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by frisco
1020 days ago
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Fun story I heard recently: apparently a bunch of pigs were placed on various small islands in the pacific in the 19th century so in case sailors were running out of food, they would have a known self-sustaining backup option. Many of those pigs were completely isolated for over a hundred years and entirely missed out on the globalization of tons of infectious diseases. A while ago a group of them were picked up and brought to a special protected refuge in New Zealand, where they are being used for artificial organ research (https://nzeno.nz/) basically for the reasons you highlight. |
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Am I just crazy? Do others not wonder that if pigs and humans have remarkably similar biology, then this increases the chance that pigs and humans might also have similar mental features? (I'm not claiming we're equally intelligent, just that it's well known that pigs are [quite intelligent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig#Behavior):
> Pigs are highly intelligent animals,[64] on par with dogs,[65] and according to David DiSalvo's writing in Forbes, they are "widely considered the smartest domesticated animal in the world. Pigs have demonstrated the ability to move a cursor on a video screen with their snouts and understand what is happening onscreen, and have learned to distinguish between the scribbles they had seen before and those they were seeing for the first time."[66][a][70]
But forget about the capacity to process information. How do we expect to improve as a society, in terms of treating other humans in a non-disposable fashion, if we regularly treat animals in a disposable fashion, given that a standard tactic in feeling okay about mistreating humans involves reducing ("de-anthropomorphizing") humans (via comparisons, propaganda, statistics, etc.) to be like "other animals"?
Suppose aliens were to visit us one day, and sci-fi-magically were to give certain animals a voice and a say, and those animals advocated for giving humans what they got from them: putting humans on little islands, where they multiply, and then a few years later, animals/aliens/etc. come by to use them as transplant sources. Clearly, the chances of that happening are next to zero. However, equally clearly, if this were to happen, the fact that humanity is reduced to such a state would be horrific. Yet the animals are giving us tit-for-tat: does it only become horrific for party A, when party B is able to do the same in return?
Damn. My heart goes out to those pigs. Sleep peacefully, this world isn't a nice place anyway.