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rixed 2 days ago [-]
I find the final question about human intervention fascinating.
The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch,” Langley adds. “But the life of a seal—and indeed any wild animal—is tough.”
This idea that human influence over nature should not reach beyond species boundaries, that there is no universal value common to several species, seems prevalent in natural sciences. Is it coming from an understandable but misleading distrust of human society and idealisation of "nature", or from a deeper understanding that "nature always knows better", I can't decide.
somenameforme 1 days ago [-]
I think the main point is that nature is in a dynamic equilibrium that's built up over eons. We disrupt that equilibrium unintentionally by things like development, but well intended disruptions can have just as negative effects. The typical example would be something like removing a predator (or even a disease) from an area which results in a population explosion of its former prey which results in increased pressures on what that prey eat and so on all the way down the food chain.
And it's not just hypothetical - for instance gray wolves were largely eliminated from many areas with catastrophic consequences. They're now being reintroduced in many places and you get interesting effects like it turning out that gray wolves were effectively helping keeping a healthy beaver population, which is particularly interesting given that beavers are prey for wolves! [1] It's just a really interesting interbalance, and changing one thing can have consequences that are practically impossible to predict.
This is the reason I'm not a fan of the idea of eliminating even mosquitoes at large. Unforeseen consequences are very much a thing, and those consequences don't inherently become 'seen' because of a study or two.
By that logic, then we "disrupting" that equilibrium is also part of the equilibrium. Is it consistent to let a few adult male seals murder hundreds of pups while at the same time forbid hunters to hunt a few seals for fur, or fishermen in Faroe islands to catch dolphins once a year?
To me, it sounds that the fear of unintended consequences that you mentioned is what I called "distrust of human society". Yes, I am aware of the risk, and that's an argument that I accept in general. But it applies only at large scale, so not in the case at hand. Or we can picture an even smaller scale: picture a single old male attacking a single defenseless pup. Interfering?
21asdffdsa12 1 days ago [-]
I want the bill for damages caused with reintroduction- to be sent to the local GREEN party and its voters, thank you very much. Reintroduction of the beaver in europe has caused millions in damages
nerdsniper 2 days ago [-]
The mature view is that it boils down to the “Chesterton’s Fence” concept. Rather than “humans bad, nature good”, we just don’t know if the result of intervention might be an unfit population / ecosystem.
The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.
tsimionescu 1 days ago [-]
I think the idea is simple, and clear.
First, we value human life above animal life, so we always prioritize humans and their pleasures above animals (with the limits being either another human's property, or when the human is showing signs of excessive brutality, such as intentionally torturing animals instead of simply killing them).
Then, when a human is not directly involved, what matters is the potential impact of any intervention. Nature is extraordinarily brutal by itself, and we can't hope to change that overall, regardless of what we might prefer. Even at a basic emotional & moral level, we can't protect every baby animal that gets killed by a predator or a parasite, regardless of the suffering we see in it, or we would be causing the death of the predator's babies to starvation. And then, at a more rational higher scale, we know that this type of intervention would typically end up destroying the entire ecosystem if we actually tried to do it consistently.
rixed 23 hours ago [-]
I think the idea is simple, and clear.
Simple and clear yet everything that follow is controversial. :)
First, humans are animals. You mean "each species value itself more than others"? I don't know, but I certainly do not value any human life above any other species life; Humans are amazing, but when they are malfunctioning they can do a lot of damage ;)
Of course I was not thinking about preventing predation, or life would be limited to some bacterias, plants and algaes that can power their metabolism from some minerals and/or sunlight.
Some violence in nature is gratuitous (like a cat killing a mouse for fun) and this looks like an example of that. If we let this happen, why stop human hunters from killing seals too?
BlackFly 1 days ago [-]
We have absolutely no way of reconciling ethics with animals. In human society, the same individuals will often be using force against others but those individuals may be the police or criminals. The notion of righteousness or injustice in a given situation is contingent on context. Until we can speak with animals, we lack that context. Violence is not inherently wrong: we do not know their nature.
aziaziazi 1 days ago [-]
> Until we can speak with animals
One can probably can have a better communication with, say a dog, than a sever autist or someone in the state of deep coma.
We don’t apply our ethics based on the communication (or same-language ability) but instead on an arbitrary selection. That selection evolved recently to includes a wider set of humans (anti-racism and feminism). Antispecism is an interesting view as it state a the specie itself (humans /dogs/caw/cat/chicken…) isn’t a valid denominator to define what is ethic what isn’t.
TimByte 2 days ago [-]
I think it's less "nature knows better" and more "we usually don't know enough"
21asdffdsa12 1 days ago [-]
It's also a inability to accept the cthullian horror built into nature.
Sentient eating sentient, everything being at constant warfare with everything else- the Grass wars the trees for the light. Add to that, the likelihood that nature will adapt new defenses in our lifetime, by for example having animals propagate hyper-allergenic plant-species - and you can begin to grasp why humanity does not want to look at the real, rather at the idyllic paintings we made ourselves.
rixed 23 hours ago [-]
We make those idyllic paintings, we dream of justice and peace and cooperation, yet we are 100% part of nature.
noelwelsh 1 days ago [-]
There are plenty of examples of cooperation in nature.
21asdffdsa12 1 days ago [-]
Which though, are not a sign of harmony- its more a sort of horrific balancing act at the abyss having clear winners and losers, the losers becoming cattle, organs or worse and usually they do not defect only because then some horror from the abyss eats the whole gametheory board and their abilities have atrophied -aka cooperation usually is a sort of slavery.
kergonath 1 days ago [-]
> its more a sort of horrific balancing act at the abyss having clear winners and losers
No need to appeal to emotions this way. At the individual level there are only losers, and we all die. At the universe level, whatever happens, happens, and it’s up to us to find beauty in it.
rixed 23 hours ago [-]
and it's up to us if those ugly old seals murder those pups or not :)
kergonath 1 days ago [-]
> Is it coming from an understandable but misleading distrust of human society and idealisation of "nature", or from a deeper understanding that "nature always knows better", I can't decide.
I don’t think it’s either. It comes from the realisation that if we intervene we are most likely to fuck things up in difficult to foresee ways. It’s humility and understanding that even though we are powerful, our understanding of things is actually quite limited.
I know a couple of biologists, and none would say anything like what you mentioned. They don’t tend to anthropomorphise nature.
denkmoon 2 days ago [-]
We’ve a storied history of making ecological interventions without fully understanding the consequences. Doing the work to fully understand the consequences is time consuming and expensive. IMO it comes a position of leaving well enough alone.
1 days ago [-]
bell-cot 3 hours ago [-]
Before invoking any moral or philosophical principals, I'd consider the PoV of wildlife & natural area professionals. They know the public can react strongly to situations proximate to charismatic fauna, or "morality play" scenarios. But the public's actual appreciation of animal behavior, ecology, and natural area issues is little beyond "parks are pretty" and cartoons about anthropomorphized animals.
Meanwhile - gov't funding and support for real-world animal, ecological, and natural area work is paltry, with many critical problems neglected.
And trying to somehow force lions to be monogamous, and hawks to be vegetarians, and cuckoos not to abandon their young, and etc. is the sort of idealistic black hole that all their funding and support could easily be poured down - with less-than-nothing to show for it.
operatingthetan 2 days ago [-]
It kinda seems like they have a serial-killer seal in the population.
QuadmasterXLII 1 days ago [-]
I’m not sure there’s a philosophical understanding yet, but the learned flinch response from how badly the last X interventions went is real
oaiey 2 days ago [-]
I always read this as: when something is doomed by itself, it is the normal unaltered way of things. Let it flow.
vasco 2 days ago [-]
So strange when you look at our total interaction with the environment. We kill millions of animals, many just for literal sport, but to save an animal from another is 'too much intervention'
And I bet the moral scientists sat there feeling sorry for themselves and for the seal. Meanwhile other people are destroying full ecosystems.
If you feel like saving an animal from another, do it, what a ridiculous horse to decide to sit on. This to me makes as much sense as me walking my dog, another dog attacking it and me throwing my hands up "nothing I can do, nature is doing its thing".
dlcarrier 1 days ago [-]
There's a species where each individual literally eats a billion animals over its lifetime. If saving animals from an early death is important, then we should do everything we can to make blue whales go extinct.
Dusseldorf 19 hours ago [-]
Finally, a cromulent argument to nuke the whales!
dlcarrier 5 hours ago [-]
Gotta nuke something
kergonath 1 days ago [-]
> So strange when you look at our total interaction with the environment.
It’s less strange if you realise that different people have different opinions and react differently. The biologists saying that we should not intervene because we don’t understand are unlikely to be the ones hunting lions for fun. On the other end, some specimens of human beings would have absolutely zero qualms about killing every single seal on the planet.
delichon 2 days ago [-]
I once lived in an apartment in Colorado with a balcony overlooking a pond. Once a grebe was paddling around in it followed by four chicks. It was a great image for the Colorado Tourism Office. Then mamma grebe swam back and swallowed the fourth chick whole, and the smaller family paddled away.
Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.
> In these three booby species, hatching order indicates chick hierarchy in the nest. The A-chick is dominant to the B-chick, which in turn is dominant to the C chick, etc. (when there are more than two chicks per brood). Masked booby and Nazca booby dominant A-chicks always begin pecking their younger sibling(s) as soon as they hatch; moreover, assuming it is healthy, the A-chick usually pecks its younger sibling to death or pushes it out of the nest scrape within the first two days that the junior chick is alive. Blue-footed booby A-chicks also express their dominance by pecking their younger sibling. However, unlike the obligately siblicidal masked and Nazca booby chicks, their behavior is not always lethal. A study by Lougheed and Anderson (1999) reveals that blue-footed booby senior chicks only kill their siblings in times of food shortage.
hn_throwaway_99 2 days ago [-]
When I was in college I worked in a lab where part of my job was killing rats (I actually had a real moral problem that the general term used for the killing of lab animals at this time was "sacrificing", e.g. "I sac'ed that litter of rats yesterday", because it felt like a way to lessen ones natural emotional guilt at the task. Not sure if that term is still used today.) I really had a moral quandary in what I did, even moreso because I felt a visceral disgust (like I actually threw up a bit) the first time I had to kill a rat and then cut off its head with a pair of scissors, but after I got used to it I had no problem with it - I came to understand how people can get used to doing things they originally found morally reprehensible, and it scared me about myself.
Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.
j_bum 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, the term is “sacrificed” is unfortunately used today in many research labs in the US.
My advisor had a *strict* policy against people using that terminology in the lab and in his department.
“We sometimes euthanize or kill animals in a part of the difficult process of research. We do not sacrifice them - we are not making offerings to some deity. We are conducting research, not participating in a religion.”
“Sacrifice” is a euphemism that serves only to disconnect the ethical and emotional burden of killing animals for research [0].
And I deeply sympathize with your ethical and emotional guilt. The research I did in my PhD contributed to the foundational knowledge in my field, but not without severe and serious tolls. The way people become normalized to euthanasia in research environments is scary.
I worked with a guy who had an internship studying the effects of some drug on rats. He said he didn't have much of a problem killing the rats but also claimed that he knew his dog realized what he was up to at work.
It made me think he might have had more of a problem with it then he thought.
1 days ago [-]
mannanj 5 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing your story. I also experienced something similar having to kill mice we caught on glue trips before I knew of how painful they can be for the mice. I heard being scared about yourself and realizing the potential you have for darkness within you, is a natural step in healthy human development. (Not that everyone has to kill or actually do something dark or unethical to realize that, there are certainly other ways).
Then when I dug into some rabbit holes to better understand the potential for humans to execute on this darkness or sinful behavior both historically and currently, it opened me up to a sudden realization where I could no longer see or experience the darkness in the world with the gullibility and naiveness I had as a child - this means surely someone died in an area like the public mall where I am at, or in this alley over the centuries, or even this may happen later today and I was just there - it could even involve my own death if I should be unlucky. (or self defense, and someone else's).
Do you ever wish you could go back to a state of ignorance about "sacrifices" and death in the sense of what those experiences opened up for you?
TimByte 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, nature has a way of very quickly correcting the version of itself we picked up from cartoons
> The males may be seeking added nutrients in high-calorie blubber to boost their mating value during the breeding season, a time when bulls usually fast, Langley speculates.
Wonder if the male killer is of the same bloodline? Lions often opportunistically kill offspring of other males to reduce competition for their own offspring and to bring females into estrous.
EDIT: FWIW I asked claude and it says
> Gray seals have a promiscuous, harem-based mating system, but paternity is diffuse and males don't guard specific females long-term the way lions do. A bull has little way of "knowing" which pups are his rivals' offspring vs. his own.
So seems unlikely (according to claude).
TimByte 2 days ago [-]
What's striking here is how long a "known" explanation can persist simply because it sounds plausible
zabzonk 2 days ago [-]
Perhaps this is somewhat like male lions killing cubs that are not immediately theirs? Do the seals kill their own pups? Difficult to study, I guess.
I am curious why the killers didn't eat more. Is this just the choicest bits - another pup is easy to find?
steve_adams_86 2 days ago [-]
As I understood it, the blubber is being eaten and the rest is left. The sheer number of carcasses makes me wonder if this blubber is relatively easy to extract using this method, so they kind of rove through the herd and pick the low hanging fruit, so to speak
pierrec 2 days ago [-]
Oddly enough, I've seen a similar injury on a dolphin before. Well, the head was missing, but the cutoff point could be described as "corkscrew". None of us had a good idea of the cause, but this hints it may have been predation or scavenging.
ivan888 2 days ago [-]
The ending reminds me of the “Americans are obsessed with protein” article
warumdarum 4 days ago [-]
Ah, nature thats more like it. Less wholesome, more cthullu.
And it's not just hypothetical - for instance gray wolves were largely eliminated from many areas with catastrophic consequences. They're now being reintroduced in many places and you get interesting effects like it turning out that gray wolves were effectively helping keeping a healthy beaver population, which is particularly interesting given that beavers are prey for wolves! [1] It's just a really interesting interbalance, and changing one thing can have consequences that are practically impossible to predict.
This is the reason I'm not a fan of the idea of eliminating even mosquitoes at large. Unforeseen consequences are very much a thing, and those consequences don't inherently become 'seen' because of a study or two.
[1] - https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-r...
To me, it sounds that the fear of unintended consequences that you mentioned is what I called "distrust of human society". Yes, I am aware of the risk, and that's an argument that I accept in general. But it applies only at large scale, so not in the case at hand. Or we can picture an even smaller scale: picture a single old male attacking a single defenseless pup. Interfering?
The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.
First, we value human life above animal life, so we always prioritize humans and their pleasures above animals (with the limits being either another human's property, or when the human is showing signs of excessive brutality, such as intentionally torturing animals instead of simply killing them).
Then, when a human is not directly involved, what matters is the potential impact of any intervention. Nature is extraordinarily brutal by itself, and we can't hope to change that overall, regardless of what we might prefer. Even at a basic emotional & moral level, we can't protect every baby animal that gets killed by a predator or a parasite, regardless of the suffering we see in it, or we would be causing the death of the predator's babies to starvation. And then, at a more rational higher scale, we know that this type of intervention would typically end up destroying the entire ecosystem if we actually tried to do it consistently.
First, humans are animals. You mean "each species value itself more than others"? I don't know, but I certainly do not value any human life above any other species life; Humans are amazing, but when they are malfunctioning they can do a lot of damage ;)
Of course I was not thinking about preventing predation, or life would be limited to some bacterias, plants and algaes that can power their metabolism from some minerals and/or sunlight.
Some violence in nature is gratuitous (like a cat killing a mouse for fun) and this looks like an example of that. If we let this happen, why stop human hunters from killing seals too?
One can probably can have a better communication with, say a dog, than a sever autist or someone in the state of deep coma.
We don’t apply our ethics based on the communication (or same-language ability) but instead on an arbitrary selection. That selection evolved recently to includes a wider set of humans (anti-racism and feminism). Antispecism is an interesting view as it state a the specie itself (humans /dogs/caw/cat/chicken…) isn’t a valid denominator to define what is ethic what isn’t.
Sentient eating sentient, everything being at constant warfare with everything else- the Grass wars the trees for the light. Add to that, the likelihood that nature will adapt new defenses in our lifetime, by for example having animals propagate hyper-allergenic plant-species - and you can begin to grasp why humanity does not want to look at the real, rather at the idyllic paintings we made ourselves.
No need to appeal to emotions this way. At the individual level there are only losers, and we all die. At the universe level, whatever happens, happens, and it’s up to us to find beauty in it.
I don’t think it’s either. It comes from the realisation that if we intervene we are most likely to fuck things up in difficult to foresee ways. It’s humility and understanding that even though we are powerful, our understanding of things is actually quite limited.
I know a couple of biologists, and none would say anything like what you mentioned. They don’t tend to anthropomorphise nature.
Meanwhile - gov't funding and support for real-world animal, ecological, and natural area work is paltry, with many critical problems neglected.
And trying to somehow force lions to be monogamous, and hawks to be vegetarians, and cuckoos not to abandon their young, and etc. is the sort of idealistic black hole that all their funding and support could easily be poured down - with less-than-nothing to show for it.
And I bet the moral scientists sat there feeling sorry for themselves and for the seal. Meanwhile other people are destroying full ecosystems.
If you feel like saving an animal from another, do it, what a ridiculous horse to decide to sit on. This to me makes as much sense as me walking my dog, another dog attacking it and me throwing my hands up "nothing I can do, nature is doing its thing".
It’s less strange if you realise that different people have different opinions and react differently. The biologists saying that we should not intervene because we don’t understand are unlikely to be the ones hunting lions for fun. On the other end, some specimens of human beings would have absolutely zero qualms about killing every single seal on the planet.
Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.
> In these three booby species, hatching order indicates chick hierarchy in the nest. The A-chick is dominant to the B-chick, which in turn is dominant to the C chick, etc. (when there are more than two chicks per brood). Masked booby and Nazca booby dominant A-chicks always begin pecking their younger sibling(s) as soon as they hatch; moreover, assuming it is healthy, the A-chick usually pecks its younger sibling to death or pushes it out of the nest scrape within the first two days that the junior chick is alive. Blue-footed booby A-chicks also express their dominance by pecking their younger sibling. However, unlike the obligately siblicidal masked and Nazca booby chicks, their behavior is not always lethal. A study by Lougheed and Anderson (1999) reveals that blue-footed booby senior chicks only kill their siblings in times of food shortage.
Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.
My advisor had a *strict* policy against people using that terminology in the lab and in his department.
“We sometimes euthanize or kill animals in a part of the difficult process of research. We do not sacrifice them - we are not making offerings to some deity. We are conducting research, not participating in a religion.”
“Sacrifice” is a euphemism that serves only to disconnect the ethical and emotional burden of killing animals for research [0].
And I deeply sympathize with your ethical and emotional guilt. The research I did in my PhD contributed to the foundational knowledge in my field, but not without severe and serious tolls. The way people become normalized to euthanasia in research environments is scary.
[0] https://openworks.mdanderson.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=...
It made me think he might have had more of a problem with it then he thought.
Then when I dug into some rabbit holes to better understand the potential for humans to execute on this darkness or sinful behavior both historically and currently, it opened me up to a sudden realization where I could no longer see or experience the darkness in the world with the gullibility and naiveness I had as a child - this means surely someone died in an area like the public mall where I am at, or in this alley over the centuries, or even this may happen later today and I was just there - it could even involve my own death if I should be unlucky. (or self defense, and someone else's).
Do you ever wish you could go back to a state of ignorance about "sacrifices" and death in the sense of what those experiences opened up for you?
Same energy as this short story.
https://hpmor.com/
Wonder if the male killer is of the same bloodline? Lions often opportunistically kill offspring of other males to reduce competition for their own offspring and to bring females into estrous.
EDIT: FWIW I asked claude and it says
> Gray seals have a promiscuous, harem-based mating system, but paternity is diffuse and males don't guard specific females long-term the way lions do. A bull has little way of "knowing" which pups are his rivals' offspring vs. his own.
So seems unlikely (according to claude).