On that note, I went and asked somebody I know who lives there. this is what I got.
intelligent is a strong word
they are very food oriented and will remember things based on jow it pertains to getting food and they know some tricks and are designed in such a way that unwary creatures become food but im not sure id place them in the intelligent category
Floridian ho! Actually, we generally don't care about alligators down here, other than the obvious bits of 'don't screw with them, they won't screw with you'.
Never seen much mention about their intelligence, but the area I'm in, despite being gator infested, isn't exactly a breeding ground of people that care about the intelligence of animals. More interest in whether they taste good (alligator does, indeed, taste pretty good, though I haven't had it very often), how to catch them for the purpose of eating them (sharp metal pole into brain, i.e. 'jigging (Gyg-ing)'; alternately, dog hanging from rope with hooks and suchlike. No, I'm not joking, people have done this. Fortunately haven't been witness to it.), and how to avoid getting bits removed by them (re: don't screw with).
That said, my father did illegally keep one as a pet for a few years, a very young one. I was too young to be able to really pay attention to it, but it wasn't a particularly stupid animal. More intelligent than snakes, less intelligent than dogs tend to appear to be. Kinda' cute and likes to be petted, when they're young. Similar to snakes in that regard, actually.
I mean, hell, the current worth of people has already been diminished by things like animal intelligence studies (tool creation, occasional innovation, etc.).
The question that arises to me fairly often, especially re: human worth: Is it really that bad of a thing for human worth to be diminished a bit? Take this in the least offensive way possible (if possible, heh) -- it's just that the sheer arrogance of our species tends to be offputting to me fairly often. We're not very special creatures, from what I've seen (though we've got some
very nice tricks), we just seem to tend to think we are. Just seems like, if the worth of people wasn't so bloody inflated, we wouldn't quite so willing to go screw with things not-us.
I'd wager that many American meat-lovers would be too squeamish to actually slaughter and butcher an animal.
American meat-lover here, and this is completely true. I actually have trouble eating meat when there's still bones in it and tend to get a bit squeamish when I actually think about what the meat is and where it came from
Why eat meat then, you ask? Because it tastes
good and I love the texture of certain kinds of meat, prepared in the proper way. If there was actually a non-meat alternative to this that didn't cost out the (and taste like) ass, I'd be all over it.
I've also got a terribly sneaking suspicion that, if we weren't exploiting food animals for, well, food, we would have killed them off somehow long ago. That tends to be what happens to animals we're not using somehow
Not a good thing, but it seems to be the pattern.
That said, there's a lot of meat eaters in the more rural areas that actually do hunt, kill, clean, and prepare their own meat at least occasionally. Not terribly uncommon for city folk of certain inclinations to do the same thing, actually. It's definitely a minority of the meat eating population, though.
None that that tends to improve their opinion of animals above the normal cultural one (exploitexploitexploit), though, at least not in an statistically significant sense. At best, it'll encourage a bit more of a conservationist (hold off exploiting fully now, so can exploit more over the long term) slant in folks.
Side question here, but let's say that someone finds a way to "turn off" the desire for animals to kill each other turning them all into herbivores... would you think that would impact future generations?
Utterly horrific violation of personal something-or-other (word forgotten!) that would be if extended to humans aside, I'm terribly certain, as RedKing stated, that would be be an utter ecological trainwreck that would cause a tremendous amount of mass extinction -- it would probably match or surpass humanity's current tally of other-species-killed-largely-or-entirely-by-us in one fell swoop. This would be an awe inspiring achievement, in the classic sense of awe.
It would also cause an
incredible economic crisis if applied to humanity in one go.
Any case, herbivores kill each other for reasons not involving food, so there's no telling how much of a genuine difference that would make. What would you be trying to accomplish with such an action?
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Topic: Chill and Relaxed Progressive Irritation and Annoyance Thread (Read 871286 times)