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I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularl

• observationist 2y ago
  Being cared for by conscientious humans, providing enrichment and variety, can be better than living in the wild. For any animal, living in the wild, life span tends to be short, and life tends to be brutal. Prey animals are hunted, and they scrounge for food; finding a steady, reliable, nutritious, and tasty source of food in the wild is vanishingly rare. Dealing with parasites, illness, injury, predation, and all the other stress and constant threats to life is why wild animals are dangerous. Peaceful, fulfilling, life is incredibly rare. It's even incredibly rare for humans - we're currently in an age of plenty and abundance, with more people living better lives than at any other point in the history of our species. Overfishing and the geopolitical nature of enforcement and exploitation aren't something we can affect at an individual level, but these aquarium staff are doing a good thing, making a pretty good life for a sunfish. An actual companion would be better, but as long as the cutouts are triggering relief for whatever social needs being affected, that's a good deal for the sunfish.
  • daveslash 2y ago
    I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.
    • ANewFormation 2y ago
      The interesting thing is predator and prey both die when they get too slow. Not sure which side has a worse ending there! Then there's disease or even a simple scratch getting infected. The world's a brutal place, probably all worlds. Because the very nature of evolution means species that exploit the most thrive the most. The obvious exception of things like a solar feeding plant isn't even an exception. The great oxidation event caused one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet - we evolved to thrive on oxygen but for most of the other life alive at the time it'd be like if plants today produced cyanide gas.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        Predators tend to have a thinner margin. Even a slight injury to a predator can mean a slow death by starvation. That's why videogame predators are so ridiculous. They keep coming after you, even when half their ass is blown away. A real predator will bugger off, as soon as it figures out that there might be a cost to attacking you. That's a big reason that many herbivore defenses seem kind of ridiculous, but work. They just need to make the predator nervous. Unless the predator is starving, it's likely to seek prey elsewhere. There's also tremendous competition between predators.
        • bitwize 2y ago
          Certain prey animals, especially gazelles, engage in dramatic leaps known as stotting. This behavior makes them highly visible to predators. One theory for why they do this is as a fitness signal to predators, who generally want to go for the easy pickin's, not the ones who present a challenge, and represent taking on more effort and risk of injury or just wasted energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting Most lions also know not to prey on humans, for similar reasons: if a lion took a human, it risks being hunted down by other humans related to their prey. Most "man-eating" lions or tigers are starving or injured, therefore desperate, and lions are largely seen in Africa as pest creatures who take livestock. (Hippopotamuses, by contrast, give absolutely no fucks and will kill you on sight. Africans consider the hippopotamus to be the fiercest animal by far, even more so than the lion.)
  • veunes 2y ago
    And sure, cutouts aren’t a perfect replacement for real social interaction, but it’s clear the staff are doing their best to address its emotional needs
• scottLobster 2y ago
  The internet in general finds the black in the rainbow, Hacker News is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd, but the overall tendency is the same. Additionally, most of us are taught "hurting things is bad" as children and many adults have a hard time reconciling that we have to intentionally hurt at least some living things to live, hurt an even greater amount of living things to flourish, and at a certain point decreasing suffering in one dimension increases it in another. For those who haven't developed a more mature framework, they tend to revert to the childhood "hurting things is bad" lesson, and an alternative framework based on nuance and context around suffering is too emotionally painful for them to accept, even if they can intellectually admit to the logic.
  • kibwen 2y ago
    > is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd On behalf of the more intellectual crowd, I'm obliged to devastatingly elucidate that we're (quite singularly) more intrinsically adept at forcefully projecting ex post facto rationalizations upon our--invariably and universally--emotional decision-making processes whilst obfuscating the same under an avalanche of loquacious hifalutinisms.
• bluebarbet 2y ago
  Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy. This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together. Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy. Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel? Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but against the law in Germany). And so on. People in developed countries have become very good at dealing with cognitive dissonance.
  • stickfigure 2y ago
    I've seen some very large farms and they didn't seem like a horror show to me. Maybe they exist somewhere but I'm starting to get the feeling that "factory farm" is a term that people throw out to conjure a mental image of something that doesn't actually exist (or is the exception rather than the rule).
    • zargon 2y ago
      If factory farms were so benign, they wouldn’t need laws designed to encumber whistleblowers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
• tensor 2y ago
  The issue is about whether the animal is forced to endure pain, not weather we eat it or not. The same is true for how we keep the animals we eat, and why people are rightfully upset about how some cows and chickens and the like are kept during their short lives before slaughter. Essentially, having the animal be free before we catch and immediately and hopefully quickly kill it for food is fine. Keeping it in a zoo where it's not suffering is fine. Keeping it in poor conditions before we kill and eat it is not fine. Keeping it in poor conditions in a zoo is not fine. This story is interesting in that it gives insight into the mental state of these zoo animals, something that is often hard for the public to see and understand. It should make you pause to consider if we're really keeping these animals in humane conditions, given that apparently even fish have possibly more complex internal mental states than we assume.
  • fbfactchecker 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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