5 ms·

Your definition of restraint seems based on that one example. What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any anim

Your definition of restraint seems based on that one example. What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any animal takes through a farming process like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :). And I'm a cat owner. RE ants, I'm not a biologist so I won't speculate how exactly that relationship came to be, but it doesn't seem to me that there was any meeting of minds involved - I would guess evolutionary feedback loops again. I made a pretty generalized argument, but the point is, what we observe as harmony in nature - the balance between predator and prey, the various species of animals and plants (and bacteria and viruses) living next to each other - is a dynamic process that involves lots of blood, death and starvation. The order in nature isn't negotiated - it's an aggregate of countless number of conflicts. Related, recently on HN, "Trillions of Viruses Fall from the Sky Each Day": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636. The money quote from the article is mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575. "One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily." That's nature's harmony at work.
- vidarh 8y ago
  > Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :) We had a cat once who, we found out, liked to sit in the berry bushes in the garden, wait for a bird to land, and then kill them. She didn't didn't eat them - she much preferred the cat food she got. She just murdered bird after bird and left them to rot. Cats certainly are not the best examples of harmony.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Humans wanted cats that would kill all the pests in their farms.
  - mft_ 8y ago
    Are (aren't?) cats the only animal that kills for fun, rather than food? (Apart from the scum that are some humans...)
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      Depends on what you define as fun, what we're observing is more like "not for immediate need" and/or "not for food" - and when the immediate need for food arises, the first reflex is the cat food, but that obviously doesn't happen in nature. A dog is most certainly capable of attacking you even though it's not hungry or feeling unsafe.
    - jand 8y ago
      Actually, there are quite a few. [1] Since it seems to me that "fun" or "malice" or other motivations cannot be measured that precisely in animal kingdom, i think it is fair to say that surplus killing covers your question. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Are (aren't?) cats the only animal that kills for fun, rather than food? Obviously not. All kinds of animals kill. Also it's not "for fun" in the way we're having fun. They don't plan on entertaining themselves that way, weighing and ignoring the moral impact, etc. It's an instinct they have. It's training to hone their hunting skills -- which they need evolutionary to survive -- even if they we take there of them for the last 5-10.000 years (which is very little in evolutionary terms)
    - lstodd 8y ago
      It's like you say my cats took and hidden my sunshades, car keys, electronic components from my lab desk to make fun of me. It's not, it's just their nature, which in other words is what they evolved to do.
- captainbland 8y ago
  The amount of birds and mice our cats used to bring in perfectly alive and unharmed was quite astonishing and one time ended up leaving a large amount of Sparrow droppings all over my room. Of course they were probably just trying to teach us humans to hunt.
- SeanMacConMara 8y ago
  > Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird I'm no expert but I vaguely recall hearing from non-trivial sources that this is a common but inaccurate misrepresentation as regards their "intent". They are not "toying" with their hunting target so much as obeying a powerful instinct to be careful to kill it with the minimum risk of infection from getting even a small scratch in return from a target that is "playing dead" as a defense/evade tactic.
de_watcher 8y ago
Whoa, domesticated cats are exactly not an example of wind animals. They're more like part of human culture.
coldtea 8y ago
>What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? What about it? Other animals don't restrain, and even a cat can eat too many of its treats at once, and end up obese. Here's some info on cats: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stone-cold-serial-killers-domestic-cats-slaughter-billions-upon-billions-of-animals-in-us-every-year-8473643.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stone-cold... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/it-s-official-cats-are-killers http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/it-s-official-cats-ar... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/killer-cats/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/kille... http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :). And I'm a cat owner. RE ants, I'm not a biologist so I won't speculate how exactly that relationship came to be, but it doesn't seem to me that there was any meeting of minds involved - I would guess evolutionary feedback loops again. I made a pretty generalized argument, but the point is, what we observe as harmony in nature - the balance between predator and prey, the various species of animals and plants (and bacteria and viruses) living next to each other - is a dynamic process that involves lots of blood, death and starvation. The order in nature isn't negotiated - it's an aggregate of countless number of conflicts. Related, recently on HN, "Trillions of Viruses Fall from the Sky Each Day": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636. The money quote from the article is mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575. "One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily." That's nature's harmony at work.

vidarh 8y ago
> Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :) We had a cat once who, we found out, liked to sit in the berry bushes in the garden, wait for a bird to land, and then kill them. She didn't didn't eat them - she much preferred the cat food she got. She just murdered bird after bird and left them to rot. Cats certainly are not the best examples of harmony.
- ianai 8y ago
  Humans wanted cats that would kill all the pests in their farms.
- mft_ 8y ago
  Are (aren't?) cats the only animal that kills for fun, rather than food? (Apart from the scum that are some humans...)
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Depends on what you define as fun, what we're observing is more like "not for immediate need" and/or "not for food" - and when the immediate need for food arises, the first reflex is the cat food, but that obviously doesn't happen in nature. A dog is most certainly capable of attacking you even though it's not hungry or feeling unsafe.
  - jand 8y ago
    Actually, there are quite a few. [1] Since it seems to me that "fun" or "malice" or other motivations cannot be measured that precisely in animal kingdom, i think it is fair to say that surplus killing covers your question. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Are (aren't?) cats the only animal that kills for fun, rather than food? Obviously not. All kinds of animals kill. Also it's not "for fun" in the way we're having fun. They don't plan on entertaining themselves that way, weighing and ignoring the moral impact, etc. It's an instinct they have. It's training to hone their hunting skills -- which they need evolutionary to survive -- even if they we take there of them for the last 5-10.000 years (which is very little in evolutionary terms)
  - lstodd 8y ago
    It's like you say my cats took and hidden my sunshades, car keys, electronic components from my lab desk to make fun of me. It's not, it's just their nature, which in other words is what they evolved to do.
captainbland 8y ago
The amount of birds and mice our cats used to bring in perfectly alive and unharmed was quite astonishing and one time ended up leaving a large amount of Sparrow droppings all over my room. Of course they were probably just trying to teach us humans to hunt.
SeanMacConMara 8y ago
> Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird I'm no expert but I vaguely recall hearing from non-trivial sources that this is a common but inaccurate misrepresentation as regards their "intent". They are not "toying" with their hunting target so much as obeying a powerful instinct to be careful to kill it with the minimum risk of infection from getting even a small scratch in return from a target that is "playing dead" as a defense/evade tactic.

de_watcher 8y ago

Whoa, domesticated cats are exactly not an example of wind animals. They're more like part of human culture.

coldtea 8y ago

>What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? What about it? Other animals don't restrain, and even a cat can eat too many of its treats at once, and end up obese. Here's some info on cats: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stone-cold-serial-killers-domestic-cats-slaughter-billions-upon-billions-of-animals-in-us-every-year-8473643.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stone-cold... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/it-s-official-cats-are-killers http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/it-s-official-cats-ar... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/killer-cats/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/kille... http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill