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nyan_sandwich comments on An argument that animals don't really suffer - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (86)
I'll keep an injured bird warm and away from the cat (it was the cat that injured it), but calling animal control for a terrorized sparrow seems like a waste of everyone's resources.
Everything I do is illegal in some way or another so I've stopped taking that into account.
Donating to a wildlife charity misses the point. It's not about producing utilons, it's about maintaining empathy. Putting on my murder face to watch a bird get torn apart by the cat while planning to donate to a charity falls in the second category (from parent) of things I could do, except that it doesn't even save me time.
If it was a larger animal like a coyote or raccoon, then calling the animal people would make sense, but not for little birds.
The bird is probably gong to die anyway. It's probably better just to kill it.
They'll probably just euthanize it anyway. But yes, it can make you feel good if you don't know or think about what'll end up happening.
The bird seemed happy enough to be safe and recovering, and happy enough to be out again once it was released, but I think it did end up being eaten by the cat once it was back in the real world.
No! That meme feels terribly wrong to me, tho I have not worked out entirely why. It's probably a combination of the implication that you should kill someone who is being tortured, even if you had a chance of rescuing them, and the effects on your personality of killing something you have empathy for.
I've heard that murder only gets easier. I don't think I want that.
EDIT:
Good point. I actually don't know what I would do for a larger injured animal. Helping it may be better than calling the death-squad. If there were a chance that it could live.
"Euthanize" sounds slightly better.
I agree let's euphemise them.
It's worth putting an appropriately strong word on death.
When I received a briefing from an Air Force pilot, he talked about how he "applied kinetic force" to "prosecute the target" rather than "shot missiles" to "kill people". I immediately noticed how useful that sort of language would be for psychological health when performing such actions.
This was long before the use of "kinetic military action" to describe our little war in Libya.
An appropriately strong word on the death of an already mauled sparrow? Euthanize is already giving the matter sombre dignity. It's a step up from 'squilch'.
To clarify, it was not mauled. It was missing feathers, and had some cuts, but no bones broken or mortal wounds.
Depends on the injury, actually. A broken wing -- yeah, that bird's not gonna last in the wild. A bite from a cat that misses vital organs and doesn't bleed out, or some scratching? It may well survive that if it can recuperate, clot up, and retain the ability to fly after. Living systems have this weird ability to, y'know, heal from damage inflicted as long as it's not too severe.
Everything's going to die eventually. So are all the people you might ever help. Should you just not help because in the long run everything's doomed to be recycled?
I take it you're not a wildlife rehabilitator and don't know anyone who is? Because that's not the standard response to injured animals...
If you must know my cynicism was given to me from my veterinarian sister who spends a surprising amount of her time killing wildlife that well intentioned but naive individuals have brought in to her or to wildlife nuts. At times she even has to bite her tongue and not tell them that if they had left the poor creature alone it probably would have lived but now that they caught it it is going to die!
Injured animals like sparrows? I beg to differ. (I'm sorry, they don't get sent 'to the farm' or 'go to sparrow heaven' either!)
Sure. And she's a veterinarian, not a wildlife rehabilitator (person whose job it is to, oddly enough, rehabilitate injured wildlife for re-release).
In the bit that's a response to, you were talking about coyotes and raccoons, not sparrows.
Not actually true.
Someone said:
You said:
I said:
So yes, actually true.
No it isn't. The context is ambiguous. Not that it matters either way since I do maintain a substantial disagreement regarding the most common outcome for larger-than-sparrow-but-still-not-important creatures that token do-gooders try to intervene to rescue.
It would not seem controversial to suggest that neither of us are likely to learn anything from this conversation so I'm going to leave it at that.