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Author Topic: IT BEGINS!  (Read 6809 times)

Tom

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IT BEGINS!
« on: 27 Feb 2010, 01:14 »

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scarred

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #1 on: 27 Feb 2010, 01:49 »

Quote
Tilikum - the five-tonne orca already linked to two other human deaths since 1991

Sounds like it began a long time ago, dogg
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JD

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #2 on: 27 Feb 2010, 01:58 »

There is a reason they aren't called cuddly whales.
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #3 on: 27 Feb 2010, 02:59 »

You'd think they had to stop training them.
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #4 on: 27 Feb 2010, 05:17 »

Or at least train them not to kill. Who was in charge when they made that decision, I wonder.
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #5 on: 27 Feb 2010, 09:51 »

Sea Mammals like Whales, Dolphins and yes, Orcas are highly intelligent creatures. 

But despite that, and the fact that they can be trained to perform 'Tricks' based mostly on natural behavior, and they do enjoy working with Humans, they are still wild creatures, and on the odd occasion will revert to their natural instincts. 
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pilsner

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #6 on: 27 Feb 2010, 10:25 »

In retrospect, it was probably a poor idea to allow the Orca to watch The Cove.

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jhocking

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #7 on: 27 Feb 2010, 11:27 »



How has this been allowed to continue after the first two people were killed?

Probably for the same reason as most things: money. Just off the top of my head, I'm gonna guess that whale a) is a significant investment for Sea World, and b) attracts thousands of visitors.

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #8 on: 27 Feb 2010, 11:31 »

This whale has now killed three people.

How has this been allowed to continue after the first two people were killed? Let it go, for fuck's sake. Just put it back in the ocean and let it fend for itself.

I agree. It all seems a little..

Orca-strated
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #9 on: 27 Feb 2010, 11:39 »

It all seems a little..

Orca-strated

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Boro_Bandito

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #10 on: 27 Feb 2010, 12:27 »

To be fair, if that whale has killed two people already, I have a feeling that the trainer knew what she was getting into. Also I doubt that she'd want the whale to be put down, having devoted her life to that kind of job and whatnot.
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Yeah, I mean, "I won't kill and eat you if you won't kill and eat me" is typically a ground rule for social groups.

Boro_Bandito

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #11 on: 27 Feb 2010, 12:37 »

Problem is that if it was raised in captivity there's very little chance it could survive in the wild. I was talking to my brother about this yesterday and we were wondering why there aren't any emergency protocols to follow in the case of a killer whale attacking a trainer. From the looks of it the other trainers basically just stood around on the stage thingy screaming out while the killer whale dragged the poor woman under. They need some sort of deterrent or distraction that can make the killer whale forget about attacking a trainer, or at least a guy sitting in the balcony with a very powerful rifle holding some sort of high-powered tranquilizer dart in it. Of course anything a human can do is nil vs. a multiton animal in its own element I guess, but come on.
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Yeah, I mean, "I won't kill and eat you if you won't kill and eat me" is typically a ground rule for social groups.

pilsner

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #12 on: 27 Feb 2010, 12:39 »

Dude, this is orca Spartacus we are talking about here.  Our concern about releasing it should be that it will rally an army of escaped orcas, figure out the whole walking on land thing, and then next thing you know we aren't the apex predator anymore.
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Ikrik

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #13 on: 27 Feb 2010, 12:50 »

In retrospect, it was probably a poor idea to allow the Orca to watch The Cove.



It's a bad idea for anyone to watch The Cove.  "Oh, look at these poor dolphins, did you know they are almost EXACTLY LIKE PEOPLE IN EVERY SINGLE WAY!" *cue emotionally manipulative music* That movie is much more propaganda than a documentary.

And I've heard from a bunch of places that a HUGE chunk of your training for being a whale trainer is what do WHEN the whale attacks you, because they do that.  They size you up, wait until they think it's right, and then they attack you.  That knowledge alone terrifies me.
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pilsner

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #14 on: 27 Feb 2010, 12:54 »

Just because it's propaganda doesn't mean there isn't anything to be learned from it....  I find the best documentaries tend to be highly opinionated, for instance The Art of the Steal, Food, Inc., the collected works of Werner Herzog....
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #15 on: 27 Feb 2010, 12:58 »

Tilikum was born in the wild and captured. The tanks they keep killer whales in and specifically Tilikum, are proportionate to keeping a person in a hot-tub. They're highly intelligent animals and enjoy people's company and interaction but that also means they are subject to mental issues, whales and other intelligent sea animals kept in captivity usually show signs of being neurotic and blah blah blah free the whales.
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scarred

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #16 on: 27 Feb 2010, 14:09 »

Just because it's propaganda doesn't mean there isn't anything to be learned from it....  I find the best documentaries tend to be highly opinionated, for instance The Art of the Steal, Food, Inc., the collected works of Werner Herzog....

Lord of the Rings was good too.
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #17 on: 27 Feb 2010, 20:04 »

Ironically they were just about to release Free Willy 4 when this happened. It's got Steve Irwin's daughter in it, which is an irony in itself.

See, we can still have nice things. This is one of them.
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #18 on: 27 Feb 2010, 20:14 »

To be honest, I'm just glad the whale just pulled her under instead of tossing her around in the air until she died, which is what they do with sea lions before they eat them. They are highly intelligent and massive wild animals that, in the wild, are known to be rather brutal hunters. They keep insisting they aren't going to terminate it, which is fine and dandy, but really they should just let it go.
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axerton

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #19 on: 27 Feb 2010, 21:29 »

you guys are forgetting the biggest reason for not letting it go - All the free publicity that Sea World has gotten through this.

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KvP

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #20 on: 27 Feb 2010, 21:32 »

This whale has now killed three people.

How has this been allowed to continue after the first two people were killed? Let it go, for fuck's sake. Just put it back in the ocean and let it fend for itself.
There might be a concern vis a vis the whale's offspring, which have been raised in captivity. Its grandson apparently spends a lot of time with it and is fairly young.

As far as the Cove is concerned, I'm not aware of Sea World slaughtering its whales, so I'm not sure where that particular discussion is coming from.
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pilsner

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #22 on: 28 Feb 2010, 00:04 »

As far as the Cove is concerned, I'm not aware of Sea World slaughtering its whales, so I'm not sure where that particular discussion is coming from.

Have you seen The Cove?  There is repeated mention on the part of the trainer regarding Sea World and the immorality of keeping dolphins in such small spaces when they are instinctually predisposed to travelling long distances.
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Tom

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #24 on: 28 Feb 2010, 00:38 »

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Inlander

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #25 on: 28 Feb 2010, 00:40 »

That is a tiny, tiny orca.
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Thomas Edison

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #26 on: 28 Feb 2010, 00:57 »

Or a very, very big Irwin.
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JD

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #27 on: 28 Feb 2010, 01:02 »

Man I totally saw at least part of that film


SPOILERZ: The Whale manages to escape
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scarred

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #28 on: 28 Feb 2010, 01:07 »

aint got nuthin on flipper

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KvP

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #29 on: 28 Feb 2010, 02:25 »

As far as the Cove is concerned, I'm not aware of Sea World slaughtering its whales, so I'm not sure where that particular discussion is coming from.

Have you seen The Cove?  There is repeated mention on the part of the trainer regarding Sea World and the immorality of keeping dolphins in such small spaces when they are instinctually predisposed to travelling long distances.
I'm open to a pretty significant degree of utilitarian ethical reasoning. Slaughter is pretty clear-cut in this case. But I could give two shits about what an animal is naturally predisposed to doing. Insofar as animals are concerned physical harm is the utmost factor in determining the justice of captivity. Psychological harm is, well, in most cases it's hard to prove, though certainly in higher-functioning mammals it's a much more persuasive element. That having been said, violence on the part of an animal can't be automatically assumed to be symptomatic of some sort of psychosis brought on by captivity. I'd need a greater understanding of the specific animal, and other clear signs of distress, and that needs to be weighed against various other factors - does years of captivity have any significant effect on survival chances in the wild, and so on. I don't lend any credence to any sort of objective Kantian conception of dignity and freedom in animals (or in humans, for that matter).
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pilsner

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #30 on: 28 Feb 2010, 07:50 »

On the one hand, slaughter is not clear cut to a utilitarian who hasn't hopped on the Peter Singer train and started assessing the balance of happiness from the allegedly self-aware animal's point of view.

On the other hand, Kant has little to do with the contention that taking an animal which in the wild travels 100 miles a day in a pod of as many of 50 creatures and putting it in a glorified swimming pool where it can do little for much of the day, often alone, is bad for the animal in question.  We are in the realm of the empirical, here.  For instance, in The Cove the allegation was made that Sea World dolphins were depressed and hurting themselves intentionally, even a few committing suicide.  The CNN article I linked discusses the captive orca's  "neurotic behavior".

Incidentally, another interesting allegation made in The Cove, pretty convincingly, I thought, was that the dolphin slaughter in Japan was ancillary to the drive to capture dolphins for captivity, which could sell for as much as 150k for trainable dolphin.  The vast majority of dolphins captured were not picked for training, and those were the ones slaughtered for their meat (and often mispackaged in stores... now I'm getting  even farther off the main point).

But what I find most interesting about your post is that it wasn't written in your normal voice.  You don't normally reference utilitarianism and Kant in the same paragraph.  Moreover it seems anomalous to do so in a fairly basic and mostly humorous discussion about a murderous captive orca.  So why the change of tone, I wonder....   Are you trying to raise the level of conversation?  Are you trying something new?  Are you feeling threatened?  Whatever it is, I hope you keep it up.  But you might want to do a little more reading before you start citing Kant all over the place.  For one thing, he wasn't all about animal rights.  I recommend checking out Singer, if you'd like a position not to lend credence to....
« Last Edit: 28 Feb 2010, 07:53 by pilsner »
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #31 on: 28 Feb 2010, 14:04 »

I'm not really on the Singer train, though I haven't read a whole lot of his stuff. If I were to commit to utilitarianism I'd do so in the more basic Mill camp, and as far as I can remember Mill only really spoke of animals having "lower" happiness. The reference to Kant has more to do with the general level of discourse vis a vis animal rights, because it certainly seems like when some people talk about "animal rights" they're not making an emotional appeal but are actually arguing for inherent rights, and an inherent dignity in animals that must be respected. It's not really a Kantian argument, removed from the foundation of rational ability as it is, rather it's an aesthetic or teleological appeal wrapped in the Kantian language of rights and imperatives. For better or worse, PETA is the most visible proponent of this argument, seeing as how they're against slaughter but also broadly discouraging of pet ownership and morally repulsed not just by the means by which meat is produced but by the very act of carnivorous consumption. Many of their stunts, such as their campaign to have the name of the Green Bay Packers (as in meat packers) changed to the Green Bay Pickers (as in produce pickers) seem ridiculous but are in fact consistent with their (ridiculous) ethical framework. Hence under this argument the sequestering of dolphins who would otherwise be swimming in the ocean has nothing to do with the physical or psychological well-being of the dolphins and everything to do with how such sequestering violates the dignity of dolphinhood.
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pilsner

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #32 on: 01 Mar 2010, 08:37 »

Singer is, according to some, the most influential philosopher alive today.  He's also one of the few who are consistently generating new and interesting ideas.  I find that with intellectuals of his ilk, even if you disagree with every word they've said, exposure is still worthwhile because in listening to them and disagreeing with them, you generate new ideas of your own that might not otherwise have occurred to you.  So I can't recommend him strongly enough.

To put some meat on the bone, Singer's contribution to our discussion that I think is particularly valuable is his inclusion of animals empirically determined to be self-aware within the definition of "person."  The consequent attribution of "human" rights to self-aware animals changes the moral paradigm substantially.  If one is to adopt even a vestige of a deontological or rights based framework, adopting Singer's approach means re-thinking swathes of public policy, corporate regulation, and even personal choices.  It is more or less accepted by this point, I think, that both dolphins and orcas show some or most elements of self-awareness, dolphins, for instance having famously done very well on the mirror test.

As I understand it, and please correct me if I'm mistaken, you are describing the classic utilitarian/deontological "rights" based dichotomy and trying to fit the issue of orca captivity within that paradigm.  This is to some extent the entrance to the rabbit hole down which many animal rights discussions disappear.  I suggest, though, that we have no incentive to commit to one side or another and instead can identify elements of both approaches in commentators who pretend to be wholly committed to one side.  Singer, for instance, despite his radical exclusion of some humans from sapience delimited personhood, goes so far as to say that he would not exclude the use of sapient animals for medical tests for the benefit of humans.  That, to me, screams consequentialist thinking.  Most of your committed neo-utilitarians, on the other hand, will blanche if you suggest to them that animal torture without any medical benefit must be acceptable for them given that it contributes to the happiness of the torturer but detracts from no "person's" happiness, especially if it is never discovered.

Now of course we could think of an even dozen counter-arguments to both of the above objections if we wanted to, but this does not change the fact that there are some principles governing our relationship with animals, particularly self-aware animals, which appear close to inviolate, whereas most appear to some degree contingent.  Applying this to the situation at hand, we consider whether orca captivity at Sea World infringes on any inviolable or quasi-inviolable principles, or alternatively whether there is a consquentialist argument which justifies the demonstrable psychological damage inflicted on the animals which I alluded to earlier.  The fact that the animals are being used to entertain with antics contrary to any behavior to which they are naturally inclined, rather than being provided to allow people who would otherwise never  experience these incredible animals, also needs to be taken into account.

I think we can agree that this is an issue on which reasonable people can differ.
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #33 on: 01 Mar 2010, 08:41 »

Okay that does it I've changed my mind, shoot the fucker.
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pilsner

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #34 on: 01 Mar 2010, 08:47 »

Another victory for philosophy!
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #35 on: 01 Mar 2010, 13:43 »

I can't believe not a single person has said, "Serial Killer Whale."  I am dissappointed
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JD

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #36 on: 01 Mar 2010, 19:28 »

Serial Killer Whale
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scarred

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #37 on: 01 Mar 2010, 19:30 »

This shit just got real
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sean

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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #38 on: 01 Mar 2010, 19:44 »

the only reason ive heard for this whale not being gone yet is cause he is that good at fuckin'
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #39 on: 01 Mar 2010, 20:47 »



Basically put way to much effort into this just for the black/white male joke. I would have put even more effort in but I realised how dumb it was so I stopped.
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #40 on: 01 Mar 2010, 21:33 »

the only reason ive heard for this whale not being gone yet is cause he is that good at fuckin'

That's pretty much why I'm still around today.
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #41 on: 02 Mar 2010, 03:04 »

I think in all the tossing around of the big words and high concepts it's perhaps been forgotten that letting the dang-ole thing go into the wild may actually contribute to less human peoples dying as well? I think that is the point?
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #42 on: 02 Mar 2010, 04:00 »

I'm pretty sure they are going to start taking the appropriate precautions now.  I need you to imagine a killer whale in the Hannibal Lecter get-up from Silence of the Lambs because I don't have the skill to photoshop it...
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Re: IT BEGINS!
« Reply #43 on: 02 Mar 2010, 04:03 »

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