Quantifying Animal Farmed Animal Suffering with Neuron Co...

The question of what weight to give to human interests and to nonhuman animal interests is difficult.67 Humans are literally outweighed by farmed animals: land-based farmed animals have 70 percent more biomass than all humans.68 Land-based farmed animals also outnumber humans greatly, by a factor of three to one, with 25 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, 1 billion sheep, and 1 billion pigs alive at any one time; farmed fish outnumber us, at a very rough estimate, ten to one, with around 1...

 This is Real

This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a break to d...

 Philosophers are "Loafers"

We were not originally made to be learned; we have become so perhaps by a sort of abuse of our organic faculties, and at the expense of the State, which nourishes a host of loafers whom vanity has adorned with the name of “philosophers.” Nature created us all solely to be happy—yes, all, from the crawling worm to the eagle that soars out of sight in the clouds. That is why she has given all animals some share of natural law, a share of greater or less delicacy according to the needs of ...

 Exercises for Emotional Maturity in Children

Let's focus on the skill of expanding sensitivity. Increased attention to music, nature, and animals can increase sensitivity. Once you identify these outlets, set up a series of exercises that use these focal points to draw out sensitivity. For example: Listening: Listen to a piece of beautiful music for 10 minutes. Close your eyes and let the notes guide your mind. Focusing: Choose an animal (even an ant) and follow it for 10 minutes; watch it with full attention. Relaxing: Sit quietly for...

 Biocides

These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in the soil—all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface ...

 The Fallacy of the Insect Age

To end on a more cheerful note, I think I have found a fallacy or two in some of the more spectacular arguments used by the Insect Age enthusiasts when they are hardest pressed. For one thing, the fact that insects as a class are 300,000,000 years old, if it is a fact, while we have been here only about 1,000,000 years, or 3,000,000 at the outside, does not prove to me that the insects are bound to win. It takes more than mere old age to get along these days. I think it quite likely that the ...