I don't think they understand the concept of time and the future and that one day they will die......
Never had one come up and shake my hand with it's fin and carry on a conversation either.
I doubt they worry about what's going on across the other side of the ocean.
Just to name a few

Do they know that they know?

That is my definition of self-awareness.

We are the only animals who will voluntarily give our lives in order to uphold an abstract notion of any kind.

Voluntary suicide.

A dog does not lknow it's own name. It knows that when it hears a certain sound, then it is supposed to come to the owner...

Stimulus response.

You cannot find an example of voluntary suicide anywhere in the animal kingdom other than us! Not yet at least.

An animal which knows something only knows what it has learned directly... we infer from previous knowns...

See any animals worshipping 'God'?

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Do-Animals-Commit-Suicide-63441.shtml

Do Animals Commit Suicide?
They experience psychological pain and depression

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
22nd of August 2007, 17:36 GMT

Animals, too, experience a profound feeling of sadness when their play/hunt/sex partner dies. Those studying the behavior of wild and domestic animals come with an increasing number of cases proving that animals are capable of pure sorrow when they lose someone close to them. Somehow, this behavior is linked to self-conscience, thus only "brainy" animals, like mammals and some birds, consciously commit suicide.

It is hard to say if animals commit suicide. An animal will not do this because of a sudden dread, or an excessive emotion. As they cannot ... speak, it's difficult to assess if there is a true suicide.

But when a dog or a cat, following the death of their master, refuse food dying of hunger, we can conclude that this is an unwitting consequence of the pain they feel. But when the animal throws itself from a height, it's hard to believe this is a casual act or the effect of its anxiety.

This case was seen in a natural reserve in Zimbabwe: chased from their pride, the luck seemed to have encountered a pair of old hungry male lions. They cornered a warthog, but the animal escaped in the last moment in a den. One of the lions, pushed by the hunger, tried to follow it, but he got trapped in the narrow hole. His partner tried to help him, pulling him out with the paw, but when the trapped lion started roaring of pain, he stopped.

The trapped lion died asphyxiated, and the next day, his partner hardly managed to pull out his corpse. Sooner, the second lion was found dead next to the body of the other. He had refused to go hunting, and died of hunger.

Dogs are known for their strong affection feelings, and stories with suicidal dogs abound. Dogs grown together get so bound one to each other, that often do not survive to the loss of one of them. One owner had an airdale and a fox-terrier, who were always hanging together.

One day, the fox-terrier was crashed by a car and died. The owner buried it in the garden. The playful airdale changed
its behavior, did not leave the tomb, refused food, and was haunting like a phantom during the night like looking for its friend. Few days later, the airdale was found dead next to the tomb of its friend.

But this attachment of the dogs is also applied to their human masters. This story occurred in Rome: the owner of Shastra, a Spanish cockerel, died. When the corpse was pulled out of the house, the dog tossed itself from the third level. It just broke one leg. It was brought to the veterinarian but once again home, the pulled out itself from the leash and threw itself again.

This time it died. Perhaps, the places in which the dog played so many times with its master could have recalled the dog such painful records that it could not resist and suicided.

This case occurred in Ostiglia (also Italy): Franz, a German shepherd dog, was laying on the railways line, near the railway station. Workers always chased away with stones the dog, but soon after the dog returned, and one day, the dog met with the Verona-Bologna train...

Franz had lost his master, condemned two weeks before to one year in jail. Since she had disappeared, the animal refused food, haunting through the city, like a suffering soul missing a beloved one.

This case occurred in the Farnese palace (Paris): a white Angora tomcat chased restlessly a ***** cat next door. But the female was indifferent to his advances, and one day the tomcat threw himself through the windows and died. The owner said because of the unshared love...

An 8-year-old girl had a cat which she surrounded with all her care and affection. The two were very bound. But the child died of a sudden condition, and everybody forgot in a such a difficult moment about the cat. When they remembered about the animal, it was gone.

Three months later, a scratch was heard at the door. It was the cat, weakened and with sad eyes. The cat refused food or caresses; it went to the girl's room, looked around, went to the open window and tossed itself: it died with the skull crashed on the pavement.

Monkeys too react in the same manner when losing a partner. Many times in Zoos, when one monkey in a pair dies, the partner refuses food, dying a few days later. Monkeys are highly intelligent, and form strong bounds with the partner.

Of course, the suicide also occurs amongst dolphins, animals considered the second after apes in what concerns intelligence level. In a Greek gulf, a pair of dolphins had been living for years. But one day the fishermen noticed that the male could not swim properly and floated with the belly up. Few days later, the male died. The female pushed the corpse, trying to keep it to the surface to "breathe".

When a storm begun, the body was taken and smashed to the rocks. Then, the female threw herself to the rocks, sharing the same faith with her partner.

As said, some birds, with a more complex behavior, can suicide, like parrots.

In a pair of pet love birds, the male got an injury that killed him in one hour. The female, witnessing the sufferance of her partner till he died, imitated all his movements, like she would have suffered the same way like him. She kept on imitating this even after her partner died, and this had a harming effect on her inner organs. Her vitality dropped, and she died soon.

But sometimes animals seem to suicide linked to depression, when serotonin ("happiness levels") drop to dangerous low levels, which is a much more common cause of suicide in humans, than longing.

A giraffe at Paris Zoo broke its head wittingly by the walls of its shelter, after a period of several days in which manifested signs of sadness and depression.

A 12-year-old lioness in an American Zoo had remained pregnant thrice, but each time she gave birth to weak cubs, which died soon. After the last pregnancy, she failed in the most severe depression. For several days she had refused food, and suddenly, she experienced a desperation crisis, starting to chew her tail as long as she reached. Than she started to chew one of her paws, and none could say the final results, if the keepers had not killed her. Post-partum depression is common also in women ...

In a English case, a farmer, renown for his brutality, bought a horse. The seller warned him not to use the whip for driving the horse. But two days later, the farmer bit violently the horse. Suddenly, the animal started running on a meadow surrounded from three parts by fences, and on a fourth side, there was a cliff dominating the sea shore. The horse galloped directly to the cliff, smashing itself on the rocks below.

In some animals, sex is pure suicidal, at least for the males. In praying mantis the female starts eating the male while still copulating, head first! And in some spiders, in which the male is a pygmy compared to female, sex is followed by its own sacrifice in the jaws of the female. In the end, males are just a piece of protein for the hungry eggs developing females. Is this a suicidal act of the male? Rather no, as he primarily has sex on his mind. . . .

We are the only animals who will voluntarily give our lives in order to uphold an abstract notion of any kind.

Got one for this?



Any of them die for 'God'?

Complex written language is required for abstract conceptual understandings...

We are the only things with this.

I don't foresee an Animal Farm like uprising any time soon, but it just seems to me, based on the evidence, that humans are not as different from animals as we would like to think.

to be honest.humans are worse than animals IMO.


What do animals kill for?food or if they feel threatened


what do humans kill for?money,oil,power,because we think it's cool....etc

how often do you see a dog come up wagging it's tale one minute and then try to kill you the next?not that often

how often do you hear of people acting like they're someone's best friend and then they kill them not long after?it's actually quite common


therefore i will trust a dog before i will a person

Wired for war?

Killer chimps fuel debate on how war began

February, 2005
Special to World Science

In 1998, researchers in Uganda saw a group of male chimpanzees beating on and swaggering around another male chimp’s freshly killed body. Its windpipe, fingernails and testicles were torn out.

Credit: Anne Fischer, Max Plank-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

The finding added to a growing number of documented incidents of chimpanzees ganging up on, hunting down and killing each other—activities in which some researchers find eerie parallels to human war. These scientists argue that the killings among chimps, our closest ape relatives, may offer clues to war’s evolutionary origins, lessons that could help us break our own violent habits.

But this claim has stirred a backlash from other scientists, who dispute its apparent implication that we’re biologically wired for war. Some of these critics prefer to blame the mass killing on various aspects of modern civilization—a force, they add, that may also be pushing chimps to violence, by eating into their habitats and food resources.

New findings could fuel the debate.

Two new reports of violence among chimps have appeared, leading their authors to claim that this activity is normal for the animals.

“Lethal coalitionary aggression is part of the natural behavioral repertoire of chimpanzees,” writes David Watts of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in one such report, scheduled to be presented April 9 at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The other appeared in the June, 2004 issue of the International Journal of Primatology. Combined, the reports documented 11 killings and some maimings in two chimp communities totaling over 200 members. Each report covers a period of slightly under a decade.

There is an online movie of a chimpanzee attack, filmed in Tanzania in 1998, which gives an idea what the incidents are like, researchers say. It’s unknown whether this assault actually killed its victim, a young male.

Chimps live in groups called communities. Most reported violence occurs when chimps wander near or into the territory of a neighboring chimp community. If they come across a chimp from that community who is alone, they may attack.

Watts declares the incidents back up a proposal that war is rooted in evolution. This view, called the imbalance of power hypothesis, holds that animals that conduct mutual group violence do so because it helps them win resources and territory. This in turn lets them survive longer and breed more—and all living species, evolutionary theory holds, descend from those that were able best do those things in the past.

The imbalance of power hypothesis states, in other words, that evolution favored humans and chimps who warred when and because they could get away with it. “This makes grisly sense in terms of natural selection,” said Richard Wrangham, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and the author of the hypothesis.

Human and chimp battles differ in major ways, he stressed. Humans seem to be much worse judges of what they can get away with. The result: human wars often drag on year after bloody year, after having been initially sold to those involved as an easy win.

But there are also similarities to chimps, Wrangham added. Fundamentally, “if we as human males feel we are in a position to kill safely, then we’re easily induced to do it.” One example may be genocide, he said. Insurgents in Iraq often attack on one or a few isolated victims, not unlike the chimps, who usually gang up on one, he added. “The old principle of attacking safely is still there.”

The modern phenomenon of long, bloody wars might stem from the fact that leadership decisions have moved away from the battlefield, Wrangham speculated, adding that he’d rather leave this issue for future research to address.

But none of this contradicts his view, he added, that warfare as a whole is rooted in tendencies like those the chimpanzees display. Among hunter-gatherers, “the surprise raid is the typical pattern. The aim is to get together a small group of men who go off, and find a helpless victim, kill them and run away again.”

But some anthropologists question parallels between human and chimp violence.

The frequency of chimp killings “has been exaggerated,” said Brian Ferguson, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J.

The first reports of chimp violence came in the 1970s in Tanzania, he said, when whole chimp communities were supposedly wiped out by others. But “in many cases, all we know for sure is that some chimps disappeared,” he said, adding that some researchers have “a tendency to take a disappeared chimpanzee as a killed chimpanzee.” Some of the animals might have just left, he added.

A possibly darker dimension to the tale is that human interference might have induced the violence, Ferguson added. This might have occurred because human activities put pressure on the chimps’ land and food resources, forcing them to duke it out over the dwindling remains.

The worst of the environmental depradations, such as logging, seems to have ended at the national parks housing the chimps in the studies, Ferguson added; but human pressure continues. For instance, he said, forest cover for chimps has vanished all around Kibale National Park, home of the chimps in Watts’ study, who accounted for eight of the 11 killings mentioned in the two new reports.

“They’re totally hemmed in now,” Ferguson said of the chimps at Kibale. “It’s a very human kind of situation: a population that’s growing, that can’t go anywhere, may be beginning to run down its resources.” The Ngogo chimp community, the one Watts reported on, is gigantic for a chimp community, he added; researchers have estimated its membership at more than 150.

If modern civilization is pushing chimps to battle each other, it wouldn’t be a totally unprecedented finding. It would fit a widely believed theory that war is basically a product of modern civilization. This view, first popularized by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the mid-1700s, got a boost in 2002, when new research suggested Native Americans had been more peaceful before Europeans landed in America than afterward.

Anthropologists at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Ohio State University examined more than 5,000 Native American skeletons and found that those from after Christopher Columbus landed in the New World showed a rate of traumatic injuries more than 50 percent higher than those from before. Some researchers speculated that the increased violence evident in the bones might have stemmed from such factors as disputes over access to Western goods and weapons, and White people’s expansion forcing once-separate groups of natives together.

Regardless of these findings, chimpanzee researchers dispute the claim that modern man’s intrusions are the main culprits in chimp infighting.

The Kibale park covers more than 700 square kilometers, and the chimps in it multiply as rapidly or slightly more than average, suggesting resources are ample, Wrangham argued. “They actually seem to be very well off in terms of their food supply.”

He also dismissed Ferguson’s idea that researchers are counting too many unconfirmed disappearances as killings. Two-thirds of the 49 killings documented to date were either directly seen, he said, or inferred from clear evidence such as chimps prancing around a brutalized corpse. Only the remaining 16 are classified as suspicious disappearances.

Some researchers have also disputed the balance-of-power hypothesis on grounds that mutual killing among animals besides chimps and humans is rare. None has been found among bonobos, apes more closely related to chimps than humans are.

Wrangham argues that this may be because only particular social structures, such as a combination of social communities with small and frequently changing subgroups, make slaying an easy option. “It is a finely tuned strategy,” he said, “used, on occasion, when killers are able to kill at very low risk to themselves.”
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/050209_warfrm.htm

I always wondered if an animal wakes up, looks around and says to itself "damnit I'm still a cat" and then goes back to sleep in hopes it wakes up as something different.

Lol too funny

That is a discussion I'd like to have. Talk about philosophy 101



back to the "thread" - If you want to argue that humans aren't the dominant species thats one thing. If you want to say other species are progressing thats another. I don't need any examples from any websites to prove my claim and I won't go find any. Bottom line is this...in the sea....the bigger fish eats the smaller ones...but there are still lots of small ones...its just the way of life