[zamazingo]

Anyone who ever interacted with any animal who had trauma in their part already knows this. The experiences of "other"s that people are too ready and wanting to ignore simply because those experiences were not rubber stamped by academic journals is astonishingly depressing.

[Ididntdothis]

I think it's just very inconvenient that animals can have feelings and can suffer. Once you accept this then suddenly a lot of things become ethically very problematic, e.g. zoos, circus animals, pollution, a lot of farming practices. Much easier to deny that and claim that humans are special and only they can suffer.

[GuiA]

Which is ironic, because I have many old relatives who used to live on farms, and they are all very attuned to the feelings of animals. They can tell when one is in pain, how to take care of it, etc. Note that it is not at odds with the fact that there are raising the animal for meat, in some cases.

What is problematic is when decision chains get abstracted out and decisions depersonalized, and a bunch of company executives in a room decide how many chickens they need to fit per square foot of space in order to turn a profit next quarter, rather than those decisions being made by the people who take care of the chicken every day.

In that light, the psychology and social systems at play in industrial farming isn’t too different from that of prisons, internment camps, etc. Lives that are abstract numbers in profit equations to decision makers who don’t have to see up too close what those numbers really represent.

[superpermutat0r]

Tyson Foods, the biggest chicken firm, gives (sells) chicken to family owned farms that make the decision to cram the chickens in small space, and then Tyson Foods buys back the big chickens. The business is done in a way so that Tyson Foods has all the upside and little downside. I do not think they bore themselves with the logistics of raising chickens, they think of how to market their chicken scam to other family farms.

[ppseafield]

Thankfully several zoos have become wildlife rehabilitation centers, and some that hold on to the traditional model (like SeaWorld) are being publicly shamed. The biggest circus is all human. Progress is slow, but it is happening.

[code_duck]

Many people are happy to admit and even enthusiastically embrace the concept that dogs have human-like emotions, but they will still resist that about farm animals and wildlife.

[microcolonel]

I think this is more of a new thing. I've talked about this stuff with people who are now in their seventies and eighties, and they basically seem to get that animals suffer in substantially similar ways to humans.

The difference is that humans are broadly capable of understanding the moral consequences of their actions, and in the west we seem to have developed the concept of showing mercy to animals (stunning and sticking rather than bleeding animals out through the neck while conscious).

While some animals have more complex proto-moral behaviour, they would not be able or willing to extend these same courtesies to us, in the reverse circumstance.

[DangitBobby]

Able? No. Willing? Possibly. Maybe the desire to not cause suffering is so common in moral frameworks because it is hardwired into us and into other animals, almost like an instinct-based universal morality.

We inject a lot of assumptions about the nature of non-human animals in these discussions in what I think is an attempt to keep them as mentally distinct from ourselves as possible.

[bgorman]

Agreed. This seems like one of the most obvious conclusions of research of all time. Why so you need to research an elephant? A simple visit to a local animal shelter would have probably sufficed.

[redleggedfrog]

Sometimes I wonder if news organization run these kinds of stories to reinforce the "scientist are clueless" angle and further sew our mistrust of science. Don't scientists have dogs, too?

[Cold_Squash]

Yep. My old dog had it's tail cut off before she ran away, and until the age of 15 always chased her tail in circles, as well as howled in her sleep on occasion.

[yhoneycomb]

Wait isn’t this something all dogs do anyway?

[soulofmischief]

Yes, plenty do, and as a counterpoint I have owned several dogs with cut tails as well who did not exhibit such symptoms.

OP's dog's neurosis was likely caused by something else unless the tail was cut late into the puppy's life. I'm not advocating for cutting tails at all but I certainly don't have PTSD about my circumcision...

[__blockcipher__]

Not to derail the thread, but PTSD or similar trauma from circumcision is very common.

Or in my case, when you were non-consensually circumcised as an infant, experiencing grief/anger/etc upon truly understanding what that means.

For anyone reading, you can restore what was taken from you by applying tension to the foreskin remnant (“circumcision scar”) and slowly re-grow the lost tissue via mitosis. You can’t reclaim everything (frenulum, ridged band) but you can regrow the inner mucosa and outer foreskin.

The process is called foreskin restoration, and I encourage anyone who is interested to look into it.

[/interrupt]

[14]

Do you think we should get children’s consent for vaccinations? I guess my point is sometimes our parents make choices for us. Hopefully they make choices that better us not hurt us. And I know with circumcisions a lot of the time it is done for religious reasons. Your parents perhaps believed in god and were doing what they felt was spiritually needed within their religion. I am curious is this the case with your family?

[__blockcipher__]

Vaccinations: no.

Elective surgery that removes functional sexual tissue: yes.

To make it clear, do you think it’s okay to cut off a newborn girl’s clitoral hood (the analog of the male foreskin)? I would hope not.

—-

My parents were raised catholic, but are atheists. So largely it was done for the usual pseudo-reasons: to “look like my father”, because it’s “healthier” (completely false), etc. I’m a white american so it’s a very common practice unfortunately.

The foreskin is not a vestigial organ. Violating the bodily and sexual autonomy of a child is never okay.

[lostlogin]

Both are done by the dog I have, but he is a rescue dog.