores have big stomachs for the purpose of storing meat) and a very long intestinal tract, ideal for the digestion of plant material. As well as that, our saliva has amylase in it, a digestive enzyme specifically geared for the breaking down of the carbohydrates that we depend on - carnivores, you should know, run off of fat, not carbohydrates for energy. When humans get fat we get fat, but for carnivorous animals like sled dogs, fat's the magic ingredient in their ability to run for what seems like almost forever.
Another thing that makes humans a pretty selfish lot is that we have a habit of imposing our ideas on other beings, whether they're an animal or even our own species. We have a decidedly bad superiority complex. One of the ways in which this is particularly bad, is when we go out and impose vegetarian or vegan diets upon cats and dogs - animals which are clearly carnivorous. This gets particularly disgusting when it comes to cats, because as obligate carnivores, animals which must eat meat to survive, who cannot digest anything else, this imposing of a herbivorous diet can have disasterous, life threatening consequences.
More things humans do which are selfish and vile to their fellow creature?
-Sport hunting - it's not predation, because you aren't depending on the death of that animal for food, you're killing it for fun, which is, you guessed it, murder.
-Being prey animals, we humans freak out the second one of us is killed by a predator. The only difference is, humans have guns and we're likely to blow the brains out of said predator, who was usually only looking for a meal, something we humans do ourselves, yet which we conveniently forget. No, I'm not going to get into this issue either, but the fact of the matter is, if we don't want to be eaten, we should try harder to be unappetizing. We're humans! We pretend we're the best damn thing on the planet most of the time, so why can't we be more responsible without resorting to violence? There are ways of dealing with predation without killing those predators - like using guardian dogs - we didn't become symbiotic partners with dogs just so that they could sit on our laps!
- We are grossly abusive to our symbiotic partner species, dogs, cats and horses. Every time we breed a dog with predisposed serious genetic problems, we are subtly torturing that dog's descendants, guaranteeing that at least some of them will have those serious genetic problems. First and foremost, because dogs cannot choose their own strong healthy mates via natural selection in our society, we must provide genetic selection services for them - starting with not allowing dogs with genetic problems to breed. We would do well to breed for soundness first.
If you want disturbing example, approximately 90% of today's thoroughbred racehorses in North America are direct descendants of the Canadian racehorse Northern Dancer. While it's fairly impressive for a male animal that Northern Dancer got laid so many times, the fact remains that with that many horses being descended from him, it means that there is a lot of inbreeding going on in the thoroughbred racing industry today with relatives being bred to each other, which is likely a cause of the many fatal breakdowns that are happening on the backstretch (ala Barbaro, anyone?) Most horses in domestic care do not have a choice about who they get to mate with - humans decide that for them and these animals receive no sexual education to understand what is happening to them as they would in the wild living with their herds, with the result being that when a domestic mare is covered, she usually has to be held against her will, her legs fettered while a stallion essentially rapes her. Meanwhile the stallion has no education to tell him that he's being too rough with her. In the wild, he would have that and the mare would absolutely have a choice in whether she gets covered or not - if she doesn't want it, a wild mare can quite easily send a good sharp kick to a stallion's nether regions to tell him off and he'll definitely get the point as he reels in agony! Probably more sad is that most domestic stallions never get to meet their babies - whereas their wild counterparts help their 'wives' raise their babies. (Wild mares are in fact often extremely loyal to their stallions. Horse harems are closely knit family groups.)
Compared to dogs and horses (I don't even want to venture into the vile world of how we treat livestock like cows and chickens) cats have it pretty easy in domestication. Dogs have it pretty easy too - unlike horses, they are still able to maintain natural culture of a sort under human care, living in surrogate packs quite happily with we their symbiotic partners - in return for their services, we feed, shelter and care for them. It's a sweet deal for dogs, cats and yes, horses too. Horses in captivity do somewhat get to live in herds, but they just usually don't have the culture that they would have in the wild. There's no ball kicking in the pasture, because humans gender segregate horses for the most part. Stallions are typically ill-socialized hooligans, because humans often keep them alone, without at least other male horses to play with. (This is for their own safety, but it still sucks for them.) The poor things probably feel overwhelmed whenever they meet a girl!
Anyway - cats. Cats have it pretty posh, most of the time. Why? Cats are probably the only one of these three typical symbiotic partners that decided to join humans on their own from the wild. Why did these small, easily spooked animals join us loud things? Well, cats are smart animals and they figured out that we, in contrast are extremely messy animals, thus attracting high numbers of a cat's favourite prey to our habitats - mice. Ancient Egyptians realized that their rodent problems disappeared with the little spotted wild cats roaming around, so they started trying to encourage cats to live near them and cats, who saw that we humans are perfect at attracting rodents, decided that living with us would probably be a pretty sweet deal. They were right. However, as humans become more sedentary, sometimes too lazy for dogs, will cats suffer as dogs have genetically? Hopefully not. There is hope in the cat world; some breeders of Persian cats are breeding for cats with less pushed in (bracheocephalic) faces, which means that they are breeding for healthier animals. (It is hard for bracheocephalic animals such as Persians, bull dogs and pugs to breathe and they frequently have health problems. English Bulldogs, because of their huge heads and tiny hips cannot be born naturally and must receive c-sections in order to give birth. Bulldogs are also top heavy and will drown if dropped in the water, because they are unable to hold their heads above the surface in it.)
There are many other reasons why humans are selfish, but you know what the nice thing is? It seems like we're slowly getting less selfish.
Which means there is hope - for both us, our planet and the billions of other animals living here. We can do this humans! We can save ourselves and our world!
All we have to do is be a little less selfish.
You know what that sounds like to me?
Once upon a time, there was a boy in Austria who liked to draw swastikas on the outer wall of his school. He grew up, ran for power in a neighboring country and eventually got it. His name was Adolf Hitler. Because of him, millions of other humans were quite literally slaughtered in one of the most obscenely vile crimes ever committed against humanity, the Holocaust and one of the things Hitler preached was that there was a 'master race.'
Now, doesn't that sound familiar?
In general 'modern' humans are constantly preaching that they are better than animals, that we are a 'master species' - when in fact, despite science, I do not believe that we can truly say that we know how animals think. We simply can not. Why? Well, that's simple. Think of different species as different countries, with different beliefs and religions. A person in so-called '1st World' Florida living in a mansion cannot possibly even begin to relate to the poor, impoverished '3rd World' farmer in Tibet. In the same manner, a human cannot possibly begin to relate with a dog, because a dog's way of thinking is even further removed from the way the farmer thinks in comparison to the rich guy who lives in Florida who has five cars. Why? Because dogs and humans are entirely different things and thus, we have entirely different ways of thinking from each other.
Let's start with primary senses.
As you know, reading this, a human's primary sense is sight. We perceive our world with our eyes; in fact, in a natural situation - aka, primitive cave men circumstances - and we remain unchanged from our nomadic 'cave man' ancestors by the way, we are the same species - it would be almost impossible for a human to survive while blind without technology. Why? Think about it - while it has been proven that at the loss of one sense others will improve, a blind human still can't see that random tree coming up that his or her walking stick didn't tap or they wouldn't see the cougar sitting silently in said tree overhead of them. Mind you, sighted humans probably wouldn't even see the cougar, but the fact remains - in an environment of uneven terrain and shrubbery, where you cannot see much less smell or hear the food that you are attempting to forage for, you as a wild human would most certainly die without the help of sighted humans.
Of course, this is the main reason why humans hunt in packs. Indeed, we have an obsessive instinct to protect our frail, which may actually prove to be a detriment to the DNA of our species as a whole, because as much as I probably sound like Hitler saying this, there's very little natural selection going on in modern human society. Everybody is getting laid. It doesn't matter what you look like - there's so many damn many of us that if you're a human who really wants to reproduce, you can do it - in fact, you don't even need a mate for the act of reproduction anymore! See? No natural selection.
Okay, that was off topic - back to dogs and humans.
While humans are animals which obviously depend on their eyesight, dogs are an entirely different pot of coffee. No, really. Forget all your anthropomorphic ideas that dogs and other animals think in exactly the same way that we humans do - they don't. Think of different species as having different operating systems - humans, being so flawed, would be Windows. Animals would be something more like Macs. Oldschool, bullet proof macs. Why?
Dogs, you see, do not see the world persay. They smell it. A dog's nose is thousands of times more powerful than a human's - in fact, a wolf can smell a single drop of human sweat for up to a month. (Wolves are also a great deal smarter than Fido, but let's not get into that right now.) In any case, a dog's sense of smell and a wolf's is pretty much the same ball of wax. Dogs can detect minute amounts of drugs, food odours in luggage and even cancer, because they, unlike us, can actually smell what is happening inside a living body - how do you think a wolf can pick out a weak specimen in a herd without it showing any outward ague? Impressed yet by dogs and wolves? You should be. Now, think - if a dog is 'seeing' everything with her nose, then she is detecting probably millions of things in her world that we as humans are completely and utterly blind to. When a dog walks into the forest or even a pet food store, you might have noticed that it'll usually get pretty excited - that's because it's experiancing something of a sensory overload. While we humans walk the stagnant, dusty halls of the pet supply store, just seeing colours and symbols on bags, Fido is detecting the ingredients in every single bag. Fido is recognizing a plethora of smells he knows - and perhaps a larger plethora of smells he doesn't. He wants to find out what they all are - but will he get to? Doubtful. Fido isn't a wolf in the wild who can.
As a greater example, there is a test frequently employed by scientists to determine how self-aware an animal is. An adult human can usually always recognize them self in the mirror, because adult humans have a fully developed sense of sight and can deduct via their sense of space that that ugly bloke or handsome devil (depending on how they see themselves) staring back at them is themselves. However, human babies aren't so intelligent. In fact, they're pretty stupid until about the age of two and border collies (yes, a breed of dog) are smarter (by human standards) than most human toddlers. But, babies are babies. They aren't self aware - they have an excuse!
So what am I getting at?
The fact is, the mirror trick is obsolete when it comes to animals whose primary sense is not sight. Dogs have good eyesight - they can even see in muted colour - but when faced with a mirror, most dogs won't recognize their own reflection. Why? Are they stupid? Are we superior to them because we can?
Absolutely not!
A dog's primary sense, as before explained, is smell! Most people who have owned a dog or studied them out of curiousity can agree that dogs can recognize their own scent. In fact, most animals are scent driven and greet each other by politely breathing into each other's faces - 'sniffing noses.' They might think that another dog looks familiar, but the only way they'll know for sure is if they smell the other dog's breath. When an animal sniffs another animal's exhalations, they are smelling air that has passed through the other animal's lungs, close to its blood which is a baffling chemical stew of cells, nutrients, various biological chemicals and hormones. They can tell the other animal's age, sex, state of health and even emotional state. Further, because they are in a sense smelling another animal's blood, they're quite likely also able to smell subtle differences in its chemical make up that make it Charlie and pooch #2 Fido.
In short, you can't judge the intelligence of an animal by how it reacts to a mirror, because chances are sight isn't its primary sense and it's also probably not even paying attention because there's a bunch of freakish two-legged animals surrounding it with cameras, staring at it.
Staring is aggressive body language. If I was a dog being stared at by some stranger, I very likely would not be very interested in all in the stupid shiny thing in front of me. And the dogs who bark at their reflection? Well; remember - this is an animal that works by scent. He's probably freaked out by the strange dog that is copying him and apparently has no smell. If he could smell that strange dog, he'd relax, but he can't.
For the sake of the record, there are scent-orientated animals who are smart enough to recognize their own reflection. Dolphins navigate by echolocation, so sight is certainly not their favoured sense, seeing as they are often swimming through extremely murky water, but they can still recognize their own reflection - and so can some dogs in fact.
Yet, for the record, if you put the average joe human in a room and asked him to consciously recognize his own scent from many others, he probably wouldn't. In fact, he probably wouldn't even want to smell any of them, because we humans often seem to dislike the natural smell of our own species. It's often only through the use of various perfumes that we can consciously recognize specific humans. No human wants to smell anyone else's scent glands - armpits, breath, anus, feet - because we're as a general rule, just not scent orientated animals. Yes, there are humans with a stupendous sense of smell (for a human) but these are the exception, not the rule. Extraordinary humans like these are usually found in the food industry. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that while I am undoubtedly a strange example of humanity, I am extremely normal in the fact that my sense of smell is nigh non-existent and in fact, I don't like eating in the dark because I simply have to be able to see my food. See? I'm an animal that depends on eyesight for survival - I need to be able to see my food to make sure that nothing has contaminated it, that it's safe. It's the same reason most humans are not keen on sticking their arms down a dirty hole after a ring - because they can't see what else might be in that hole. It's survival instinct, hardwired around humanity's dependency on its eyes. Most humans become anxious if we cannot see a perceived threat to ourselves, just like the freaked out dog that barks at its reflection in confusion because it cannot smell it.
"So?" you ask - "Dogs don't have language. Animals don't talk to each other. Humans must be superior, because we can."
Such a selfish, human-like way to think - you have to put yourself outside of the human perspective! Forget that you're a human. Seriously. Do it. Mentally remove yourself from your human perceptions. Think outside the 'box,' if you will!
The statement that animals do not have language or culture is grotesquely wrong. Think about it - humans, from a sensory perspective, are rather pathetic creatures. Yes, it's true - we are. We have pretty good eyes - but we can't see in the dark, we have a great sense of touch - but pretty much all mammals have that, we have okay hearing - but we can only hear within a certain range of decibels - whereas most animals can hear a far wider scope and as a whole as a species, our sense of smell positively sucks. We're lucky if we can smell dinner cooking in another room. No seriously. We are. There's lots of humans who have no sense of smell at all, or who have lost it. This is pretty much unheard of in animals and because humans have such bad whiffers, there isn't even a common term for a human who can't smell. Blind in the nose? Deaf in the nose? What?!
As a species, a human's secondary sense for perceiving the world around them is most definitely hearing and because we have such a poor sense of smell, we depend on watching each other's body language combined with each other's vocalizations to communicate - truthfully, humans really don't make that many sounds either.
"What?!" you ask, "But what about our vast dictionaries? We make loads of sounds!"
Actually, we don't.
While different languages often have different sounds (making the learning of some near to impossible for outsiders, who will lack the ability to hear some sounds in languages that are very foreign to theirs) the truth is, in any human language there aren't many of these sounds. Each word that we make is really a conglomeration of a very small group of sounds, a group that is smaller than the 26 characters in the modern English alphabet. For example:
'K' makes a 'kuh' sound - but so does 'C' and 'Q' without a 'U.'
'S' makes a 'sss' sound - yet so can 'C!' (In fact, 'C' is a rather useless letter if you ask me.)
So, here are the actual sounds of an english speaking human:
'Ah' 'Beh' 'Deh' 'Ee' 'Fff' 'Geh' 'Hah' 'Ih' 'Jeh' 'Kuh' 'Ell' 'Mmm' 'Nnn' 'Ooo' 'Peh' 'Rrr' 'Sss' 'Teh' 'Veh' 'Wuh' 'Zzz'
Notice... some letters are missing. There's only about 21 distinct sounds made by the characters in the English Alphabet which we mix together to create words, adding in tonal inflections as the flavour to convey our points across better. Dogs only have about five distinct barks, but they also have growls and oh, yes, they can howl! So, they might seem to have less distinct sounds than us, but there's several things we humans have to take into account when judging other creatures for lingual skills:
1. Most animals can make sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.
2. Most animals can hear sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.
Personally, I think that dependency on body language in human societies versus animal societies is probably about equal and the amazing thing is, is that most humans - and animals - can read body language across special barriers - one has only to watch recent documentaries on dogs to know this fact. Further, domestic cats do this too and is it really that far of a stretch to say that wild animals do it with each other as well? Body language is fairly universal - perhaps another fact of thousands which supports evolution. Humans and all other animals share a common ancestor - somewhere way back in antiquity. But I'm not going to obsessively argue evolution right now. No. Don't even try it with me!
So, in short, animals have language. This is pretty much accepted in scientists studying cetaceans such as dolphins and whales - but I'd say that it's present in most other animal species too; after all, it's not how big your brain is that counts - it's how you use it and the typical human uses very little of its brain! What's not to say that animals don't use more eh? We can't firmly say, even with science what an animal thinks, because we are humans! We are a different species from a dog, a cat, a bison, a horse - granted, there are likely animals who do just survive off of simple instinct, like ants perhaps, but it is my theory that most animals are in fact very smart, just as smart as humans, just in a different way!
As for the question of if animals have culture? I believe that's a stupid thing to even ask. Of course they do - that's like saying that people in Britain don't have a different culture from people in a traditional Indian town. Frankly, it's racist of humans to propose that animals don't have culture - how do we know that they do not? How do we know that they do? Well, actually in some species there's some pretty good evidence for the latter; dogs and wolves are the same species after all - look how differently they live. Wolves in the desert and wolves in the forest also would have different cultures, as would a mustang opposed to a racehorse. Is animal culture rich? Hell yes it is. Want an example? Wolves mourn their dead. After her mother died, my cat Smokey searched and cried for her for days - clearly she was in mourning. When babies of any mammal species are taken from their dams they cry and the mothers get depressed - they want their baby back! Doesn't this denote intelligence? Doesn't this denote culture? An alpha female wolf will show her family what she wants them all to hunt by parading in front of them a piece of the targeted prey, like a cached leg. Hell, pretty much all pack animals use strategy when they hunt - is a leopard's ambushing spring from a tree upon an impala really that different from a human hunter loosing an arrow at a favoured buck? No!
Humans are animals, yet we like to pretend that we stand on a pinnacle above the rest of our earthly brethren, pretending that we are better. "We are the master race, because we can use tools! This is what makes us smarter than everyone else!" we say. "We have gods, so we are smarter!"
Um, really? No. We are not. Sorry human kind - but we're no more stupid or intelligent than Fido. We're a great deal more dangerous, but that does not make us better. That makes us worse - given a choice and removal from humans, dogs go feral. Natural selection takes place - they become wild things again, like the dingos of Australia. Who says dolphins don't have gods? Who says that deer don't? A human will go feral just the same as a dog if placed in 'the wild' for long enough.
So, why are humans selfish? We frequently run screw with the environment for our own 'self gain' - thus shooting ourselves in the foot. We breed incessantly and we are far worse than rabbits, because rabbits can't blow shit up with napalm, or worse, do things ala Hiroshima the nuclear way. Despite all our great technology, we humans are usually too stupid to realize until after the fact that doing certain things, like filling in wetlands or mowing down miles of pristine forests might be very bad. Also, despite our great technology, humans, an omnivorous species whose only claim to being able to eat other animals is the pepsin in our stomachs, are still eating meat, despite how unsustainable meat is. The fact is, we as omnivores-ranging-more-on-the-herbivorous side of the spectrum have a choice - we can survive perfectly fine without meat or we can eat it and wonder why things are getting so polluted. Meat eaters are selfish - we eat meat because we see it as a status symbol. 'Oh, we're better than the other herbivores, because look what we can do.' If we were better, we would recognize several facts:
1. We do not have digestive tracts that are tailored towards the digestion of meat. If we did, our intestines would be extremely short (carnivores digest things very fast), our stomachs would be far more acidic than they are (cats and dogs have a stomach acid acidity rating of 1-2 molars - the purpose of it is to fry harmful parasites and bacteria; thus true carnivores have the ability to eat carrion, aka rotten meat, which humans cannot - carrion would be extremely dangerous to us) and we do not have the proper teeth for eating meat. If we did, our canine teeth would be an inch long and the rest of our teeth would be a lot pointier! Carnivore teeth act like scissors and stabbing knives.
2. Anatomically, we are geared towards eating a chiefly herbivorous diet. In fact, of all the primates, humans probably have the shittiest teeth for meat consumption. Our teeth are like a cows - morter-and-pestle molars combined with scissoring, snipping incisors at the front. Our canines are pretty much non-existent. Further, we have a small stomach (carnivores have big stomachs for the purpose of storing meat) and a very long intestinal tract, ideal for the digestion of plant material. As well as that, our saliva has amylase in it, a digestive enzyme specifically geared for the breaking down of the carbohydrates that we depend on - carnivores, you should know, run off of fat, not carbohydrates for energy. When humans get fat we get fat, but for carnivorous animals like sled dogs, fat's the magic ingredient in their ability to run for what seems like almost forever.
Another thing that makes humans a pretty selfish lot is that we have a habit of imposing our ideas on other beings, whether they're an animal or even our own species. We have a decidedly bad superiority complex. One of the ways in which this is particularly bad, is when we go out and impose vegetarian or vegan diets upon cats and dogs - animals which are clearly carnivorous. This gets particularly disgusting when it comes to cats, because as obligate carnivores, animals which must eat meat to survive, who cannot digest anything else, this imposing of a herbivorous diet can have disasterous, life threatening consequences.
More things humans do which are selfish and vile to their fellow creature?
-Sport hunting - it's not predation, because you aren't depending on the death of that animal for food, you're killing it for fun, which is, you guessed it, murder.
-Being prey animals, we humans freak out the second one of us is killed by a predator. The only difference is, humans have guns and we're likely to blow the brains out of said predator, who was usually only looking for a meal, something we humans do ourselves, yet which we conveniently forget. No, I'm not going to get into this issue either, but the fact of the matter is, if we don't want to be eaten, we should try harder to be unappetizing. We're humans! We pretend we're the best damn thing on the planet most of the time, so why can't we be more responsible without resorting to violence? There are ways of dealing with predation without killing those predators - like using guardian dogs - we didn't become symbiotic partners with dogs just so that they could sit on our laps!
- We are grossly abusive to our symbiotic partner species, dogs, cats and horses. Every time we breed a dog with predisposed serious genetic problems, we are subtly torturing that dog's descendants, guaranteeing that at least some of them will have those serious genetic problems. First and foremost, because dogs cannot choose their own strong healthy mates via natural selection in our society, we must provide genetic selection services for them - starting with not allowing dogs with genetic problems to breed. We would do well to breed for soundness first.
If you want disturbing example, approximately 90% of today's thoroughbred racehorses in North America are direct descendants of the Canadian racehorse Northern Dancer. While it's fairly impressive for a male animal that Northern Dancer got laid so many times, the fact remains that with that many horses being descended from him, it means that there is a lot of inbreeding going on in the thoroughbred racing industry today with relatives being bred to each other, which is likely a cause of the many fatal breakdowns that are happening on the backstretch (ala Barbaro, anyone?) Most horses in domestic care do not have a choice about who they get to mate with - humans decide that for them and these animals receive no sexual education to understand what is happening to them as they would in the wild living with their herds, with the result being that when a domestic mare is covered, she usually has to be held against her will, her legs fettered while a stallion essentially rapes her. Meanwhile the stallion has no education to tell him that he's being too rough with her. In the wild, he would have that and the mare would absolutely have a choice in whether she gets covered or not - if she doesn't want it, a wild mare can quite easily send a good sharp kick to a stallion's nether regions to tell him off and he'll definitely get the point as he reels in agony! Probably more sad is that most domestic stallions never get to meet their babies - whereas their wild counterparts help their 'wives' raise their babies. (Wild mares are in fact often extremely loyal to their stallions. Horse harems are closely knit family groups.)
Compared to dogs and horses (I don't even want to venture into the vile world of how we treat livestock like cows and chickens) cats have it pretty easy in domestication. Dogs have it pretty easy too - unlike horses, they are still able to maintain natural culture of a sort under human care, living in surrogate packs quite happily with we their symbiotic partners - in return for their services, we feed, shelter and care for them. It's a sweet deal for dogs, cats and yes, horses too. Horses in captivity do somewhat get to live in herds, but they just usually don't have the culture that they would have in the wild. There's no ball kicking in the pasture, because humans gender segregate horses for the most part. Stallions are typically ill-socialized hooligans, because humans often keep them alone, without at least other male horses to play with. (This is for their own safety, but it still sucks for them.) The poor things probably feel overwhelmed whenever they meet a girl!
Anyway - cats. Cats have it pretty posh, most of the time. Why? Cats are probably the only one of these three typical symbiotic partners that decided to join humans on their own from the wild. Why did these small, easily spooked animals join us loud things? Well, cats are smart animals and they figured out that we, in contrast are extremely messy animals, thus attracting high numbers of a cat's favourite prey to our habitats - mice. Ancient Egyptians realized that their rodent problems disappeared with the little spotted wild cats roaming around, so they started trying to encourage cats to live near them and cats, who saw that we humans are perfect at attracting rodents, decided that living with us would probably be a pretty sweet deal. They were right. However, as humans become more sedentary, sometimes too lazy for dogs, will cats suffer as dogs have genetically? Hopefully not. There is hope in the cat world; some breeders of Persian cats are breeding for cats with less pushed in (bracheocephalic) faces, which means that they are breeding for healthier animals. (It is hard for bracheocephalic animals such as Persians, bull dogs and pugs to breathe and they frequently have health problems. English Bulldogs, because of their huge heads and tiny hips cannot be born naturally and must receive c-sections in order to give birth. Bulldogs are also top heavy and will drown if dropped in the water, because they are unable to hold their heads above the surface in it.)
There are many other reasons why humans are selfish, but you know what the nice thing is? It seems like we're slowly getting less selfish.
Which means there is hope - for both us, our planet and the billions of other animals living here. We can do this humans! We can save ourselves and our world!
All we have to do is be a little less selfish.
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