EnviroLink Forum

Coral World Park on St Thomas is applying for a permit to open a Dolphinarium offering Swim with the Dolphins tours and dolphin performances. We urge you to say NO to captive dolphins on St. Thomas. Keep wildlife in the wild!

Dolphins are highly intelligent, sentient beings that swim up to 100km a day in the wild. In captivity they suffer restricted movement, forced human contact, artificial social groupings, being fed dead fish, exposure to loud sounds and the performance of unnatural activities in exchange for food rewards.

The proposed Dolphinarium is an open water facility in Water Bay, a problem area with sewage runoff from surrounding homes during heavy rains. Captive dolphin waste sinks to the ocean floor & currents don't wash it away.

This "attraction" is proposed purely for commercial gain and teaches people that exploitation of animals is acceptable for the sake of turning a profit.

We urge the US Virgin Islands CZM Commission, Governor John deJongh and the Legislature to deny any Dolphinariium permit.

PLEASE SHOW YOUR SUPPORT BY SIGNING THE PETITION AT THE FOLLOWING LINK:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/374/581/ ... in-islands

Thank you.
VI Dolphin Voices

Another misguided, no intro, spammer.......

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"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle
“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein

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I use red, not because of anger but to define my posts to catch rebuttals latter and it makes the quote feature redundent for me. The rest of you pick your own color.

Life is a time capsule we strive to fill with precious memories.

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I use red, not because of anger but to define my posts to catch rebuttals latter and it makes the quote feature redundent for me. The rest of you pick your own color.

Life is a time capsule we strive to fill with precious memories.

Ah, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.... it did land on my desk this week and elicited a ho-hum response... same old story, no real progress, and rather a lack of clarity. Consciousness is not a result of, defined through or determined by emotions. It is not the equivalent of being able to feel pain, fear, or to show aggression. Animals can be awake and aware, and show instinctive (wired in) responses to environmental and other stimuli (because of natural "drives", eg, food, drink, sex, sleep, withdrawal from negative stimuli) or learned responses, learned as a result of positive or negative feedback; and certainly humans are just another animal in these respects. But if ultimately, conscious processes are dependant on the number of nerve cells and the complexity of the circuits formed, primates (human and non-human) show their specialization there, and what sets us apart is what we can do with regard to learning is, unfortunately for the Declaration, having a cortex. I think where the CD goes wrong is in stating that young humans and nonhuman animals without neocortices retain "brain-mind functions". Is instinct, "mind"? I prefer not to think so, or every living thing would have a "mind". It goes even more spectacularly off the track by repeating that chimpanzees and elephants show mirror self-recognition. Not all chimpanzees do, only one of four elephants did, and some chimps seemed to have lost the facility when retested later. As for Stephen Hawking sponsoring the CD, I sincerely promise I will never make grandiose statements about the universe if he does refrain from talking about the brain. He has his knowledge, I have mine. To think that just because someone has a Nobel Prize (Crick! for biochemistry) means they know all about everything is the fallacy of the appeal to authority.

Out of body experiences are linked to activity in certain brain areas, while the OBEs claimed by people who have been near death are likewise thought to be the result of nervous activity. A person in a coma is not "aware" since by definition (the criteria of the Glasgow Coma Scale) they do not react to any stimuli. You may be thinking of people who show a "minimally conscious state" who show fluctuating awareness, or of people in a "permanent vegetativie state" who sometimes show aspects of awareness, thought to be the result of some sparing of function -something of much interest in research. However, an animal or a human without a cerebral cortex does not show awareness or intentional behaviour and only reflex reactions to certain stimuli that are not dependent on the cerebral cortex. As for mirror recognition, it is simply questionable whether it is really a test of self-awareness. Only the most severely brain function impaired humans do not recognise themselves in a mirror . So if only a few animals show it, does that mean that only a few animals have self awareness, or that only a few animals show they have acquired a knowledge of what mirrors do, ie, reflect my body? Animals have body awareness, and monkeys learn what mirrors can do when given them as enrichment in captivity - using them to "look" at who is entering the room when they cannot see the door in direct vision, for instance; chimpanzees have used mirrors to find food not otherwise visible. OTOH, mirrors put in horses' stables seem to be seen by the occupant as another horse, and company.... so maybe ot realize what mirrors do does require more complex brains? In summary, what mirror recognition means is subject to debate, and many people who make grandiose claims about it in relation to animal self awareness and from there, about animal rights have never bothered to read even the original paper. Why I find the Cambridge Declaration tedious is because to me it seems just another talkfest without any real progress. You will not find a neuroscientist who denies that the principles of reward and punishment, positive and negative reinforcement, approach and avoidance, are shared by all living things, and that, given the principles of evolution, that humans and other "higher" mammals share some of the neural mechanisms involved; and that for some of the "basic" emotions, fear and aggression, subcortical structures are shared by many species. And of course this very common "sharedness" of neural structures is the reason animal are used in brain research, from insects to fish to birds to non-human primates. So what actually has the CD contributed to the advancement of our understanding? As for Hawking, he is not a neuroscientist. Why didn't they ask Eric Kandel? He is, and a top class neuroscientist as well (got the Prize for that).

I don't think we actually disagree on whether animals have (a?) consciousness that is similar to that found in the talking ape at least in some respects. The lack of an overall and all-encompassing definition maybe because C depends on the nervous system, and there are large differences as well as common features across species because ultimately, the mammalian brain has evolved from earlier forms. Hence the fact that even without a cerebral cortex, mammals including humans may still react to stimuli reflexly because the reflex circuits do not involve the cortex. Even in intact humans - we probably all have experienced this: if you accidentally touch something hot, you will already have started withdrawing your hand away from the heat source, even before you consciously feel the pain. This is because the withdrawal reflex is through the spinal cord only, but for the painful sensation to become conscious perception the information must travel to your brain and be processed there, which takes time. I am not sure I follow you about OBEs: they involve people describing scenes in which they are looking at themselves from someone else's perspective; however, this has nothing to do with being out of your body, physically, or for consciousness to be out of your brain - you brain creates this picture (as it can also do in normal humans, in dreams). As far as mirror recognition goes, I picked on it because the CD uses this as evidence of self-recognition, and self-consciousness, and pointed out that if that is so, how come animals of the same species do then not all have it, or, if they show evidence of it, can lose that ability? Possibly, because it is learned (although chimps in the wild know about mirrors in water): enculturated apes have mirror recognition. But this makes it all the more clear that mirror recognition as a phenomenon has nothing to do with having an innate sense of self beyond that of a bodily self ("tigers don't eat their own paws" as someone said). Therefore, I simply am disappointed that mirror recognition is dragged out by a bunch of philosophers to argue continuity of animal-human consciousness and related to self-awareness. To me, I repeat, the CD does not add anything, and looks tired in its considerations. Consciousness and self-consciousness are fascinating to study but if people keep on making the same old and unwarranted assertions how can we ever get anywhere? And please do not insult Kandel (or others of his age) - he just published another major monograph.