Animals Are As With-it as Humans (Animals Are Conscious)

Animals are far more attuned to nature than human animals
Yes humans are but animals also

reply to post by psyko4570

If the answer is no then we have nothing further to discuss due to extreme arrogance

What you interpret in me as being 'extreme arrogance' is actual exasperation with what's being discussed - and how little understanding actually exists of the subject matter.

Whats actually extreme arrogance, but of course not known by the people displaying it - is the mind numbing stupidity of insisting that human beings and animals share an essential consciousness - with nothing unique demarcating the human from the animal.

I love animals, with all my heart. I am not by any means an 'arrogant' person. I losr patience when I see an entire culture - and the people here are an example of it - ascribing abilities like self consciousness - the ability to observe oneself - to animals. This is an arrogant claim - and supported only by a wild imagination and shoddy analytical skills.

I get annoyed, and speak with assurance because I know i'm right. i'm not going to admit the possibility of something else when I know that possibility in no way exists. Just as someone who knows 6 + 6 = 12 will not allow any other answer but 12. The psychological differences between man and animal are demonstrable and deducible for anyone to see: but not all minds are alike in their abilities to derive meaning, to break the mind up into it's basic aspects.

Animals - or dogs, if you will - experience the world, consciously, no doubt - in a way completely different from ourselves. Thus, the analogy of the 3rd and 4th dimension that I used is completely appropriate.

Well I agree with this OP. We have five cats, tow outside and three inside. They all understand us, if the outside cats hear us talking about a fire in the fire pit, the female goes sit on it and waits. The male goes and kills something and hauls it by the fire pit. He should know we never cook his chippies or mice, he's done that twenty times already. He usually leaves them in other places and not by the pit. If TSHTF I can count on him to bring food. Maybe he does that so we won't think to eat him if times get tough

The deer understand us and we understand them. If you start thinking of what they would taste like they get skiddish and run right away. They can sense things but I do not understand how. They have feelings just like humans. I was mad at a doe that was our friend for eating in the garden and yelled at her and threatened to turn her into food. She ran away and the granddaughter was crying. She returned the next day and when she saw me she put her head down almost as if to say sorry. She did that for a few days and we fed her again and she was happy, I appologized for yelling at her. She was a good friend for many years after that but didn't come back from her winter place this year. Her kids, grandkids, and great grandchildren are still dropping by, I can recognize some of them. I hope the old doe had a good life. Not one of our regular deer ever disappeared during hunting season.

I think it is quite easy to imagine what an animal consciousness is like, at least roughly. Animals are sentient and conscious, but they are not sapient. The same as human children. So some of our first memories are analogous to how an animal percieves the world, IMHO.

reply to post by Maslo


Oh be careful - you've just said what I've said, and everyone - or mostly everyone here - is completely convinced, I don't know how, that animal sentience somehow involves sapience i.e. wisdom, understanding.

Does a 3 or 4 year old - who I as well likened the behavior of an animal to (and so their conscious might be similar) - understand morality?? I have never seen such a kid. My sister works as an ECE, and we have conversations about this all the time. Children at this point in life only experience base emotions, everything being an extension of themselves, therefore,they want and need and yell and complain: but when it comes to understanding the wrongness of a certain way of acting, they don't have the ability to reflect and compare, and so realize the justness or unjustness of an action. Even their admittance of "I was wrong" - like the dog, is nothing but a repetition of what the adult wants you to acknowledge that you did wrong, and not a genuine understanding. Reflection - which is the full blossoming of a self consciousness mind that feels itself in it's entirety, and thus experiences a sense of responsibility to the externals of life, does not exist for a child of that age; nor does it exist for any animal, dog, chimp etc.

Earlier on a poster here argued that she conducted an experiment trying to show (already compromising her results) that dogs have a sense of justice, and so morality: she has two dogs; she gave one dog a larger piece of treat than the other dog. When the other dog realized it had been given less, she went up to the owner and made an awkward face, which, to the eyes of the owner, implied to her that the dog recognized the unjustness of that action.

What REALLY happened, and this only highlights the mental immaturity of the woman who made that claim, is first and foremost, the expression of a base emotion: jealousy.

Dogs are scavengers. This is how they subsist outside their domesticated state with man. When one scavenger dog sees a carcass on the ground, it goes for it. And if there other dogs with it, they each fight for a larger piece of the whole. What she saw as an expression of injustice, was nothing but the dog turning to her caregiver - her interlocutor, and jealousy asking for more, because this dog was given more. It was not a reflection upon the rightness or wrongness of that dog having more, but a realization and recognition that her jealousy can only be remedied by going to her owner - by petitioning her through her dumb faces that she wants more.

To argue otherwise is to show a complete lack of analytical ability.

"While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it's the open acknowledgement that's the big news here. The body of scientific evidence is increasingly showing that most animals are conscious in the same way that we are, and it's no longer something we can ignore.

Truly great news but...but..."nonhuman animals"? Huh?

So my question to you is this, ATS. Does this change the way you view animals? Should it change the way we treat animals, such as animals raised and slaughtered for food? Will it impact the way we treat animals?

What about the poisonous snakes that kill us? The sharks that eat us? The tigers that gnaw our dying bones?

Do the animals tell them "Doods, uncool!"

Maybe. Maybe not.

reply to post by rickymouse

Well I agree with this OP. We have five cats, tow outside and three inside.

A mouse who owns cats, two of which you pull behind your car and/or boat?

Mods should delete your post. Really.

reply to post by URmyHON


Typical typo.

Humans are the most successful animal in the predator stakes
Also the most successful animal at trashing their environment
Is this success a measure of intelligence or is it merely cunning and stupidity

Certainly Humans are a curious lot - by that I mean curious about say exploring the Universe for example
Human animals are very different in this respect - as animals tend to accept their place in the Cosmos without the Need to question it

reply to post by artistpoet


Growing Change on the food revolution in Venezeula - new documentary free viewing only this weekend!!

This is an amazing doc about the human food crisis and what to do about it.

Again logarithmic exponential energy use technology = human civilization. It looks fine until the LAST step of growth where on a "linear" mind set it looks like you still have twice as much resources available. But on an exponential mind set that means it's only one more step of growth -- a doubling -- before everyone dies.

So what to do about it? First of all everyone is in denial about the exponential math -- I posted the videos before --

O.K. if you watch this video - the math speaks for itself. There is no rhetoric and no escape from the math.

Except if you watch the Food Revolution documentary -- what is the secret? Reversing all that logarithmic growth. Under the logarithmic growth there are huge rich landowners speculating on land values and letting land sit idle in fallow. All that has to be taken over by poor unemployed people to be farmed. How to farm it? Composting all animal manure including humanure. I went to a village in Morocco and that's how they lived for thousands of years -- humanure farming. The same was true all over Asia as F.H. King documents in his 40 centuries of farming book.

So Nature is not logarithmic -- it is cyclical growth as an arithmetic spiral. We have to merge back into ecology. Stop using flush toilets -- save the clean water and the electricity from flushing. Save the humanure as fertilizer for growing food. Make charcoal from cooking or use waste carbon from plant material for composting. You need an aerobic environment -- outside -- plus a 30 to 1 carbon to nitrogen ratio. ABout a 3 to 1 carbon-based plant material to manure and urine. Let it compost for at least 6 months as after 6 months of manure ageing then the rotavirus is killed off -- and that same virus is found in dairy manure also. So if you do thermofilic composting for over 6 months you'll be fine -- if you use black biochar it goes faster as the black heats up faster, etc. The charcoal creates nanopores as home for the aerobic bacteria which sanitize the manure -- check out Ecosan videos on youtube.

Once you have good compost then you can grow tons of food and the cycle of life continues. Humans instead have been raping the Earth -- the top soil and the oceans -- and so resources are depleting. For ecology a species will do this and then the species collapses. For humans we applied this logarithmic math to the whole planet by using logarithmic technology. Normally a species just grows its own population and that is what collapses. For humans the whole ecology of earth is collapsing. So humans have to merge back into ecology.

Algae as biofuel is a good step also since oil comes from algae anyway. There's a new start up in Israel and some big algae research in the U.S. Biofuel can work if it is not corn but more efficient from using permaculture food systems -- intercropping without using oil-based inputs.

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


Great stuff thanks.

"Give back the Earth that which you take from it" is very ancient wisdom. Animals naturally do this without questioning why

Yes the soil is a precious yet it is so abused.
We are so out of touch with our Biological Purpose for being on Earth that it is taboo or something to joke about or be repelled by.
Without being fed with organic/matter the soil will eventually turn to sand - See how the deserts of the World rapidly encroach.

Whilst living an organic self sufficient lifestyle on a remote Island - I visited a neighboring Island.
This Island was called Sanday and for good reason - The fields were more sand than grass - Why - Because Viking Invaders grew wheat crops year after year without feeding the soil.

Nature is so receptive and abundant in it's generosity if we care for it.
We (generically speaking) however are so removed from nature and it only hurts us by being so.

reply to post by artistpoet


Yeah we have some local Hmong farmers being attacked by a multimillionaire! Why? He has tons of empty land for speculative horses as a tax deduction and he's doing creepy drivebys against people working hard with hand tools to grow food!! It's insane. But since the Hmong farmers didn't have indoor plumbing they got attacked. Hmm - I guess WEsterners are too idiotic to understand composting. Hello -- why would not compost if you're farming? It's crazy -- so now they have to use a port-a-potty in their farm field of 100 acres. It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen but that's the class warfare in the U.S. - multimillionaires attacking forced migrants who fought for the CIA because they worried that the Communists would attack their farming.

Oh well Mother Nature bats last as Earth First! says earthfirst.org... -- I worked in an environmental nonprofit for 10 years that "lobbied" but only got marginal results meanwhile overworking everyone so that the administrative could live their bourgeois American Dream (commute long distance in a car, have a house, etc.).

Yep -- so I quit that place - I found out they got sued by the IRS so that shut them up I guess. But so they relied on Wall Street money and the foundation suddenly pulled the funds -- Hmm a Rockefeller "enviromental" foundation -- nice.

Yep there is fake environmentalism out there I have lived it - they are antiunion while joing the Blue-Green Alliance. What a joke -- they actually hired a corporate lawyer from on the other side of the U.S. to fly in to fight against overworked poor people being replaced by computers.

So the biggest deal is people just farming on land that is sitting idle and understanding ecological sanitation as composting humanure. Just think all the people in the city don't even know how to take a crap properly. haha.

Oh that doc only runs this weekend so catch it while you can -- it's awesome.

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


Yes to those who think they run the show - Self Sufficient lifestyles are the enemy of their mind control martix.
To be self sufficient would mean

No Money
No Corporations
No Government
No Big Pharma
No Elitism

Yet this is the future for the Matrix is doomed by design
Start small - Plant a seed and nurture it.

Like Dante said - One small spark can start a forest fire
One spark of truth can set the world alight
From small acorns - Mighty Oaks grow...... etc

To keep this on topic - Animals do not question nature or build artificial constructs that harm nature

reply to post by dontreally

Earlier on a poster here argued that she conducted an experiment trying to show (already compromising her results) that dogs have a sense of justice, and so morality: she has two dogs; she gave one dog a larger piece of treat than the other dog. When the other dog realized it had been given less, she went up to the owner and made an awkward face, which, to the eyes of the owner, implied to her that the dog recognized the unjustness of that action.

What REALLY happened, and this only highlights the mental immaturity of the woman who made that claim, is first and foremost, the expression of a base emotion: jealousy.

Wow. I didn't realize you could read my dogs' minds!! "Mental immaturity of the woman"?
Whatever. Believe whatever you want.

To argue otherwise is to show a complete lack of analytical ability.

Oh. Okay. You're right, I'm an idiot.

reply to post by artistpoet




Well the original humans are struggling to survive -- 90% of original human history is threatened.

90% of the males trained to be shamans through trance dance healing.

They spirit traveled into animals.

Check this out for animal spirit communication of the original human culture from 100,000 BCE.

Toward what I believed to be the end of the evening, Xaxe, a great hunter, healer, and shaman, laid hands on me....I felt the energy, his energy, surge through my body. He had his hands on me for about twenty-five or thirty seconds, but it felt like he had only touched me for a split second. Time stood still. I literally had a short out of body experience. I could see him touching me from just above my body, almost like I was floating six feet off the ground, watching myself. All of a sudden I was back in my body observing an image of him thumbing through the book that contained all the pictures and moments in my life. I saw images of my childhood I hadn't remembered in years, pictures of my mother and me walking on a beach and shelling, very strong images. At the time, both during his touch and immediately afterward, I described it as him flipping through the pages of my life....Later the next morning, I spoke with Xaxe about the trance dance. He told me he wanted access to me in a way that was not possible through a translator....Xaxe's curiosity was such a caring, loving gesture....When he detached from me it felt like someone was unplugging a lamp from a wall socket. As he let go of me and continued to dance around the fire, I spontaneously burst into uncontrollable tears....I had been stripped to my emotional core, completely stunned by what I had witnessed so up close and personal.151 151 Andrew Zimmern, The Bizarre Truth: how I walked out the door mouth first – and came back shaking my head (Random House, 2009), 234-5.

The blind leading the blind.

Scientist continuously admit they know little about the brain and now they claim animals can mentally fabricate the universe. Right. You expect me to believe animals are conscious when you (neurologist) don't even truly know what makes humans conscious?

By the way, Stephen Hawkings is smart, but can be a complete moron regarding some of his philosophy.

reply to post by wildtimes

Wow. I didn't realize you could read my dogs' minds!! "

I love how you think your dog could possibly be different from dogs as a species.

"Mental immaturity of the woman"?

If you keep on insisting that dogs have any of those abilities outlined in those posts I've made, then you must lack the requisite knowledge, and thus the intellectual ability to make sense of what your observing when you look at your dogs.

Why not just admit that it was most likely jealousy you were seeing, and not a sense of justice? I have a dog too. My dog, my cousins dog, my dog I had as a kid, and all the other dogs I know and interact with, are in no ways fundamentally different from each other, as you seem to be avowing in the case of your own dogs.

We can love dogs in their own ways. There's no need to make yourself look stupid by saying self observation, self consciousness, the power to reflect and evaluate, abilities which produce sapience in humans, exists in dogs.

Whatever. Believe whatever you want.

Know that it's what your saying that bothers me - not you. You seem like a very nice woman with a sincere love for her dogs. I respect that. I however cannot stand by and tolerate what is logically impossible, yet insistently claimed.

reply to post by milkyway12


Stephen Hawking believes he can pronounce on anything, and that everything he has to say is somehow more cogent than what any other human being has to say.

His arrogance knows no bounds, unlike his body.