> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa
End to life worthy of being envied.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).
War sucks.
Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow
Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...
So the hierarchy is
- our kids
- "third-world orphans"
- other species
For what it's worth, I'm not denying the benefit we obtain by testing on animals, nor am I suggesting that we live surrounded by rodents that we know to be vectors for multiple diseases that would affect us.
The comment above was merely an observation on the value of life and how little attention we pay to it.
We subject sentient beings to untold amounts of horror every day, and we are completely destroying the balance of life on earth with a system that is entirely devoted to serving humans--individual humans, not humanity.
The statue is not the point. The point is what this little creature did and how we might learn to show mercy and respect to our fellow sentient beings.
From Google, 2019,
https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...