An Owl?

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But in the philosophy of the country where this transaction takes place, they claim that all species are part of the Grand Scheme of Things and if you're not careful you may come back as one of them, at the mercy of both nature and your (formerly) fellow man!

Pakistan (Listeni/ˈpækɨstæn/ or Listeni/pɑːkiˈstɑːn/; Urdu: پاکستان) (Urdu pronunciation: [paːkɪˈst̪aːn] ( listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Urdu: اسلامی جمہوریۂ پاکستان) is a sovereign country in South Asia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan

Islam has no notion of karma and interspecies serial reincarnation.
 
In the rest of America, "Redneck" has become a derogatory term for anyone (especially people of modest means) with the stererotyped Southern cultural values of racism, sexism, evangelical Christianity and political conservatism, and often carries with it the implication of poor education and drunken brawls.

Indeed. Painted exactly the picture I had in my head - hey look at that I can rhyme! LOl.

Spookiness is entirely subjective. Something that's spooky to Person A may not be spooky to Person B, and vice versa. I have no problem walking through East Los Angeles at 3am, but I'm scared to be in Mississippi in broad daylight.

But stuff like fear - of heights and predators is instinctive, which is what I wonder about - how are instincts and behaviours genetically determined?
 
Indeed. Painted exactly the picture I had in my head - hey look at that I can rhyme!
Rhyme? Where? If you mean "indeed" and "head," those are two different vowels. "Indeed" rhymes with "seed" and "feed." "Head" rhymes with "said" and "fed."
But stuff like fear - of heights and predators is instinctive, which is what I wonder about - how are instincts and behaviours genetically determined?
We're wandering off into material more appropriate for the Biology or Psychology subforums... But instincts are programmed into our brain cells by evolution. Any animal that doesn't have the instinct to flee from a large animal with both eyes in front of its face--without stopping to think about it--won't live long enough to reach sexual maturity and reproduce. A newborn giraffe will clumsily scamper away from a hyena, but will calmly stand and graze next to a much larger rhinoceros.

The same is true of any animal that will nonchalantly walk off a cliff.

All animal behavior is complicated, but for vertebrates, insects, molluscs and other phyla of animals with a centralized brain, it has taken hundreds of millions of years for the programming to evolve to its current level of complexity. Each new neuron configuration was the result of natural selection--or in the case of recently domesticated animals like dogs, very unnatural selection. (We have bred dogs to be much more gregarious than wolves, to prefer scavenging to hunting, to have smaller brains which can survive on the lower-protein diet of a scavenger, and to accept a human as the alpha in the pack.)

Configurations which induce behavior that enhances survivability were passed down to the next generation; those which induce behavior that makes survival difficult or impossible were an evolutionary dead-end.

The psychology of our own species is much more complex because our forebrain is about ten times as large as that of our closest relative, the chimpanzee, and vastly larger than those of other animals. There's just so much more room for thinking in our brains.

We can identify many instincts in our own species that are not clearly related to survival. These are not all behaviors, just ideas and beliefs that occur in nearly all societies in nearly all eras. Legends, rituals, visual images in our art, Carl Jung calls these archetypes. Perhaps they were once survival traits in an era whose dangers we can't imagine. Or they could be random mutations passed down through a genetic bottleneck.
 
No, it's not, because in the scenario mentioned earlier, the capturer sets them free only against payment.

In fact, three entities directly benefit in such a commercial transaction:
1. the capturer - for earning some money,
2. the customer - for feeling good about giving a bird a chance to flee (and whatever metaphysical satisfaction the customer might derive from it),
3. the bird - for getting a chance to flee.


Without paying customers, these people would have no business, and ALL the birds would be free. In short, REFUSING to pay or participate would allow you to enjoy a more meaningful type of karma.

People have the right to earn money.

Not when it involves capturing and possibly maiming or killing alive things.
 
* * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * *

Me-Ki-Gal has been banned for 3 days for two posts which violated so many forum rules that I had to simply delete them: Trolling, posting meaningless content ("incoherent" might be a more accurate description), insulting another member, responding to a previous ban in inappropriate and inflammatory language, insulting the Head Moderator who performed the ban.

Technically, he qualifies for a longer ban period and this one may be extended.

This may be the very first time I've had to ban anyone in the Linguistics subforum. Normally this place has all the excitement of the drawing room in a 19th century London gentlemen's club--without the liquor.

I wish it hadn't happened and I hope it doesn't happen again. I'm pretty loose with the rules here but some simply must be enforced.
 
Note from Administrator: Me-Ki-Gal has been banned permanently from sciforums.
 
Without paying customers, these people would have no business, and ALL the birds would be free. In short, REFUSING to pay or participate would allow you to enjoy a more meaningful type of karma.

Are birds more important than people?


Not when it involves capturing and possibly maiming or killing alive things.

Do you eat meat?
 
Are birds more important than people?


You didn't, or possibly, just couldn't, address my main point directly: that you get the same desirable result (setting birds free) by not participating. That actually you get a more meaningful result, by not participating.

Until you become able to answer the point directly, there's no point in going further with the discussion.
 
* * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * *

This discussion has gone too far from the original topic. That in itself is not something I usually care about. But now you're getting snarky with each other, and I have no patience with that.

This thread is closed.
 
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