marichiko

There is no court in the land that would try an animal for murder. Animals that kill human beings are simply dispatched themselves or in rare cases, relocated to territories far enough away from humans. Look at all the outcry there was on that thread sometime back about sharks in Austrailia being killed for having killed humans. No one accused the sharks of murder. No one came forth to plea extenuating circumstances for the sharks other than that they were merely animals. Males of various species of felines will kill kittens that they have not sired - this is called the reproduction instinct. Every organism is equipped with an instinct to perpetuate its own genetic code. By killing kittens, it did not father, a male feline is merely following this instinct and could hardly be considered a "murderer". Animals may be sentient beings, but they do not have the intelligence from which to create a strict rule of morality and ethics. The ethic of the animal world is Nature's - nothing more. The cases where we see the animal "ethic" go awry are generally ones where either man has interfered and upset the balance in some way or where we do not know the full story of what is going on. I find the killer lion story highly suspect because no zoologist or ethnologist was on the scene to obseve the facts in a scientific manner. Felids are known to prey on men almost always because the cat is injured or sick. The large size of the lions killed make me think that the "great white hunter" of the time found a couple of convenient scapecoats to placate the natives and tell a good story back home while the real killer lions probably had died of some illness or injury already sustained.

Oh and Bruce, I just found your quote in the hamster thread, "She would have to have comprehension and I doubt she's pondering the meaning of life. I fully understand your not wanting her to suffer pain, but how do you know she's feeling anything other than unusual?" Well which is it? Either an animal is capable of advanced philosophical thought or it's not. Make up your mind.