Comment by vector_spaces | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vector_spaces | Hacker News Reader

This article reminds me of another from 2006 about PTSD in elephants. In various parts of the world, culling events and poaching have killed elder elephants in elephant clans, and traumatized the mostly young survivors, who grow up without guidance in parenting among other crucial activities. This has resulted in a breakdown of the elephant family structure, so that these traumatized and directionless young and mostly male elephants roam the grasslands engaging in senseless acts of violence against other animals and humans (the latter being probably more justified).

One of the Ugandan researchers profiled draws parallels between what is happening to elephants and what has happened in the recent history of her country, with the civil war killing parents and grandparents, creating a generation of young traumatized and directionless men who similarly engage in senseless violence and bloodshed.

It's a really beautiful and really sad article

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html

I don't think I can handle the article seeing as merely your above comment was so strikingly beautiful and sad!

And business-as-usual will just keep churning along, everything is fine, everything is peachy. Profits profits profits. Exploitation, single use plastics, dead oceans, destruction.

The shocking truth is that, even if you exclude empathy (which is sadly quite common), this represents a total abrogation of humanities collective responsibility to protect ourselves. Earth and her biosphere is our space-ship and our life-support system, respectively, and we cannot seem to come to grips with this simple fact.

It doesn't anger me when people act in ignorance. What angers me are those who know better, and keep others in ignorance with their cynically spent PR money, and those who know better and repeat the lies to pander to ignorance and garner votes. It is not a message that can be addressed with reason, since it appeals to the basest instincts of men: don't worry, everything is fine, keep doing what you want, you're justified. The ability to doubt (let alone challenge) authority when authority is telling you what you want to hear is vanishingly rare.

Not that I disagree with anything you’ve said, but I feel it’s important to acknowledge the often ignored fact that the same process of industrialization and capitalism that has impacted the environment has also lifted billions of people out of poverty and brought about the the highest standards of living in human history.

We are only now seeing the structural changes that will stabilize the human population after generations of growth from the advent of industrial agriculture. Contraception has only been widely available in most parts of the world for ~30 years and there are still places without it.

It’s very different to deliver this moral lecture to a Starbucks sipping, SUV driving North American, than to someone who lives in a rural village in Mongolia.

Effective environmental altruism must recognize the human element as it forms a key piece of the ethical dilemma. You will never convince someone who lives in poverty or other forms of hardship to make sacrifices to preserve the environment, and it may not even be ethical to attempt to do so.

For me this is proves the urgency of alleviating poverty.

> This has resulted in a breakdown of the elephant family structure

Recovery from this kind of thing is actually quite quick in terms of generations, usually one or two. In this case, that's tough to observe, because one elephant generation is quite long in human terms.

(And of course, if the old ones keep getting poached, the problem will keep being refreshed rather than recovering.)

Quick for core stuff, perhaps.

Crows can vocalize ultrasonic sounds, like many other creatures can.

They have been known to use these sounds, especially during the rain, to find grubs underground. I have personally observed an elder crow, teaching a young crow, how to do this.

I wonder how many generations it took, for crows to learn this the first time?

I suspect many.

This is fascinating behavior. Do you have a link with more details. I had no idea that cows deliberately hunted grubs. I wonder if it is a regional herd "cultural" behavior or common to cows worldwide?

Crows, not cows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYl_d7dc-EY

If you watch, the older crow is making large vertical head movements, and if you really crank the volume, you can hear part of the sound it is making.

The rest isn't in a hearable frequency.

They noticed me watching, and the older crow didn't immediately believe the younger, more excitable crow when it called an alert, but you can see him walk over and react when he sees me.

More than anything, he seems mad. :P

I have a relationship with crows here, for a variety of reasons, suffice it to say, the older crow knows I am not a real threat.

Something to be wary of, but not a real threat.

But, would you tell a child, when seeing a tiger, not to be worried? Even if you knew that particular tiger wasn't a threat?

Anyhow, after I googled, and yup... ultrasonic hunting.

(And as buddy said, crows, not cows)

Yeah video quality sucks, I couldn't get closer, just grabbed my phone, did what I could to record it.

The video is set private-- too bad, I'd love to see it.

We spend a lot of time watching the deer here and they have a multitude of extremely complex social behaviors. It's very obvious that the adults teach the children foraging patterns.

Including things like the descendants of a particular line of does knows how to direct their fawns into our fenced off courtyard where the adults can't fit and there are plenty of delicious planets-- but other deer don't do that with their fawns, presumably due to not having had the experience themselves as fawns.

Thanks for mentioning this. It is an older video, so google set it to private.

(I recall a story here, where google did so for silly reasons...)

Anyhow, should be viewable now.

> Recovery from this kind of thing is actually quite quick in terms of generations, usually one or two. In this case, that's tough to observe, because one elephant generation is quite long in human terms.

Quite identical to human generations, rather than quite long. My mother's oldest brother was murdered 50 years ago, and the rest of my aunts and uncles aren't over it, and although it happened before I was born it's been something I and my cousins know the details of, and still comes up in conversation. My generation's children are barely aware or not aware. Of course, any knowledge that he had is gone, but we're really almost over it. It probably won't have taken more than 70-80 years in total.

Really well laid out anecdote, thanks for sharing.

Do you think the 70-80 year number you come up with has more to do with 3x generations (3*~25, the length of a generation) or 1x human lifetimes (~70 years)?

It is highly unlikely that recovery will be so fast. Some things take a long time to learn for a population. For example learning which plants are poisonous is quite costly for a population. Elephants in Botswana travel through the Kalahari desert to get to the Okavango delta. On this 650 mile migration they travel from watering hole to watering hole. It will take a very long time to recover from the loss of memories about their locations, because they die if they cannot reach the next watering hole in time.

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