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I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants. It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fi

I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants. It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. Ever killed a dog because it annoyed you? That said, doing it for science at least has a justification.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Well, some insects represent a genuine threat to food supplies and the spread of disease. I don't really follow where you're going with the dog example. What kind of comparison is that supposed to be? Edit to add: Even ants produce antibiotics that they groom on to their bodies to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungus on themselves and inside their nests. So I'm going to continue to swat flies and not lose any sleep over it.
- sillysaurus3 10y ago
  Probably a bad one. I agree that killing insects is fine if there's a reason. But I was reacting to "I kill things because they annoy me." Which is valid, but always frustrating. My parents used to flip out and kill caterpillars, spiders, etc whenever they saw them. More than once I'd notice one and corral them outside while my parents weren't looking. There's just no point in killing something because it simply exists. None of this probably matters though.
  - notpresident 10y ago
    At home it was my Dad who told me to be nice to spiders. :-)
    - jschwartzi 10y ago
      Mine too! He would tell me that the spiders are helpful because they kill other bugs, and to leave them alone or put them outside. The more I think about these things, the more connected even the small things in our world are.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - red75prime 10y ago
      Sure, they are good at killing flies and you don't have to feel sorry killing flies yourself. Win-win.
  - nh2 10y ago
    Killing things only when you have to is objectively the safer choice when it comes to not feeling bad about yourself in the future.
notpresident 10y ago
Tangentially related and I expect a 50% chance to be punished for this but it is really interesting and I think it deserves some thought: It always surprises me how a number of HNers worries about killing insects, even for science - all while supporting the killing of unborn children.
- Falling3 10y ago
  This is a ridiculous oversimplification of the issues and a guaranteed way of hijacking this for a completely unproductive argument.
  - pepve 10y ago
    To be fair, this thread started with someone describing the killing of maggots as "disturbing". It was never going to be a productive argument.
  - 21 10y ago
    GP does have a point. A 4 month old or whatever is the latest you can perform an abortion is certainly bigger than a fly, or even many mammals. I am pro-choice by the way.
- orthecreedence 10y ago
  Perhaps I can answer your question. I catch flies and bring them outside when they are in my home. I also regularly go for walks outside. In doing so, I will step on ants, caterpillars, various plants, etc. Some of them surely die. In other words, I will show kindness to animals, but only to the point where it doesn't completely impede my life or my ability to find happiness. When I think of abortion, I don't think of it as killing babies. I think of it as killing a collection of cells that some day perhaps might be a child. But it is not one. I don't see how one can say that a clump of 64 cells is a child, given that it has the potential to be one, but not also take issue with their sperm not fertilizing an egg. Isn't every sperm a potential child as well? On what point of the scale to you draw the line and say "this is now a child" vs "this is a collection of biological material that may become a child if proper conditions are met?" I think the first trimester is a fairly decent cutoff.
orthecreedence 10y ago
Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science. Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would rather scoff and silently disagree than challenge their own shaky belief system. Granted, if a few dead caterpillars can cure our accumulating trash problem, that's a tradeoff I am ok with.
- alwaysdoit 10y ago
  Does the animal's lifespan matter? Intuitively it seems like killing something that will only live for a few days or weeks at most matters less. So I'm not sure it's all due to "cultural worth" (though I don't disagree that's part of it).
  - orthecreedence 10y ago
    Yeah, I've thought about that too, actually. And certainly, I feel better about killing any animal that I perceived to have had a "full life" (dogs included). I tend to think that lifetimes are measured in lifetimes (relative scale) by various animals. So where a fly might live four of our weeks, to that fly, perhaps it was perceived as a good 60 years time if it was on our scale. So to me, lifespan doesn't factor into it too much, although perhaps you're right that that is another piece of data used by people to measure an animal's "worth."
- killin_dan 10y ago
  Hey whatup cl-async guy! I'd liked to add that there are aspects of mutualism underlying how much we value dogs. We used to hunt alongside dogs, there exists a special bond between man and dog that does not exist between any other species, to my knowledge. They know our emotions, our smells, our noises, our physiological needs, they are even aware of fragility of our bodies compared to other animals. Dogs are pretty amazing
  - 10y ago
greenshackle2 10y ago
Do you eat animal products? I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets. At least there are principled reasons to care less about insects (much less complex nervous system), I can find no principled reason to care more for dogs than pigs.
- jonnybgood 10y ago
  The principled reason to care more for dogs from my understanding is mutualism. Dogs are dogs because of humans. Same for cats.
  - chc 10y ago
    AFAIK the prevailing theory is that humans did not domesticate cats, and instead cats just learned to coexist with us because we attracted lots of tasty pests.
  - greenshackle2 10y ago
    It's the same for farm animals though, isn't it? Modern broiler chickens, egg-layers, dairy cows and beef cattle, turkeys, etc. are very different from their wild ancestors. Farmed turkeys can't have sex, they have to be artificially inseminated, I don't know who made them that way if not humans.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- coldtea 10y ago
  >I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets. Pets are a recent phenomenon (last 100 or so years, and urban). [edit: recent, not common phenomenon] In rural places animals like cats and dogs where actually useful: guarding, helping with the sheep, killing mice and snakes, and such. The bonding came from having them around (and having them be useful), not because there was some bizarro artificial distinction between e.g. cows and sheep and cats and dogs. And in many cultures and/or periods things we now call pets were/are eaten as casually as we eat cows or kale.
mikeash 10y ago
It's because insects have such a primitive nervous system that we don't see them as being aware in the same way that a dog is. You draw the line somewhere, right? Drawing the line at a certain complexity of the nervous system is more sensible than drawing it at "animals" in general, IMO.
- Eleopteryx 10y ago
  >You draw the line somewhere, right Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". Perhaps my consciousness is so dim relative to theirs that it would be analogous to me squashing a bug. I hope that their methods are advanced enough that they don't need to.
  - freeflight 10y ago
    >Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". They might as well just terminate your primitive nervous system for their own nutritional needs or out of mere hunting instinct. Plenty of animals do this all the time, nature isn't romantic idealistic, it's ruthless and unforgiving.
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      Or alternatively, beautifully efficient.
      - mirimir 10y ago
        Eating other species does have selective advantages.
      - kwhitefoot 10y ago
        Efficient at what? Efficiency is always relative to a particular goal, what did you have in mind?
coldtea 10y ago
>It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. I don't find it strange at all. I find it strange that the notion of "violence toward insects" is even a thing.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

Well, some insects represent a genuine threat to food supplies and the spread of disease. I don't really follow where you're going with the dog example. What kind of comparison is that supposed to be? Edit to add: Even ants produce antibiotics that they groom on to their bodies to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungus on themselves and inside their nests. So I'm going to continue to swat flies and not lose any sleep over it.

sillysaurus3 10y ago
Probably a bad one. I agree that killing insects is fine if there's a reason. But I was reacting to "I kill things because they annoy me." Which is valid, but always frustrating. My parents used to flip out and kill caterpillars, spiders, etc whenever they saw them. More than once I'd notice one and corral them outside while my parents weren't looking. There's just no point in killing something because it simply exists. None of this probably matters though.
- notpresident 10y ago
  At home it was my Dad who told me to be nice to spiders. :-)
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    Mine too! He would tell me that the spiders are helpful because they kill other bugs, and to leave them alone or put them outside. The more I think about these things, the more connected even the small things in our world are.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - red75prime 10y ago
    Sure, they are good at killing flies and you don't have to feel sorry killing flies yourself. Win-win.
- nh2 10y ago
  Killing things only when you have to is objectively the safer choice when it comes to not feeling bad about yourself in the future.

notpresident 10y ago

Tangentially related and I expect a 50% chance to be punished for this but it is really interesting and I think it deserves some thought: It always surprises me how a number of HNers worries about killing insects, even for science - all while supporting the killing of unborn children.

Falling3 10y ago
This is a ridiculous oversimplification of the issues and a guaranteed way of hijacking this for a completely unproductive argument.
- pepve 10y ago
  To be fair, this thread started with someone describing the killing of maggots as "disturbing". It was never going to be a productive argument.
- 21 10y ago
  GP does have a point. A 4 month old or whatever is the latest you can perform an abortion is certainly bigger than a fly, or even many mammals. I am pro-choice by the way.
orthecreedence 10y ago
Perhaps I can answer your question. I catch flies and bring them outside when they are in my home. I also regularly go for walks outside. In doing so, I will step on ants, caterpillars, various plants, etc. Some of them surely die. In other words, I will show kindness to animals, but only to the point where it doesn't completely impede my life or my ability to find happiness. When I think of abortion, I don't think of it as killing babies. I think of it as killing a collection of cells that some day perhaps might be a child. But it is not one. I don't see how one can say that a clump of 64 cells is a child, given that it has the potential to be one, but not also take issue with their sperm not fertilizing an egg. Isn't every sperm a potential child as well? On what point of the scale to you draw the line and say "this is now a child" vs "this is a collection of biological material that may become a child if proper conditions are met?" I think the first trimester is a fairly decent cutoff.

orthecreedence 10y ago

Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science. Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would rather scoff and silently disagree than challenge their own shaky belief system. Granted, if a few dead caterpillars can cure our accumulating trash problem, that's a tradeoff I am ok with.

alwaysdoit 10y ago
Does the animal's lifespan matter? Intuitively it seems like killing something that will only live for a few days or weeks at most matters less. So I'm not sure it's all due to "cultural worth" (though I don't disagree that's part of it).
- orthecreedence 10y ago
  Yeah, I've thought about that too, actually. And certainly, I feel better about killing any animal that I perceived to have had a "full life" (dogs included). I tend to think that lifetimes are measured in lifetimes (relative scale) by various animals. So where a fly might live four of our weeks, to that fly, perhaps it was perceived as a good 60 years time if it was on our scale. So to me, lifespan doesn't factor into it too much, although perhaps you're right that that is another piece of data used by people to measure an animal's "worth."
killin_dan 10y ago
Hey whatup cl-async guy! I'd liked to add that there are aspects of mutualism underlying how much we value dogs. We used to hunt alongside dogs, there exists a special bond between man and dog that does not exist between any other species, to my knowledge. They know our emotions, our smells, our noises, our physiological needs, they are even aware of fragility of our bodies compared to other animals. Dogs are pretty amazing
- 10y ago

greenshackle2 10y ago

Do you eat animal products? I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets. At least there are principled reasons to care less about insects (much less complex nervous system), I can find no principled reason to care more for dogs than pigs.

jonnybgood 10y ago
The principled reason to care more for dogs from my understanding is mutualism. Dogs are dogs because of humans. Same for cats.
- chc 10y ago
  AFAIK the prevailing theory is that humans did not domesticate cats, and instead cats just learned to coexist with us because we attracted lots of tasty pests.
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  It's the same for farm animals though, isn't it? Modern broiler chickens, egg-layers, dairy cows and beef cattle, turkeys, etc. are very different from their wild ancestors. Farmed turkeys can't have sex, they have to be artificially inseminated, I don't know who made them that way if not humans.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
coldtea 10y ago
>I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets. Pets are a recent phenomenon (last 100 or so years, and urban). [edit: recent, not common phenomenon] In rural places animals like cats and dogs where actually useful: guarding, helping with the sheep, killing mice and snakes, and such. The bonding came from having them around (and having them be useful), not because there was some bizarro artificial distinction between e.g. cows and sheep and cats and dogs. And in many cultures and/or periods things we now call pets were/are eaten as casually as we eat cows or kale.

mikeash 10y ago

It's because insects have such a primitive nervous system that we don't see them as being aware in the same way that a dog is. You draw the line somewhere, right? Drawing the line at a certain complexity of the nervous system is more sensible than drawing it at "animals" in general, IMO.

Eleopteryx 10y ago
>You draw the line somewhere, right Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". Perhaps my consciousness is so dim relative to theirs that it would be analogous to me squashing a bug. I hope that their methods are advanced enough that they don't need to.
- freeflight 10y ago
  >Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". They might as well just terminate your primitive nervous system for their own nutritional needs or out of mere hunting instinct. Plenty of animals do this all the time, nature isn't romantic idealistic, it's ruthless and unforgiving.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    Or alternatively, beautifully efficient.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      Eating other species does have selective advantages.
    - kwhitefoot 10y ago
      Efficient at what? Efficiency is always relative to a particular goal, what did you have in mind?

coldtea 10y ago

>It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. I don't find it strange at all. I find it strange that the notion of "violence toward insects" is even a thing.