Swedish zoo kills 500 rescued lizards with liquid nitrogen - Sensationalist Headlines

I understand that people are pissed off but maybe you should get pissed at the poachers and smugglers themselves rather than the police and zoo that had, as @Headhumpy clearly informed, very limited options. Sure you could try sticking them in a sanctuary but this is Sweden- not a tropical country- so chances are that the native climate is different. There's no denying this was a massive waste of life but let's not take out our anger on the wrong people.

Do you hate farmers too? Because their animals are their property and they butcher them.

They're reptiles, they don't "want" things in the same way that you or I do.

What a mind blowing argument! How about instead of personal jabs when you don't know anything about me and come up with a a proper argument? Oh wait, you can't. Because sometimes the reality of the situation doesn't match the little utopia you want the world to be. Would it be ideal for no animal to die in this situation? Of course. But, being realistic, taking in the factors and context of the situation it clearly wasn't feasible for the zoo. Sorry, you lack critical thinking skills.

nice evaluation doc

Oh, you've lived as a reptile to know their brain doesnt construct for them rudimentary, yet pertinent, senses of reality, suffering, and happiness? I you dont think it matters they (or animals in general) get hurt because of their lesser consciousness then what is the trait present in animals that if present in humans would justify mistreatment? No answer then you have a double standard.

I don't have to have. Non-aware creatures do not have concepts like "reality", "happiness", "want" or "suffering". They just don't need them. If something does not have the ability to have an internal, reflective thought process, then they can't. It makes sense that most non-mammals don't have anything like this, even more so at smaller sizes... Having a powerful brain that allows you to employ those concepts takes a lot of energy, something that smaller animals just don't have the time to expend. Now, that's not to say that they don't experience anything. Going back to the suffering point specifically, Of course it matters when we cause undue pain to animals! Nearly all forms of life can experience pain in one way or another. Lizards in particular definitely have a sense of "pain" that isn't entirely foreign to us, because they do have some form of spatial memory, and pain is one of those base things that develops first as brains get more advanced than the base "acquire food". But read the article. This method of killing reptiles is about as humane as it gets, and it kills them essentially instantly. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/249570/20650c46-b7b5-436f-a03b-71bd929e9f73/image.png It's important to remember that pain != suffering. Suffering is a state of being, and it requires consciousness.

Are you serious? They have diminished consciousness, not none at all. What the fuck lol. So does a chimpanzee have no consciousness? If it does then wouldnt it follow that the other species would have it too to varying degrees since our brains are all relatively similar and consciousness is merely physics within the brains?

you arent reading and are reacting overly emotionally

You know, I think that there is too much stigma on this forum against writing emotionally sometimes.

So...he claims animals have no consciousness so i show a species that practically has to be conscious...problem?

Why not? what's wrong with typing something enthusiastic even if it's not necessarily logically sound if it's not malevolent?

Imagine yourself without some brain functions, like spatial memory, problem solving, etc, cut out whole pieces or sever them. Do you stop being conscious or is it just really fucked up? Theres nothing special about what we experience, we just have it very vividly.

Do you own a pet? If so, you own it because of property laws. Did your pet consent to domestication? If not you should find out because you might be holding a pet hostage. Because it is wasn't property anyone could make claim to it and take it from you. Just like you cannot go into a shelter and just take a pet without permission. Stop looking into things more then they are, you are coming off as extremely arrogant and full of yourself. I was talking about the law prior and you want call me a psychopath. I can have the belief that I think a cow should be treated well and with some dignity before it gets slaughtered, but at the same time when I eat a steak I don't cry because the cow is dead.

My pet probably did consent tbh, as long as they're happy and dont associate its owners negatively id call it consent. Property rights are for items, not thinking beings. Would you call a disabled person under your care your "property?"

that wasnt the claim, please reread the post

Oh, so now you can talk for your pet? Did your pet come to your house and ask to live with you? or did you take it from somewhere? How do you know it wants to stay? What if your pet has Stockholm syndrome? Are you really trying to stretch property rights and the discussion to animals to people? What a joke.

Hello thats the point of the question i asked that you avoided

People are not considered property so your whole question is pointless. It's pretty illegal to own a person as property/slave from my understanding. You are stretching being a caretaker (owner) to a disabled person (property), which the ideal in itself is illogical and does not work. Disabled persons have rights and a caretaker may have power of attorney which grants them legal authority to make decisions. The fact that you are trying to compare a disabled person to an animal is pretty offensive and I'm the sociopath here.

I think that lamb has the exact problem that I do in the sense that it sucks that shit has to die, however at the same time an enormous amount of chickens get ultra murdered so we can eat them on the daily basis, and now all of a sudden 500 lizards die and an article is made about it and we should now be upset about the lizards? We should have probably cooked and eaten them as compensation, although I have no idea if lizards are even edible to any degree.

My bad, I misread the title as "Swedish zoo kills 500 rescued lizards with liquid nitrogen" instead of "Swedish zoo kills 500 rescued chimpanzees with liquid nitrogen". Also, you completely failed to read my post at all so I'm not going to bother responding with any more effort since it will clearly go unread.

My whole point to the discussion isn't to sway you or Lamb from having some sort of empathy towards animals. The outrage of the situation is misdirected, the smuggler is the one to be mad at. The smuggler ripped animals from their habitats for profit, then on top of it did not care about the ecosystem he pulled the reptiles from, nor does he care about the ecosystem which was going to transplant them in. Once the authorities found out, they got people who could help involved, the zoo that got involved clearly tried to help the situation but it wasn't enough. So they had to kill the lizards. It is a pretty shitty situation, but trying to look into any more then what it is is pretty dumb in my opinion. The lizards are dead, that is the end result. People wanted to discuss why it happened and why the zoo can do what it did. What really drives me up the wall though is being called a psychopath simply because my narrative doesn't fit the perfect little utopia he wants to build. Transplanting animals from different ecosystems that they may or may not belong in is dangerous and can tilt the balance of the ecosystem. That balance is important because without it entire species could die, land masses can transform into wastelands, and create other issues ecologically or even economically. No one wants to hear this but preservation efforts really boil down to population control and there is a lot of death involved in it. It is why hunters can buy tags and hunt deer when the population is at peak. Bring down the population and you bring balance to the ecosystem because many natural predators have been wiped out or do not exist like they did before. In the grand scheme of things the zoo did what it could and with resources/options becoming more limited they did what they had to do. Lizards do not get some special status, hell not even human begins get special status near the end of their life. If life was valued nearly as much as Lamb made it out to be everyone could have equal access to organ transplants. The reality is we don't and those who need it get prioritized by selection and many others die before getting a transplant. Even that is straying away from the main argument. Hundreds of thousands of animals get slaughtered so that we can eat and use the animal byproducts in other goods/products. As a species we've done this since our early existence. This is our nature, just like animal have biological and genetic drives. They mate, feed, and survive until they die. They ultimately live to reproduce. Which is why animals are recognized as lesser species - yes there are animals that have a high level of intelligence and can learn things, but at most it is a basic level. Again, their intelligence is compared in relation to other animals. Does that mean I want to go kick a dog and skin them alive? no. I can treat animals with respect and dignity. But at the same time I'm not going to cry when a situation goes bad and animals die. In this case the zoo had to make a tough choice and they made the right one in my opinion. If the zoo had came out and said "yeah we could have taken care of the animals until they died, but we wanted to throw them in some nitrogen for kicks" my opinion would be very different. Though ironically enough Lamb wants to talk about animals having a level of consciousnesses and should be treated as such. But he thinks it is okay to keep a pet because "as long as they're happy and dont associate its owners negatively id call it consent." How does he know it is happy though? The pet could just stick around because it has a steady food source. It could come back to the house because it knows it has food there. How does he know if the pet is happy or unhappy? Maybe it misses it mother and the original pack it was with. Maybe if he thinks his pets are truly happy he should let them out and see if they come back. Maybe the pet has been with the owners for so long that it has Stockholm syndrome and actually needs to be rescued and rehabilitated.

From my perspective you are on the exact opposite side of the coin and are being a bit TOO realistic in some respects. Also why shouldn't we accept emotional ramblings from people sometimes? Why should we not desire a hypothetical utopia? One of the nicer things that human beings have is our ability to wish for something nicer. There is being aware of the grim reality that we exist in and then there is being too absorbed in it. I proposed a slightly goofy idea to save the lizards, and he equally got peeved by the fact that the lizards got deadered because of this retarded ass incident. On a very fundamental level our arguments are useless because the lizards are already dead, but nevertheless it is difficult to ignore that something feels kind of fucked up here and that something could have been done differently. Are we capable of proposing a flawless alternative? Maybe not, but we can still act reasonable hypothetical questions about cases like this.

What shits me the most is "We have received many requests from the general public, from people who wanted to take care of these animals," he said. "But when you suspect that these might be animals captured from the wild, we just can’t do that." Literally zero problem with finding a place to send them, if they are that interesting of a lizard that people come out of the woodworks to ask to take them, is it that big of a problem to confirm the ones given away are not infected with any disease? (Which I assume is the only reason you could justify doing something like this)

Didn't say you, i said lamb. Sorry to confuse that.

Youre comparing apes to lizards. Thats like comparing apes to lizards. You dont know shit about human or animal brains dood.

The problem with giving them away to people who come forwards is that not everyone who comes forwards is actually capable of caring for the lizards. This happens every time a animal group of any kind euthanises something, people will come forward claiming they would have cared for it who honestly can probably barely look after themselves. Let alone a creature that likely has very specific climatic and nutritional requirements. And professional carers or enthusiast carers can only take so many.

Man some of you guys are just heartless monsters with this appeal-to-law bullshit. The status quo is hardly an appropriate argument in an ethics debate.

Yea the problem with your argument is that the law makes sense and is perfectly reasonable. Circumventing laws like this is how invasive species get transferred and preventable illnesses in pets spread. Why take the risk when you can just follow the law to the letter. The zoo in this situation did nothing wrong, and like viper123 said, dont focus your anger at the zoo, focus it on the smugglers who caused this.

law isnt even the point. it was only brought up as a direct response to the question "why do they have the right to do this?". because they own them. ethics is a totally different argument that has been also discussed, with really rousing points made on the emotional side of things such as: strawmen arguments comparing to slavery and the extermination of primates. putting down an animal that cannot be cared for is "mistreatment". geckos have the emotional capacity of humans. what i dont understand is why phrases like "heartless monster", "sociopath", etc are being thrown around when basic facts on the situation and the cognitive ability of simple animals are presented. how is being so hostile remotely justified.