No, asshole, it is not "okay." How would you like it if YOU were made a slave?

1) They are social creatures. Empathy is the backbone of complex social interactions, and orca grieve for their dead. There is nothing to indicate that they dont feel empathy in some form. Now, it may be the case they they cannot expand that to other species. It is certainly possible that their cognitive capacity is insufficient and too child-like to be able to extend their empathy that far. However considering how dolphins in general interact with people who they have accepted into their social group, that possibility seems remote.

No trade is required. Different groups of orca specialize on different food items. Some pods on seals, others on fish etc, depending on what is locally available and what other pods are eating (two different pods in the same area specialize on different prey to avoid competition). Eating of other fully sapient beings is generally rare.

Oh and um... you know, there is nothing saying we cannot just... you know, give the affected pods food should we eventually learn to speak orca and convince them that eating other dolphins is probably wrong. We could also stand to stop over-fishing so that they can more easily merge pods. I figure if things progress that far, we should be able to deal with that issue.

Have moral hazard you want to deal with? Find a fucking solution. The solution to moral hazard is not to complain about how hard it might be to deal with it. You be an adult, and you deal with it.

Quote:
It doesn't excuse humanity, but, how can I complain in my comfortable home typing away using electricity?


Wait, so because you live a cushy life, you have no right to say "hey, maybe it would be a good idea if we stop raping the oceans" and instead must simply assent to every fucked up things people do?

I am sitting here using electricity. Electricity that is 100% renewable. I also restrict my fish intake to sustainably farmed fish (read: lower trophic level freshwater fish that are not fed other fish) and well-regulated alaskan salmon. Other meat intake is limited to a fraction of the typical american diet. I drive a fuel efficient car.

With even that small amount of effort, I have managed to mitigate both my carbon footprint, and my impact on the world's oceans. It is not even the limit of the various things I do.

What you are is a contemptuous lazy moral coward, worthy of nothing but contempt.

I suppose the materials to make those renewable power sources are themselves renewable, biodegradable, and free of toxic industrial chemicals as well?

I suppose you are going to say that you are 20% more efficient or cleaner then others? The fact of the matter is that you are far more dangerous to the planet then someone in Bangladesh living off of ten dollars a day.

What you are is a high brow hypocrite, smug in your sense of self-superiority, and your own ethical values are superior to others.

. In the end, it is a struggle between species.

Besides, slavery is unprofitable, most slave owners allowed slaves to work for others so that the slaves themselves may buy their own freedom, which often was more profitable for the owner then have the slaves do backbreaking labor all day.

Heh, jumping the gun just a wee bit there.

I also am hesitant to say "talk". It implies a certain complexity of interaction which I am not convinced is possible, not because orcas are "less" intelligent or anything, but simply because their cognition does not necessarily parallel ours closely enough on a higher perceptual level to allow for "talking." Communication, yes ... we already CAN communicate with them, and those methods will get increasingly sophisticated and complex with more research, but I am skeptical it can ever really reach the level of "talking."

They are not. Yet. However, they are a better alternative at every timeframe possible than what humans otherwise are doing.

No. I am also not in extreme poverty. As that peasant in bangladesh tries to become better off, they use more energy. Would you rather have that energy come from gas? Or would you prefer a mixture of nuclear (sans yakuza), wind, and solar power?

Support that claim. How exactly do you reach that determination?

I also see that you insist on your categorical fallacy.

...

That is not true. Yes, they rented out their slaves. However, if slavery was not profitable, why do the founding documents of the CSA state clearly that slavery was the basis of their economy?

And that is just US slavery. Roman slavery was amazingly profitable. The patricians who owned slaves however were expected to free slaves for free who displayed certain roman virtues, and slavery was operated differently than southern chattel slavery in a great many respects. So you cannot even go back that far.

Your argument is a non-sequitur. Please make non-fallacious arguments.

I look at it like this. It is plausible that orca etc are smarter than we give them credit for, given what we have observed in the wild and in captivity from them, and that they have the capacity to communicate complex information to eachother in a manner that we might consider language. Dolphins for example understand syntax and IIRC transitive reasoning. That is not cognitive light-lifting.

"The failure of voluntary emancipation" represents a divergence
between economic theory and our understanding of the market econ-
omy on the one hand and real world results on the other.58 In order
to explain such puzzles, economists normally look a t institutional
rigidities, changes in relative scarcity, and most especially to govern-
ment interventions in the economy.59 The positive contribution of this
paper is to introduce such a n explanation: the role that certain slave
codes played in the profitability and survival of slavery in the ante-
bellum South. Despite the almost obvious implications of the slave
codes, this form of government intervention has been ignored as an
economic factor in the profitability and perpetuation of slavery.60
While the direction of this approach could have been derived from the
work of G e n ~ v e s e , ~ ~ and while Stampp certainly discussed the subject
a t length, it seems that Ludwig von Mises made the clearest state-
ment of the connection between government intervention and the
inability of markets to bring down antebellum slavery:
The abolition of slavery and serfdom could not be effected by the free
play of the market system, as political institutions had withdrawn
the estates of the nobility and the plantations from the supremacy of
the
The political institutions that had withdrawn the plantation from the
supremacy of the market were slave code statutes. While all the
statutes had some impact, the statutes that required slave patrols
and the laws that prohibited the manumission of slaves are of pri-
mary importance.

The patrol statutes required all white males to participate in
slave patrol duty. The state required counties to establish regular
patrols, and the counties in turn placed responsibility for organizing
patrols on local judges and constables. These officials appointed a
series of rotating patrol leaders who would be responsible for organ-
izing and reporting on the activities of their patrols. Failure to
participate in the patrols or to carry out organizing responsibilities
would result in a series of escalating fines.

The low rate of private manumissions was not due to a lack of
interest, but rather to prohibitions and restrictions on manumission
in the slave states.

I would refuse to work, or rather go on strike.

A talking elephant may sound like something out of a Rudyard Kipling novel but scientists have shown for the first time that elephants are capable of imitating spoken words – albeit by “whistling” in the Korean language.

Within weeks of a study showing that a white beluga whale was capable of uttering a few words in English , scientists have discovered that an Asian elephant called Koshik has the comparatively extensive vocabulary of five Korean words.

Koshik, who was born in captivity and lives in the Everland Zoo in the city of Yongin, has developed a method of imitating human speech patterns by inserting the tip of his trunk into his mouth while vocalising to reach the relatively high pitches of the human voice, rather like a man whistling with fingers in his mouth.

Scientists have analysed the sound spectrum of Koshik’s noises and have found that they match well against the human speech patterns for the same words. A panel of native Korean speakers said they could understand what Koshik was saying.

Angela Stoeger of the University of Vienna, who was part of the team that analysed Koshik’s voice recordings, said she was astonished when she realised that the 22-year-old elephant could speak Korean words such as “annyong”, meaning “hello”, and “choah”, meaning “good”.

“I was fascinated and thought that this is now really the evidence that elephants are indeed vocal learners. I really wanted to scientifically prove it so that no doubt would be left,” Dr Stoeger said.

Koshik had to overcome some fundamental limitations of his anatomy to reach the relatively high pitches of human speech given that elephant sounds are normally low-frequency grumbles, according to the study published in the journal Current Biology.

By inserting the tip of his trunk into his right cheek he was able to modulate the sounds in his mouth and so extend his vocabulary to include “anja”, meaning “sit down”, “aniya”, meaning “ no”, and “nuo” meaning “lie down”.

“Human speech basically has two important aspects: pitch and timbre. Intriguingly, the elephant Koshik is capable of matching both pitch and timbre patterns,” Dr Stoeger said.

“He accurately imitates human formants [sound spectra] as well as the voice pitch of his trainers. This is remarkable considering the huge size, the long vocal tract and other anatomical differences between an elephant and a human,” Dr Stoeger said.

Like other animals that are capable of imitating human speech, such as parrots and mynah birds, there is no evidence that Koshik could actually understand what he was saying, only that he was using the sounds for basic communication with his human trainers.

Koshik was born in 1990 and spent the first few years of his life with two adult female elephants but between 1995 and 2002 he lived on his own and it was during this time that he probably learnt to imitate the noises made by his trainers, Dr Stoeger said.

There have been anecdotal reports of elephants imitating human speech or noises. A male Asian elephant kept in a zoo in Kazakhastan was reported to speak a few words of Russian and Kazakh, and wild African elephants have been found to imitate the grumbling engines of nearby Landrovers.

“In addition there have been reports about two Asian elephants that imitated the idiosyncratic whistling sounds of a female elephant that they were housed with,” Dr Stoeger said.

“We do not know whether all elephants in Koshik’s situation would have started to imitate human speech, but even these case studies show that elephants in principle seem to have the ability to imitate vocalizations,” she said.

This video shows Koshik, "an elephant that speaks Korean," interacting with his trainer. Following vocal interaction with the trainer is documented: Koshik: "choah" (good) Trainer: "choah choah annyong" (good good hello) Koshik: "choah" (good) Trainer: "choah choah annyong" (good good hello) Koshik: "choah" (good) Trainer: "choah choah" (good good) Koshik: "choah" (good) Trainer: "annyong" (hello) Koshik: "choah" (good) Trainer: "annyong" (hello)

It seems like the news agencies have all but forgotten about Koko.