@Dangerous Amoeba  
Crows are actually one of the smartest things out there, save humans. They can talk and even use tools. A man once went fishing and left his line in the water while he was away, a crow came along and reeled in a fish.

@Darkmoon  
NOTE: I don’t have any formal education in neurology and have only taken a year of university psychology, anthropology and sociology. This is mostly from stuff i have read.
 
Sapients is still not well understood, but saying its just instincts is too simplified. The curios thing is, intelligence is useless to evolution in a short term scale, which is why we have very few species that exhibit intellectual behavior. Humans can contemplate abstract concepts, while animals simply can’t, or show they can. Animals hardly use verbal communication, and while humans also mostly communicate physically, we are capable of non physical conversation, like the one we are having now.
 
Washoe a chimp raised like a human child was taught around 350 or so arbitrary symbols to represent items and actions, however very few emotional signs where learned by the chimp, the one i remember and stood out was “cry”. She was also taught to be aware of herself becuase she was taught to refer to people with names, so when looking in a mirror she answered “me” when asked who it was. She was taught to string together 3 or 4 gesture sentences, and when her first child died, she said “My baby died.”
 
See this paints than chimps can learn and even create language to some degree, but only in the right environment, specifically a human environment, becuase Washoe had a “Identity crisis” when she learned she wasn’t human. She somehow hadn’t picked up that she was different, which humans do all the time such as adopted kids often questioning why their eyes are blue while both their parents eyes are brown.
 
Any developed language by another ape, as Washoe seems to show, would be extremely utilitarian, with little abstract thought. Of course not all animals are chimps which are highly intelligent.
 
Gorilla’s taught sign language can answer questions but for some reason no matter what, it can never ask a question unless its extremely pragmatic and utilitarian. For example if you taught a chimp to paint and it painted something, but you gave it no reward it is not very inclined to paint again. But if you rewarded it with things like food it would paint again given the chance. This demonstrates to some degree that chimps didn’t put any emotions into their work.
 
Simply put: No. there is some kind of “perfect combination” of nurture and genetics in intelligent species. We can safely say that animals like cows and chickens don’t think in abstract like humans, but like i said before certain animals blur the line, case in point chimps.

@Dangerous Amoeba  
And what are our actions but a collection of instinctive reactions that have been honed by our genetics and memories?

@Darkmoon
 
Very few animals use tools, this argument only works for those that use them.
 
I don’t know much about kangaroos.
 
Cats stalking prey is instinct, detect certain pheromones you lay low and move towards them. The only cat i could give credit to would be lions, they like to scare animals towards a dedicated hunter.
 
Fiction, i don’t even understand why you brought them up.
 
That’s what you’re not getting, humans aren’t as bound by instinct as other animals are. We can build if we want to or not, not becuase our instincts are telling us to, of course there are benefits to building objects, but we can still shrug it off if we feel like it.

Anyone else just enjoying this until Lampman comes along?

@Dangerous Amoeba  
Otters keep special stones in pouches as tools.  
Kangaroos drown dingoes.  
Cats stalk their prey.  
Birds drop turtles on rocks to crack open their shells.  
Fluffies (sometimes) plan ahead to get spaghetti in very Tom & Jerry scenarios.  
Humans do whatever fancies them. Be it building something beautiful or destroying it.

@Darkmoon  
>Marking territory  
Pheromone detection, same way certain immune cells attach chemicals to attacking organisms, attracting white blood cells to eat them. Modern apes have a dulled pheromone sense, ours seems to have weakened as brain sizes increased. But we still detect pheromones, or at least try to, when you smell something bad, you scrunch up your face, letting the smell enter your nose, but scrape against the surface, touching mucus to try and filter toxic or otherwise chemicals. Or when we widen our eyes, the passage to our nose is made clear, letting us detect more scents.
 
Wrong, cats don’t “think ahead”, they don’t strategies before hand, they attack in the moment, using their natural silence to remain undetected. (early) Humans in fact even “Homo erectus” would chase mammoths into swamps or murky water. When the mammoth was stuck, they would impale it over and over, until it died. That’s strategy, complex pre-thought plans, not pre-programmed like cats, but learning how a prey behaves. Orcas also do that, they bump sharks to turn them over, knocking the shark out, then feast.

@Dangerous Amoeba  
Cats mark their territory and have complex hunting patterns. They have to think ahead about how they will fight prey or even each other.

@Darkmoon  
We have reactions just like most other animals, reactions are hardly a judge of intelligence, no significant information ever reacts with the brain. What cats cant do is think about situations before hand, or afterwards, they lack the intelligence to do that. Like i said before, there are animals that blur the line between sapient, chimps, gorillas, dolphins, etc. But we no domestic species has a nervous system capable of thought, beyond crude levels.

@Dangerous Amoeba  
On a relative scale those are very simple actions, as opposed to a cat for example. When a cat is falling it thinks and executes several motions throughout its body to right itself. When a cat hears something, it interprets whether it’s predator or prey and decides what to do accordingly. The illusion that we’re very different from animals is false, we have a few specific differences that give us all the advantage.

@Darkmoon  
>Bad situations from a good one.  
Yea so can bacteria, all life reacts to its environment, a plants roots grow towards water, a protist uses an “eye spot” to detect light, bacteria can produce chemicals to help them against harsh environments. Non of these animals are thinking about what they are doing, they simply respond to stimuli, animals have a much better scene of response, but still do not know why they are responding to it.

@Dangerous Amoeba  
They most certainly are capable of complex emotions. After so many billions of years of evolution, most animals, especially mammals, have been honed to be able to tell a bad situation from a good one.

@Darkmoon  
>Animals don’t have feelings  
Feelings and complex emotions are different. And yes animals lack the advanced nervous system to feel on a deeper level then just stimulation.
 
@Sandwich  

@Dangerous Amoeba  
You’re one to talk Mr. “Animals don’t have feelings.”

@Dangerous Amoeba  
@Darkmoon
 
Hey guys, when are you gonna like… Shut up?

@Darkmoon  
At no point would McDonald just mash up carcasses of cows. Not for ethical or moral reasons, simply for business, there would a smell in the meat that would cost too many chemicals to get rid of, they meat would lose consistency and texture, they still purify the meat, becuase killing people directly would be bad for business, the picture above would be very hard to purify or at least more expensive then simply following the normal procedure for slaughter. Kill, skin, gut, remove limbs, saw off meat, etc.
 
The worst the fast food meat has is tons of chemicals that increase dangerously increase immunity in animals, often killing good bacteria like the ones that help in digestion, and feeding sub par feed to the animals is bad for the animals health and can cause diseases in the meat.
 
Humans do not eat worst,You’re talking shit.
 
Seriously bro, ask the scientific community instead of going to youtube.  

@Dangerous Amoeba  
Well allowing that, the point remains. Humans eat worse things than fluffy meat. I’m sure some big corporation would get away with this in a similar manner.

@Darkmoon  
You can believe whatever you want, animal nervous systems being less developed than humans is a fact.
 
As for the meat thing: Limbs and intestines are edible, very little of an animal is not edible, my cousin went to India and brought some recipe for making cow hooves curry. So i don’t know, if you know what you’re talking about.
 
The “big” fast food joints often skip regulations, like regular butchers cant. McDonald raises their own cattle, in Brazil and such, and by claiming some loop holes which i don’t completely understand, they can import products that would normally fail health standards. But that’s cos they’re big business, and for some reason, big business is not regulated while the local business is heavily scrutinized. That’s not a flaw in the meat industry, it’s a flaw in your government, and you cant use fast food companies as an argument against the meat industry, simply because the raw or direct meat industry is hardly related to the fast food imports. Its like judging the pharmaceutical industry by the standards of homeopathy or acupuncture, they’re not even related.

@Dangerous Amoeba  
I’m having a hard time believing your psychology arguments. As for the health argument, the ingredients they put in make up too large a portion of what is sold, and the actual meat is, a lot of times, the little pieces you can scrape off the bones after you remove the limbs, intestines, and other desirable parts. I’m not saying this about all meat, but the stuff you get in fast food places is mixed with ingrediants that are banned in Europe, China, and Russia. It increases health risks.
 
Now please stop asserting that I’m a crazy, radical, activist. I’m just pointing out some crucial flaws in the system that can stand a bit of revising.

@Darkmoon  
>Humans being fed worst  
No. Just no. There is almost NOTHING added into commercial food products that is worst than grinding up a fluffy rodent thing, hooves and all. You seriously sound like some anti-vaccine activist or some chem trail nut, i am seriously expecting you to say “If the average person can’t pronounce it, you shouldn’t eat it.”
 
Let me address that before you may or may not say it: The average person can’t pronounce “deoxyribonucleic acid”, i have met people who had trouble pronouncing “Phosphorus”, there are people who don’t understand the differences between sugar, glucose and sucrose. Its not theses things are harmful, its that people are dumb and jump on bandwagons before research.
 
While the “system” isn’t perfect (nothing is) its very respectable in terms of human health.
 
Your problem with animal suffering is you thinking that animals have human like awareness or thought processes. They don’t, the way their minds work is not human-like, its based around instincts, not intellect.
 
Think of it this way: “Is a man a slave if he doesn’t know it?” The question is to ultimately question whether people have free will or not. Animals simply lack the understanding of free will, and choice and what is slavery, they don’t know they are slaves, becuase they don’t even understand the concept.

@Dangerous Amoeba  
PETA? No. But I’m not talking about chemical purification, I’m talking about adding things to make it taste better and more appealing to the American populace, which is why the argument of “don’t give this stuff to humans” falls short because they’re already being fed worse things. As for the slaughterhouse bit, I just can’t wrap my head around animals living like that in the same way you do. I really cannot stand suffering. I think the system needs some reforms, for human safety, for minimal suffering, and for health reasons.

@Darkmoon  
Chemicals for purification? Yea that would be a good thing. For the same reason you would purify water before drinking it. Would you rather eat meat infected with something?
 
Are you some PETA activist? Cos you seem to have the demeanor of one.  

@Background Pony #79D0  
To be fair, that meat is probably going to be mixed with 1,000 other different chemicals. The meat industry is fucked up in more ways than the mass killing.

@fifthcru5ader  
So how new are you?

Eugh. What a bloodbath.