
Asian elephants have different personality traits - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-asian-elephants-personality-traits-humans.html
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maxxxxx
Am I missing something or is this already known to anyone who has handled
animals? I have dealt with dogs, cats, pigs, lizards and horses and they all
had very distinguishable personalities.

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ENGNR
You're not wrong, sometimes it feels like they're as aware and present as us,
exactly as 'human', just with less ability to solve complex problems

It's surprising we haven't given them more rights yet, maybe this paper can
pave the way toward legitimizing at least the larger animals as our sentient
neighbours

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cryptonector
The problem with giving animals rights is that ultimately they'd have to be
able to communicate in court, and it's not clear that assigning them a proxy
is sufficient to represent the animal. But if ever we find a way to
communicate well enough for an animal to understand the concept of "court", or
even just "tell us how you feel about this", then such an animal must be
accorded rights commensurate with its ability to communicate and self-control.

(An animal that cannot keep from committing what to us are "crimes" can't be
given all the rights that a human has. But supposing we figure out how to
communicate such concepts to, say, orangutans, and they can handle them, then
they must have rights equal to ours.)

Merely having personality and feelings cannot enough, otherwise we'd be
obligated to eat no vertebrates -- I'd not be pleased to go that far!

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RikNieu
This is an interesting comment and made me consider various scenarios and
situations.

For one instance, 'Right to Live' would mean we can eat/use animal products
anymore - but what about plants then? If you listen to the RadioLab episode
Smart Plants, who knows what will be discovered about them in the future. And
for most of humanity, most cultures have survived on animal consumption and
animal products. Also, would these laws be enforceable on animals too? How
would you feed predators and omnivores?

But what about instead of instead of specific rights like those afforded to
people, we adopt more general 'kindness' rights to other living beings. For
instance; the right of any animal to not being tortured, the right of kept
animals to not be subjected to reasonable sized spaces(however that might be
determined), the right of kept animals to medical treatment, the right of kept
animals to the food it would be consuming in nature, ect.

Not sure how this would all be controlled and enforced(or even how this
applies to current animal rights laws), but interesting to think about.

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cryptonector
One might say that obligate carnivores (e.g., felines) get to eat other
animals. Humans aren't quite obligate carnivores (though some of us might feel
that we are :)...

We already do have animal cruelty laws -- we already forbid cruelty to
animals.

And we forbid hunting of endangered species' individuals.

Some jurisdictions have laws about how much space domesticated animals must be
accorded to live in.

So it's not like we accord animals no rights.

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exabrial
I mean, so do cats?

