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OfflineAnnoA
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Animals Just Want to Have Fun
    #5965174 - 08/15/06 03:32 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/reviews/0,71556-0.html?tw=wn_culture_1


Animals Just Want to Have Fun

By John Gartner| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Aug, 15, 2006

They get intoxicated, delight in chasing each other, and have sex just for kicks. The subjects of Jonathan's Balcombe's Pleasurable Kingdom are not spring breakers, but animals large and small.

Balcombe, who is the Animal Behavior Research Scientist for the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine, describes little-explored similarities between humans and animals from an unusual persective: how various species have fun.

Balcombe calls this line of study "hedonic ethnology," and Pleasurable Kingdom offers myriad examples of animals expressing human-like emotions, such as happiness, observed by luminaries of biological science such as Charles Darwin, Joanna Burger and Jane Goodall.

The upshot: Animals are more like us than conventional wisdom generally allows, so much so in fact that they deserve many of the same ethical considerations that govern human relations. "If animals feel, then we have a responsibility towards them," says Balcombe.

Balcombe relies on his own and other scientists' research to show that, just like people, many animals experience joy, happiness, longing, boredom and love. This assertion is perhaps not surprising to dog or cat owners. But the author extends the argument daringly, and somewhat less convincingly, to a long list of critters that rarely receive such consideration, such as crustaceans and even insects.

The author cites research -- more than most of us would ever care to know -- detailing how fish, fowl and invertebrates are touch sensitive and will avoid painful situations. Badgers, monkeys and felines all crave physical contact with others, he reports.

Reindeer eat hallucinogenic mushrooms more for the high than the nutrition, he argues, and normally carnivorous jaguars sometimes trip on tree bark.

While Balcombe admits there can never be definitive proof that animals feel pleasure, their facial gestures, he says, can be similar to humans'. Animal brains, he writes, undergo comparable chemical changes.

The argument really gets interesting with his discussion of animal sex, where he persuasively arges that humans can't lay exclusive claim to more highly evolved responses to the primal urge.

Evolutionary biologists have often struggled to explain human non-reproductive sex, though some such as Jared Diamond have found numerous payoffs, for example, strengthening emotional bonds between parents charged with raising their young over an extended period of dependence.

Balcombe claims that not only humans but many species have sex for fun, and plenty that masturbate and have homosexual interactions. He reports that more than 300 species of vertebrates engage in homosexual activities (including giraffes, gulls and bonobo), while others practice auto-eroticism (bats, walruses, rodents). He also accuses scientists of gender bias in their studies of animal sexual pleasure, claming that only a small fraction of the studies of mammal sex focus on the clitoris as opposed to the penis.

Balcombe says many scientists depict animals as joyless, continually at risk creatures so that killing them will be seen as doing them a favor. But in the final chapter, he argues that since animals most likely feel pleasurable and pain, then they deserve more humane treatment during our interactions.

Balcombe makes an engaging, if not entirely convincing, case for the lowliest denizens of the animal kingdom. Whether or not you agree with him, his arguments may change your opinion of the next lobster that arrives steaming on your plate.

Was it, like us, entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?


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OfflineMustNotBe
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Re: Animals Just Want to Have Fun [Re: Anno]
    #5965434 - 08/15/06 08:51 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

bats masturbate? and gulls are homos.. you learn something new everyday...


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Junkies United we stand , Devided we're sick as fuck.
-                  -                -
"Hallucinations are something heroin users are not at all accustomed to," said Const. Conor King, Victoria police drug expert. "They react like you or I would react if we took Aspirin and all of a sudden the TV got up and started walking across the room."
-                  -                -
Make drugs legal, or alcohol and tobacco illegal. Either way it's more fair.


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InvisibleStroFun
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Registered: 07/11/06
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Re: Animals Just Want to Have Fun [Re: MustNotBe]
    #5966097 - 08/15/06 12:59 PM (17 years, 5 months ago)

if i was a bat i would masturbate upside down.


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OfflineGSxx83
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Registered: 04/13/06
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Re: Animals Just Want to Have Fun [Re: StroFun]
    #5966131 - 08/15/06 01:20 PM (17 years, 5 months ago)

^ LMAO

VERY interesting read though.


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Offlineptsfp
Stranger
Registered: 07/25/06
Posts: 1
Last seen: 17 years, 5 months
Re: Animals Just Want to Have Fun [Re: MustNotBe]
    #5966444 - 08/15/06 03:12 PM (17 years, 5 months ago)

Maybe it was the reindeer who came up with the story of elves at the north pole.


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Offlinewiggles
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Re: Animals Just Want to Have Fun [Re: ptsfp]
    #5966494 - 08/15/06 03:31 PM (17 years, 5 months ago)

I always thought that the only other animals that had sex for fun were dolphins?


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You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.
Hunter S. Thompson


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OfflineEkstaza
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Registered: 04/10/03
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Re: Animals Just Want to Have Fun [Re: wiggles]
    #5966874 - 08/15/06 05:26 PM (17 years, 5 months ago)

I'm still eating meat, though.


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YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH ANY GIVEN DRUG ISN'T THE DEFINITIVE MEASURE OF THE DRUGS EFFECTS.


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OfflineXanthas
Blaspheme,blaspheyou, Blaspheverybody

Registered: 11/19/05
Posts: 267
Last seen: 16 years, 8 months
Re: Animals Just Want to Have Fun [Re: Ekstaza]
    #5968088 - 08/15/06 11:23 PM (17 years, 5 months ago)

Dolphins are just one of the most well known. If sex wasn't enjoyable, animals wouldn't do it. Ever. Nobody does anything that doesn't pay off in some way, animals included.

Anyone that's owned a mammalian pet knows that they are perfectly capable of acquiring some form of sexual stimulation, and often do.


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If you don't ask the question, you always get it wrong.


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OfflineEquilibriuM
dream stalker

Registered: 07/17/05
Posts: 2,323
Last seen: 16 years, 7 months
Re: Animals Just Want to Have Fun [Re: Ekstaza]
    #5969171 - 08/16/06 11:12 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

Just wait till they figure out about the plant minds.... what will we eat then?  :grin:


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HELP!!!!!!!!!


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