D

if you google elephants seeking medical help. it's not just one incident. i think that's what they are doing. it's the twilight of their species. and they are seeking help from the species wiping them out. like one time one was poisoned but if you read a george orwell essay, it can take a long time to kill an elephant. so he went to that elephant orphanage in africa, and they said because he had mated with one that was raised and released from there he knew they would help. and they did. they helped another one that showed up after being shot. this could a common thing. kind of like when we hunted whales. and a few of them still survive today that can remember that time. but now they show off and we watch them. like a bowhead whale that lives for 200 years and has a spear still in him from the 1800's.

https://www.thedodo.com/elephants-tr...353631970.html

"Mwende and Yetu's dad has remained in the area with his friends and they have regularly been seen since undergoing treatment," the rescuers wrote. "Thankfully all their wounds have healed beautifully so they have all made a full recovery," they added.

[nullnor]

i think i suddenly understand the whole seaworld argument, or even zoo's. it's a necessary evil. because we are stupid. ppl have to see the animals in person and what they can do for their species to survive. when you get right down to the bottom line. i mean the few ppl that know how cool they are is far less than the ppl that would realize from going to a circus or aquarium or zoo.

[Fresno Bob]

If I was a superbillionaire, I'd be buying land to create super-reserves in Africa, powered with solar and wind, patrolled by locals on foot supported with drones. Hell, I could have safaris for gun-fools where you get to shoot poachers instead of animals.

[johnnya24]

2 circus elephants reunited after years apart ...

[Teenwolf]

Why do people care so much about whales, elephants, and all other sorts of mystical creatures, when we kill billions of cows, chickens, and pigs for palate pleasure? You guys realize cows, chickens, and pigs have the same emotional and social needs as more respected species (dogs, cats... whales, lions, etc), yet we use a huge amount of resources to torture them so we can eat what we like... right?! The absolute evil of factory farming is considered a necessary evil, but I'm thriving on a vegan diet for 4 years now. I don't miss the low-grade 7-11 trash meat sandwiches of my old life.

I'm also watching my dad eat himself to a heart attack in his mid 50's... But we're all such coddled babies, we can't make smart food choices to improve our health or longevity, no matter how obvious it is. No matter how much we think of ourselves as animal lovers, with our fat domestic house pets that we give names and allow to sleep in our beds...

Mourning elephants and whales while eating burgers is just dumb. We should all seek to minimize environmental harm, and unnecessary torture of animals.

Shouting on message boards about elephants or whatever "special animals", while making no impactful choices in your own life? Why bother? Like that idiot Ricky Gervais, always posting on social media about elephants, tigers, whales, whatever special animals he deems worthy of our collective sadness... It's a joke.

Finally, I think zoos teach kids about animals being commodified for human pleasures. I've taken my daughter to the aquarium a few times, and I stopped doing it after reading about Sea world's practices. I hope they go out of business... Just like all those social media posts about sharks dying from having dozens of teenagers passing it around to take selfies with... We're all too selfish and brainwashed to realize our direct influence on animal cruelty... Or on our own health. Sad.

[Fresno Bob]

If I had to kill cows, pigs and chickens to eat them, I would, same with deer, rabbits, goats. I'll admit it, I have an animal hierarchy, based on implied intelligence. I don't want to eat predators, because there are only 1 of them for every 1000 "prey". (Big cats, sharks, wolves, bears, etc) I don't want to eat animals that I think are too intelligent (dolphins, whales, elephants, chimps, apes), but recognize that I'm probably hypocritical on that with octopi and pigs. I don't want to eat my dog, but I'd eat dog if that's all there was. I promise to eat the dead first if we crash in the Andes.

I do think that anyone that wants to eat meat should have to visit a slaugterhouse, and see a cow get hammered and processed. We are too disconnected from our meat. Once a year gets you 1200 pounds in "meat credit"

[johnnya24]

Also, all those animals you mentioned have been bred and domesticated over 1000's of years as food. That's the difference.

There is a clear difference between respecting the habitats and lives of animals in the wild and domesticated animals farmed for the survival of the species.

I wouldn't even say there is any hypocrisy here either. For instance, I don't see any hypocrisy in demanding that farm animals be treated "humanely" even though I am supporting their eventual extermination.

I respect your decision to not eat meat. But I also think you are well off base to take such a militant and frankly naive approach.

In any case, with the scale of human overpopulation -- Nigeria for instance is estimated by the UN to have a population approaching 1 billion by the end of the century (Nigeria!!) -- some humans will be forced to eat Snowpiercer style insect goop just to stay alive. Good luck to us in protecting endangered species, when humans are starving and looking for any food to feed their families. These debates will one day be seen as a luxury of a bygone age.

[Funkley]

Awesome info but so tough to read. Break my heart.

[baldgriff]

Awesome info but so tough to read. Break my heart.

Is this really a Funkley sighting??

Good to see you're alive!

[Funkley]

Is this really a Funkley sighting??

Good to see you're alive!

[Steve]

Hey, Funkley!

[nullnor]

i was once upset about how we took over the planet. and i realized that there are a lot of wild animals that survive because of us. they adapted whether they became urban. and then there's farm animals. where do they fit in? there's only a few animals that joined up with us willingly like dogs, cats and horses. i tried being a vegetarian but i can barely feed myself. not in the sense there is no food, i don't have the motivation. so after a few days of not eating i get to work and need to eat meat. i don't shower or eat unless im working and i only work 3 days a week.

eugenics right? that's what farm animals have become. it's not the path they wanted to take but they're still here. the information in their DNA has survived. but elephants, we don't eat them. these kinds of species, once their gone that's 50 million years of information.

as far as i know an elephant is the only animal besides us that can literally cry. it's a life form like us that extended it's childhood in order to have big brains someday that can survive birth but still be smart. it's called neoteny. some other species have thrown in the towel and developed smarts their own way. but they are limited to their brain size. you might even say since elephants are pregnant for 2 years before that give birth, they're trying harder than we are.

but it's not just baby elephants that cry because they develop slow and need their mothers. adults do it too. there was an elephant Raju that was rescued in india that broke out in tears when the rescuers broke in. so for 60 years it waited because it knew there were ppl telling it someday they would rescue it.

[nullnor]

..with the scale of human overpopulation -- Nigeria for instance is estimated by the UN to have a population approaching 1 billion by the end of the century (Nigeria!!) -- some humans will be forced to eat Snowpiercer style insect goop just to stay alive. Good luck to us in protecting endangered species, when humans are starving and looking for any food to feed their families. These debates will one day be seen as a luxury of a bygone age.

you said this before and i've given a lot of thought to it. snowpiercer style insect goop. that's a quote. makes me feel like asking if a restaurant has that.

it probably won't ever come to that. nature has rules. and she monitors herself. everything you see is limited by a set of rules; from the smallest things to the biggest. take elephants for example, only 3 species of their kind left over from 50 million years. im sure there were lots of different kinds of them, just like there were different kinds of us. they were big, and they were intelligent. and im sure we didn't kill all of them. so where did they go? well.. they went like we did. they consolidated. you know the last living humans like neanderthals, they weren't entirely wiped out, they assimilated with us. 5% or 10% of their DNA survives in us.

Charles Darwin was fascinated by how slow elephants reproduce. as mentioned above, an elephant gestates for 2 years, and then takes care of the baby for another decade or longer. so starting around 25 years old she would give birth periodically for another 50 years. Darwin estimated that each one would give birth 6 times in her lifetime. and in 750 years there would be 19 million elephants. and he wrote in fewer than 5 generation or 2,500 years 'the total volume of elephants would exceed that of the planet.' the fact the planet wasn't swarming with elephants caused him to realize that natural selection was the main reason behind evolution.

on a side note, the number of bacteria on the planet is 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. which is more than all the stars in the universe. not only do they out number us but they outweigh us by a factor of 100 million.

take for example cancer, it's a set of rules governing cell division that runs amok. it's like a forest without wolves where the elk are allowed to run all over the place and ruin the ecosystem. it's all connected. buffalo, elk, without them doing their thing the woodlands don't thrive. without lions they aren't kept in check. when these things aren't in balance, whether you are talking about a human cell or an entire ecosystem, a critical component of health suffers.

there are any number of things that will occur in the future that will prevent us from having to resort to eating snowpiercer style insect goop. the most obvious is disease... when you start going in greater numbers into places you've never gone before you'll pickup and transmit diseases that never existed. in the past when we did it, something would happen and it stopped there. there were no roads or airplanes. but nowadays you've got markets where animals like fruit bats and birds and pigs and ferrets all next to each other swapping genes. that's where SARS and probably middle eastern respiratory disease came from. am i saying that humanity can be wiped out by a natural disease before we eat insects for lunch? no. on this planet, we're here to stay. the last pandemic of swine flu and ebola proved that. our healthcare system is pretty damn good. but that is one example.

another example is global warming or nuclear war, or just war in general. competing for resources will eventually limit the competitors. and nature will just start doing her thing again with or without us and without the elephants.

[nullnor]

also, i was thinking a dog has to hold his head pretty high. not to say in the wild a wolf isn't a proud animal. but that dog lost in the woods in ecuador that met up with that swedish ironman team. he was like, i won't go away. because he knew he had the tools, the knowhow, and the confidence to help them win the race. even tho they didn't want him at first. if that's what domesticating an animal is than im not sure welcoming them into our world is the wrong path.

highly sensitive animal a dog is. i sound like jack london. it's abandoned and overruled almost every wild rule it's gathered over 100's of thousands of years or more. and i think so you should be kind to a dog when disciplining it. it's too proud of an animal and it's self-esteem too high to do wrong. in it's genes it knows we are partners. it knows humans are trying to build something. and humans know the world or universe is trying to build something. that makes a dog, God's accomplice. so you should never eat a dog.

[swampdragon]

The dog nully is talking about
http://http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne...ve-finish.html