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I would be astonished if they had a concept of privacy that could be violated by a tracking device, and even more astonished if they could somehow deduce that t

I would be astonished if they had a concept of privacy that could be violated by a tracking device, and even more astonished if they could somehow deduce that the device is actually sending invisible rays that contain information about their whereabouts to humans. Moreover, I've seen no evidence that tracking devices in general cause discomfort or stress, or that animals tend to try hard to remove them, before these magpies. Indeed that would defeat the whole purpose of a tracking device by changing the animal's behavior, which is why they're obviously designed so as to minimize any such change in behavior.

jstanley 5y ago
I agree they likely have no knowledge or concept of privacy, but just wanted to point out: > astonished if they could somehow deduce that the device is actually sending invisible rays that contain information about their whereabouts The fact that the victim is unaware does not excuse the crime!
- Fatnino 5y ago
  If a human walked out on the street after forgetting his pants, is it a crime if I look at him? Show me an animal that prefers to wear clothes and I'll start considering it's privacy.
  - jakear 5y ago
    Look all you want, but maybe draw the line somewhere before “shoot them with a tranquilizer dart and glue a gps transmitter to them while they’re passed out”
jakear 5y ago
Are you equivalently comfortable tracking humans who do not ponder privacy and/or realize they are being tracked? Honest question, I know some developers will give an unequivocal “yes” to the above. As for the discomfort, I don’t have a link but it was a Love Nature episode focused on rhinos. They stated they needed to invest in heavy duty materials affixed to the horn by drilling through it otherwise the rhinos would remove the device. In the same episode a rhino died of suffocation after the tranquilizer knocked them unconscious in an undesirable position, and the verdict was that such occurrences were unavoidable costs of doing business.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > Are you equivalently comfortable tracking humans who do not ponder privacy and/or realize they are being tracked? Not OP, but: Even speaking as a strict vegan, there's a pretty big difference between a human having not thought about privacy much, and an animal that literally has different conceptual experiences of the world. I really don't see the equivalence. It's like getting upset about a cat walking into the bathroom while their owner is pooping; these are creatures with completely different mental models of the world and to me part of respecting animals is not trying to force all of their mental models through a human framework. Again speaking as a vegan, that doesn't mean we can just ignore their experiences of the world or that we should be fine with causing them physical or mental pain, but I really don't believe there is any conceptual mapping between modern human privacy notions and animal privacy. If people want to argue the devices are causing discomfort or that it's risky to trap/tag the birds without injuring them, then fine, those are different arguments. If they want to argue that magpies in specific do have some kind of mental model of privacy or norm that we're violating, then they can make that argument as well (although I suspect there isn't any real evidence for that). But no, I don't believe that it's violating their privacy to watch them, and I don't think that a human who is being secretly tracked or who hasn't thought much about privacy is the equivalent to a magpie's internal model of the world. At the very least, if we're going to talk about mental torture for an animal, that conversation should be framed around what we know about the animal's point-of-view, not based around what a human would feel. A lot of mental harm has been caused by us assuming that animals just work the same way that humans do, and in using that assumption to decide that certain actions towards them are good or bad based purely on what we would feel in their position.
throwanem 5y ago
Interesting. I'll admit this isn't my area, and as a hymenopterologist I'm really only an interested amateur in any case; I will say that I've never observed any wasp to be obviously dismayed by my camera flashes, and only once even by my presence - a bald-faced yellowjacket who was surprised to find me inches away upon emerging from a flower where she'd been nectaring, and circled my head a few times before zipping off about her occasions. But then, on the other hand, I'm not really interfering with them, and certainly not attaching a semi-permanent tracker - the most you ever see in that direction with wasps is a dab of paint on the dorsal thorax, as with queen bee marking, which if perhaps not perfectly innocuous is still certainly much less intrusive than the devices typically applied to mammals and in this case at least to birds. Can you cite the claim that the subjects of tracking studies typically find the trackers innocuous?
- aksss 5y ago
  > hymenopterologist Had to look that one up. Wasn’t sure if it was a joke from high school or a real field. The latter, for those interested - bees, wasps, and such.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    It's a specialization of entomology, yes. That said, and to the point of your initial uncertainty, there has long been question over the presence of the "hymen-" radical in the family name Hymenoptera ("-ptera" meaning "winged", cf. Orthoptera "straight-winged", Hemiptera "half-winged", Lepidoptera "jewel-winged", etc., and also eg Chiroptera "hand-winged" for bats.) It's confidently understood to derive from the name of a Greek god of marriage, as does the name of a more widely known mammalian membrane, but no one is entirely certain why that radical was used here. It was previously thought that "hymeno-" referred to the membranous nature of the hymenopteran wing, but this doesn't make much sense given that all insect wings are membranous to some extent; a name in that sense would not differentiate the family, and thus be a relatively unlikely choice even on the part of a classical taxonomist. Currently the radical is understood instead to refer to the fashion in which hymenopterans' rear wings can lock into the forewings via a series of small hooks, in order to both support the mechanics of flight and allow bees and wasps to narrowly fold their wings along their backs where they do not obstruct entry into narrow spaces such as brood burrows and nest cells. This feature, which is distinctive to hymenopterans, could very reasonably have inspired the family name Hymenoptera, meaning "married-winged".
djtango 5y ago
Given that birds exhibit magnetoreception, it's not outside the realms of probability that they could sense EM radiation [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception

jstanley 5y ago

I agree they likely have no knowledge or concept of privacy, but just wanted to point out: > astonished if they could somehow deduce that the device is actually sending invisible rays that contain information about their whereabouts The fact that the victim is unaware does not excuse the crime!

Fatnino 5y ago
If a human walked out on the street after forgetting his pants, is it a crime if I look at him? Show me an animal that prefers to wear clothes and I'll start considering it's privacy.
- jakear 5y ago
  Look all you want, but maybe draw the line somewhere before “shoot them with a tranquilizer dart and glue a gps transmitter to them while they’re passed out”

jakear 5y ago

Are you equivalently comfortable tracking humans who do not ponder privacy and/or realize they are being tracked? Honest question, I know some developers will give an unequivocal “yes” to the above. As for the discomfort, I don’t have a link but it was a Love Nature episode focused on rhinos. They stated they needed to invest in heavy duty materials affixed to the horn by drilling through it otherwise the rhinos would remove the device. In the same episode a rhino died of suffocation after the tranquilizer knocked them unconscious in an undesirable position, and the verdict was that such occurrences were unavoidable costs of doing business.

danShumway 5y ago
> Are you equivalently comfortable tracking humans who do not ponder privacy and/or realize they are being tracked? Not OP, but: Even speaking as a strict vegan, there's a pretty big difference between a human having not thought about privacy much, and an animal that literally has different conceptual experiences of the world. I really don't see the equivalence. It's like getting upset about a cat walking into the bathroom while their owner is pooping; these are creatures with completely different mental models of the world and to me part of respecting animals is not trying to force all of their mental models through a human framework. Again speaking as a vegan, that doesn't mean we can just ignore their experiences of the world or that we should be fine with causing them physical or mental pain, but I really don't believe there is any conceptual mapping between modern human privacy notions and animal privacy. If people want to argue the devices are causing discomfort or that it's risky to trap/tag the birds without injuring them, then fine, those are different arguments. If they want to argue that magpies in specific do have some kind of mental model of privacy or norm that we're violating, then they can make that argument as well (although I suspect there isn't any real evidence for that). But no, I don't believe that it's violating their privacy to watch them, and I don't think that a human who is being secretly tracked or who hasn't thought much about privacy is the equivalent to a magpie's internal model of the world. At the very least, if we're going to talk about mental torture for an animal, that conversation should be framed around what we know about the animal's point-of-view, not based around what a human would feel. A lot of mental harm has been caused by us assuming that animals just work the same way that humans do, and in using that assumption to decide that certain actions towards them are good or bad based purely on what we would feel in their position.

throwanem 5y ago

Interesting. I'll admit this isn't my area, and as a hymenopterologist I'm really only an interested amateur in any case; I will say that I've never observed any wasp to be obviously dismayed by my camera flashes, and only once even by my presence - a bald-faced yellowjacket who was surprised to find me inches away upon emerging from a flower where she'd been nectaring, and circled my head a few times before zipping off about her occasions. But then, on the other hand, I'm not really interfering with them, and certainly not attaching a semi-permanent tracker - the most you ever see in that direction with wasps is a dab of paint on the dorsal thorax, as with queen bee marking, which if perhaps not perfectly innocuous is still certainly much less intrusive than the devices typically applied to mammals and in this case at least to birds. Can you cite the claim that the subjects of tracking studies typically find the trackers innocuous?

aksss 5y ago
> hymenopterologist Had to look that one up. Wasn’t sure if it was a joke from high school or a real field. The latter, for those interested - bees, wasps, and such.
- throwanem 5y ago
  It's a specialization of entomology, yes. That said, and to the point of your initial uncertainty, there has long been question over the presence of the "hymen-" radical in the family name Hymenoptera ("-ptera" meaning "winged", cf. Orthoptera "straight-winged", Hemiptera "half-winged", Lepidoptera "jewel-winged", etc., and also eg Chiroptera "hand-winged" for bats.) It's confidently understood to derive from the name of a Greek god of marriage, as does the name of a more widely known mammalian membrane, but no one is entirely certain why that radical was used here. It was previously thought that "hymeno-" referred to the membranous nature of the hymenopteran wing, but this doesn't make much sense given that all insect wings are membranous to some extent; a name in that sense would not differentiate the family, and thus be a relatively unlikely choice even on the part of a classical taxonomist. Currently the radical is understood instead to refer to the fashion in which hymenopterans' rear wings can lock into the forewings via a series of small hooks, in order to both support the mechanics of flight and allow bees and wasps to narrowly fold their wings along their backs where they do not obstruct entry into narrow spaces such as brood burrows and nest cells. This feature, which is distinctive to hymenopterans, could very reasonably have inspired the family name Hymenoptera, meaning "married-winged".

djtango 5y ago

Given that birds exhibit magnetoreception, it's not outside the realms of probability that they could sense EM radiation [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception