fear factor cruelty

[Sting Crazy]

Actually you could make the argument that keeping wild animals, such as Ts in captivity is cruel in of itself.

 

[Malhavoc's]

You're certainly free to feel sorry for them, but Code is saying that you can't make a case for CRUELTY. Invertebrates as a rule, and certainly tarantulas without exception, don't "suffer" or feel pain like higher mammals or companion animals. If you're not able to inflict pain and suffering on an animal, it's quite hard to be cruel to it.

When you cut off a Tarantulas leg, about the only thing that registers in their teeny-tiny nerve center is "Oh, there's not a leg there anymore." Inverts are so fragile that it simply doesn't behoove them to have very developed nervous systems, as they would live their lives in a state of almost constant pain due to the damage they must take on a frequent basis.

We've had this discussion a few times before, and it always ends up being a giant pissing match between the "cutesy-wootsey, fuzzy-wuzzy, widdle precious T" type keepers and the adroitly realistic keepers who enjoy them for what they are: fascinating, but largely unintelligent and completely incapable of emotion.

THey may not posses emotion as we understand it, but if you hold a flame to an invert, do they not try and escape? If you try to kill them or damage them slowly do they not fight back, or again try to run? when you pull or sever a tarantulas leg from its body do they not flea while it twitches. Pain is a defensive mechanism which they do posses. They register it as pain as damage and know it will harm them-and insictualy try to flea from it. To argue that they have no emotion is easy, but they certainly do have pain weather it's on our level of comprehension or a completely different basis.

Well the only reason it's possible is because of how cheap wild caught adult G. rosea are. A. avics are almost as cheap too though. So I guess people buying them to eat or whatever will never really be stopped. Not until there are only CB T's from hobbiests that won't sell to people like this.

Poeple eat tarantulas around the world, weather it be part of their cutlure, religion or just every day diet. Alot of things offered in the 'eating phase' of FF are usualy from different cultures who enjoy eating what most 'civalized ' people would consider gross. And FF is jsut capatilizing on this by introduceing the 'Civilized' persoon to this menu.

Day to Day, we 'consume' tarantulas aswell. We buy them and put them in plastic,glass,plexiglass ect. Prisons for our various levels of pleasure, FF merely assults people with them for Viewers pleasure. They make a buck doing it, we don't. So which is more cruel? them spending the lives of therphosa [spelling] for their pleasure or us spending the millions of lives of crickets mice and other various feeder objects for our pleasure? how can you argue the 'cruelty' of FF without arguing the very 'cruelty' of our hobby in itself, sure I bet you will come up with alot of reasons why we're better then they are but I bet if you took the arguement to them they'd do the very same thing.

Edited for my horrible type-os

 

[Professor T]

So essentially what you're saying is that I could stab my Ts with needles and it wouldn't ne considered torture since they cant feel pain? This is so cool. I always wanted to see who would win between my Goliath and my Salmon Pink but I thought it would be cruel. Thanks Mr. Internet!

And I was going to make a video of my Usambara fighting with my Emperor scorpion if anyone is interested, since I now feel better about putting them in together.

Do we really know what a T feels? The answer is no.

Do we care what they feel is really the question.

Dogs don't get to decide what is cruel, people get to decide.

I feed mice to snakes. Not creul.

I feed crickets to Ts. Not Cruel.

Pouring salt on a slug. Cruel.

Starving your snake to death. Cruel.

If you need to know what's cruel and what not, please post the example and I'll decide for you.

Goliath vs. Pink Salmon...cool! :clap:

Usambara vs. Emperor...cruel! I've already tried this, the Emperor just pulls the legs off the Usambara...very disappointing pay-per-view.
:liar:

 

[RaZeDaHeLL666]

I seen a ff episode and was appalled at what U saw. They put a whole bunch of Ts in the same tank on someone head. they even showed one being killed as also a mating. Hey people.. am I wrong for saying that isd animal cruelity? I am really jerked over this. should we , as a gathering , say something?

HEY tahst terrible, we should do something about this cruelty to our bugs!!

 

[knightjar]

Just because an animal doesn't have the same way of experiencing pain as we do doesn't mean it doesn't experience it. Equally just because we don't understand how such an apparently basic nervous system is capable of experiencing distress doesn't mean that it can't.

There is much more going on in animals' nervous systems than we currently understand. for example, how can something that supposedly has no memory be trained or tamed? Goldfish get bad press for their supposed lack of memory, but I've seen them exhibit pavlovian excitement when they see a fish food tub. Anyone who has kept invertebrates will have observed similar examples - the tarantula that waits at a dry water dish, normally defensive animals that can be safely handled thanks to becoming familiar with human contact.

Mike

 

[tkn0spdr]

A good way to gauge what might be considered needlessly cruel or not is to ask yourself if this would be a situation that happens in nature or not.

Feeding one animal to another (if it's a natural prey item) - not cruel
Killing animals for viewing pleasure (either FF or Roman gladiators) - cruel
Any sort of chemical/drug testing on an animal that hasn't asked to be a test subject - cruel

You can make the case that since they don't suffer the way other animals do that it's not cruelty, but since we're the ones with the highly evolved brains we ought to be better decision makers that we've shown ourselves to be so far.

 

[Scott C.]

Cruel? Maybe not....
Wrong? Definitely!

 

[Sting Crazy]

Having to watch Fear Factor -Cruel

 

[Seinfeld-]

Yup! i saw this too, i didnt see the mating or ne thing but it doesnt suprise me. they were all adult G.Roseas in both stunts as far as i can tell. BOY they musta been itching all over at that lol...

And yes if they kill any it is very wrong i would say.

 

[Vanan]

I think it's more a matter of ethics than cruelty.

 

[Code Monkey]

I think it's more a matter of ethics than cruelty.

Now that I can agree with. I find the callous disregard for other lifeforms to be an *ethical* issue, just not one of cruelty. Of course, this demands that we answer some ethical questions: where does snuffing out lifeforms without a need for food or survival become an ethical violation?

You snuff out millions of innocent life forms that were completely harmless just by doing your laundry. Do you exempt the millions of lives you individually snuff out every day just because it's a matter of convenience and potentially greater hygeine to wash our hands, wash our clothes, and wipe down the kitchen sink with a soapy sponge? It's a nice ethical swamp to start trying to draw the line at where lives demand our consideration before we snuff them out.

I raise this question because we, as a group, have quite the bias towards these top level predators of the arachnids, yet we think nothing of rearing up cockroaches, crickets, mealworms, etc. to toss as food to our chosen favorites. I don't find it intellectually complete to make the argument that the spider needs to eat and therefore it is automatically ethical to feed it. To use the example that came up earlier, I find keeping snakes utterly barbaric on a personal level. A snake isn't much brighter than one of our tarantulas, but people take pleasure in tossing living rats to their snakes. That rat has more intelligence and more emotional capacity than every snake in captivity put together. My personal sense of ethics says that to rear snakes in captivity, an entirely unecessary hobby for most people keeping them, and then to sustain that snake on a production line of emotive creatures is far more unethical than dumping a few hundred tarantulas on some idiots for cash - yet some of the people condemening the Fear Factor stunt used the snake feeding as a counter example of ethical killing/inflicting of pain on animals...

See where this sort of nitpicking gets you?

 

[Xanzo]

Well CM as you are mentioning the deaths of millions of bacteria, I don't think that works. Bacteria don't feel pain, the closest thing to it is chemotaxis-moving away from undesirable/dangerous chemicals. I don't think anyone feels it is wrong to wipe out large numbers of a innumerable creature that doesn't feel pain, and if they do, people need to realize they are suffering from an extreme case of hypersensitivity.

 

[Code Monkey]

Do we really know what a T feels? The answer is no.

Actually we do: it "feels" nothing as even that is indicative of more anthropomorphosising. The nervous system of most inverts is non-centralized, non-complex. They are no more aware that they have lost a limb than you are another hair fell out - they continue to try and carry out hardwired subroutines when all manner of damage is done to them because there isn't any central consciousness that registers the damage in any sense that you or I could fathom. You want a skinner-box, the tarantula is it. There is limited habituation and learning, and Vernier's example of water dish banging shows even some ability to put cause & effect together, but even that merely results in a switching to some other subroutine. It's one of the reasons why I wonder why some people have so much trouble transferring Ts and take refuge in the bathtub, they are essentially completely predictable.

Where we have a bundle of thousands and thousands of axons in our spinal cord for the huge amount of information flowing to and fro our brain, inverts have a handful of giant axons because they only move a few data points from sensory system to brain and back again. It's faster than our nervous system, but it's hitting something with a rock versus the moon landing for complexity comparisons. Most things are handled by distributed ganglia centers that have but a couple of purposes. For example, in the tarantula, although the nervous command to move may originate in the brain, each leg is controlled by a particular ganglion. And when you push them on the rump to get them move where you want, that doesn't even reach the brain, it gets processed by a couple of abdominal ganglia and the "decision" to move/not move is purely a function of doing the math.

To attribute things like feelings, suffering, etc. to an invert such as a tarantula is to disrespect what intelligence and emotive capacity in higher animals actually is.

As for the argument that they react to pain and therefore "feel" it, well, so doesn't an amoeba, an organism without a single neuron at all. Pain, as an objective type of stimulus is felt by all living things with anything that qualifies as a sensory system. Pain as something that causes emotional distress and/or physical suffering is only a result of emergent consciousness. As an organism becomes more and more subject to a more and more voluntary central consciousness, the psychological concept of pain become necessary for faster learning of danger avoidance.

 

[Code Monkey]

Well CM as you are mentioning the deaths of millions of bacteria, I don't think that works. Bacteria don't feel pain, the closest thing to it is chemotaxis-moving away from undesirable/dangerous chemicals.

Tarantulas don't feel pain either and that is why I mention the bacteria. Besides, there are dust mites, skin mites, and all other manner of organisms in there that do, by your false definition of 'feeling pain', feel pain.

I don't think anyone feels it is wrong to wipe out large numbers of a innumerable creature that doesn't feel pain, and if they do, people need to realize they are suffering from an extreme case of hypersensitivity.

And that is *exactly* how the vast majority of humanity sees inverts and their deaths

 

[Xanzo]

I don't think it's accurate to lump together the response to simple stimulus, such as an amoeba would, and the response to pain as a tarantula would.

The ameoba only reacts due to chemical receptors on the cell membrane. A tarantula reacts to pain which has been interpreted by the ganglion. There is no interpretation device in the amoeba, just a chemical homeostasis which it needs to live (generalizing) The amoeba receives and reacts, using cilia to move away from the stimulus. There is no arguing that the tarantulas methods are far more advanced. Many of my tarantulas do not negatively react to light touching, it is possible that the light touch isn't registering, but I find that to be unlikely. Tarantulas certainly react to pain.

 

[Rourke]

You want a skinner-box, the tarantula is it.

LMAO, Chip....LM<edit>AO.

stimulus.....response
stimulus...........response
stimulus..................response

The inability of the human mind to step, even transiently, outside of its instinctive tendency toward anthropomorphism is unfortunate. Yessir....

 

[Xanzo]

Tarantulas don't feel pain either and that is why I mention the bacteria. Besides, there are dust mites, skin mites, and all other manner of organisms in there that do, by your false definition of 'feeling pain', feel pain.


And that is *exactly* how the vast majority of humanity sees inverts and their deaths

Dust mites and skin mites don't exactly have nervous tissue to interpret the pain stimulus, they just react, like amoeba, they don't interpret.

I agree, and I am not arguing that the death/suffering of any creature is wrong, it's a natural process, just like extinction, then again I think the majority of people are hypersensitive.

 

[Code Monkey]

Dust mites and skin mites don't exactly have nervous tissue to interpret the pain stimulus, they just react, like amoeba, they don't interpret.

Um, since their nervous system is pretty much a carbon copy of the tarantulas, that's a bit of an odd argument, wouldn't you say? Sure, it may be Windows 3.1 versus Windows95, but it's still Windows under the hood.

 

[Code Monkey]

The ameoba only reacts due to chemical receptors on the cell membrane. A tarantula reacts to pain which has been interpreted by the ganglion. There is no interpretation device in the amoeba, just a chemical homeostasis which it needs to live (generalizing) The amoeba receives and reacts, using cilia to move away from the stimulus. There is no arguing that the tarantulas methods are far more advanced. Many of my tarantulas do not negatively react to light touching, it is possible that the light touch isn't registering, but I find that to be unlikely. Tarantulas certainly react to pain.

Not reacting is called habituation. And if you can find me one objective difference between the chemical stasis system of the amoeba and the simple equation of excitatory and inhibitory chemicals at the nerve synapse, I'd love to hear them

Pain, love, sadness, longing, you know, emotion, is an emergent effect of billions of nerve junctions acting in a synergistic system. There is no more of that type of nervous system synergy going on in a tarantula than there is deep thoughts on topographic mathematical theory in George Bush's head.

 

[Xanzo]

Um, since their nervous system is pretty much a carbon copy of the tarantulas, that's a bit of an odd argument, wouldn't you say? Sure, it may be Windows 3.1 versus Windows95, but it's still Windows under the hood.

You caught me, and since I was unable to find any sources for mite anatomy/nervous system I made a (stupid) assumption and went off the idea that mites lacked a ganglial nerve structure because of their small size.