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rixed 19 hours 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 15 hours 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 13 hours 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 19 hours 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 15 hours 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 3 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?
TimByte 18 hours ago [-]
I think it's less "nature knows better" and more "we usually don't know enough"
21asdffdsa12 13 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
We make those idyllic paintings, we dream of justice and peace and cooperation, yet we are 100% part of nature.
noelwelsh 12 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of examples of cooperation in nature.
21asdffdsa12 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
and it's up to us if those ugly old seals murder those pups or not :)
BlackFly 9 hours 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 7 hours 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.
kergonath 9 hours 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.
10 hours ago [-]
denkmoon 19 hours 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.
QuadmasterXLII 14 hours 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
operatingthetan 18 hours ago [-]
It kinda seems like they have a serial-killer seal in the population.
oaiey 19 hours ago [-]
I always read this as: when something is doomed by itself, it is the normal unaltered way of things. Let it flow.
vasco 17 hours 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".
kergonath 9 hours 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.
dlcarrier 15 hours 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.
delichon 22 hours 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 18 hours 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.
hackeraccount 7 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
TimByte 18 hours 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 18 hours ago [-]
What's striking here is how long a "known" explanation can persist simply because it sounds plausible
zabzonk 21 hours 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 18 hours 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 20 hours 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 22 hours ago [-]
The ending reminds me of the “Americans are obsessed with protein” article
warumdarum 3 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It made me think he might have had more of a problem with it then he thought.
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).