But if it's concussed after flying into a wall or window---a very common bird injury---and isn't dead yet, apparently it has decent odds of full recovery if you discourage it from moving and keep predators away for an hour or few.
Thankyou, I wasn't sure about that. My sisters and I used to nurse birds like that back to health where possible but I had no idea what the prognosis was. I know that if we found any chicks that were alive but displaced from the nest they were pretty much screwed once we touched them due to contamination with human-smell causing rejection.
More recently (now that I'm in Melbourne rather than on a farm) the only birds that have hit my window have broken their neck and died. They have been larger birds so I assume the mass to neck-strength ratio is more of an issue. For some reason most of the birds here in the city manage to not fly into windows anywhere near as often as the farm birds. I wonder if that is mere happen-stance or micro-evolution at work. Cities have got tons more windows than farmland does after all.
Actually the human-scent claim seems to be a myth. Most birds have a quite poor sense of smell. Blog post quoting a biologist. Snopes.com confirms. However, unless they're very young indeed it's still best to leave them alone:
...Possibly this widespread caution against handling young birds springs from a desire to protect them from the many well-intentioned souls who, upon discovering fledglings on the ground, immediately think to cart them away to be cared for. Rather than attempting to impress upon these folks the real reason for leaving well enough alone
My apologies if this doesn't deserve a Discussion post, but if this hasn't been addresed anywhere than it's clearly an important issue.
There have been many defences of consequentialism against deontology, including quite a few on this site. What I haven't seen, however, is any demonstration of how deontology is incompatible with the ideas in Elizier's Metaethics sequence- as far as I can tell, a deontologist could agree with just about everything in the Sequences.
Said deontologist would argue that, to the extent a human universial morality can exist through generalised moral instincts, said instincts tend to be deontological (as supported through scientific studies- a study of the trolley dilemna v.s the 'fat man' variant showed that people would divert the trolley but not push the fat man). This would be their argument against the consequentialist, who they could accuse of wanting a consequentialist system and ignoring the moral instincts at the basis of their own speculations.
I'm not completely sure about this, but figure it an important enough misunderstanding if I indeed misunderstood to deserve clearing up.