Can anybody tell me why anyone needs scientific proof about animal cognition and sentience, etc. Address the individual/group themselves to get an answer in and under their own terms!
Those middlemen are never authorized to judge about congnitions/sentiences that they most likely don’t even understand – by measuring limited criteria with limited parameters.
Those middlemen see the animals in question in oversimplified ways, in relation to factual reality, just to offer some well meant biologistic data about your “species” in question.
They’d never use such parameters to describe themselves, as humans, but nonhumans can supposedly be objectified and limited in such scientific ways.
Nonhumans are social subjects/selves/agents not biological objects.
antispeciesist animal sociology
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Recent thoughts I tweeted about animal allyship when it turns weird: https://twitter.com/tiere_am_rhein/status/1279764646757629960
Weird when people call the human friends of a nonhuman animal their “dad” e.g.,
blurring out that this nonhuman has own parents ( – and these nonhuman families have tragic histories …),
while talking at the same time about what’s supposed to be radical antispeciesism. #antispe
Weird also when humans pose with single nonhumans for photos, acting as if being with a human was the greatest thing, and socialising for nonhumans with other nonhumans would be a bit secondary at that moment. #anthropocentrism
Their is a lot of these type of weird things going on the “our” (the vegan/AR) movement … strikes me weird.
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Scrap the biologistic speciesism that leads you to assume that nonhumans wouldn’t know that the/ir entire world is being oppressed.
A reductive concept of intelligence leads you to think of nonhumans as having to be pressed into the human concepts of how to measure perception.
The bad thing is that we still run around with views of animals and animality that are not much different to the “animal-machine” model (by Descartes), only on an “advanced”/”diversified” biochemical level. The idea that animals are acting in causalistic ways is still similar.
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[1] Eine Frage, die mit einer Frage beantwortet werden muss … Haben Tiere Vernunft und können Tiere denken? https://simorgh.de/about/die-frage-nach-dem-tierlichen-denken-ist-mit-einer-gegenfrage-zu-beantworten/