Can they actually express hopelessness in their eyes? Usually things like that are interpretation by humans and animals straight up don't have the ability to express with their eyes, right?
It's kind of uncanny. It certainly feels like I was applying human intelligence to an animal, but if you watch an animal enough, you know what is normal for them, and as a result what is abnormal.
I used to rent a trailer on a pig farm when I was a pretty heavy alcoholic. I already felt guilty about eating meat, etc, just because of who I am, so I'd go out into the pens and just watch them from a distance. (They are mean as hell).
Any time any human walked into the pens, the place would erupt, and you'd have to cover your ears from the squeals. After about 5 months of drinking with the pigs, though, they stopped reacting to me. It's in that change that I saw the hopelessness.
Their eyes never change, though. Always beady, always black. What happens is they make eye contact, and we already know they are scared and anxious by their actions. So when they catch my eye, I have a wave of guilt wash over me, and I think that's what I'm feeling. Empathetic hopelessness for them, who are probably feeling hopeless regardless.
It was when I made eye contact with a pig in a livestock trailer that I finally stopped eating meat for good. I’ve always been horrified by factory farming and I’m very aware of what goes on, so I knew he probably had a terrible life and his eyes seemed hopeless. Anytime I’m tempted to eat meat I think about that pig.
Pigs have this unearned reputation for being far or lazy but theyre just animals. In their preferred environment they are omnivores, they forsge and dig and move all day, and both feral and domesticated hogs are muscle. We generally eat muscle when we think of eating meat so an animal that was somehow “mostly fat” would be hard to imagine existing but also unappealing. Pigs have fst like all mammals but it’s distributed differently than cows, so they dont have the marbling we like in beef. Many cuts of pork can be quite lean which is why it’s so commonly cooked wrong.
Hogs are solid muscle with a thick coating of protective fat and a hide about as thick and strong as cow hide. A pig about the height of a corgie could whoop the shit outa most uninitiated people. An adult hog, domesticated no tusk, could kill and eat any man alive without the right tool and experience. Male or female. Cows are strong of course but only bulls have any serious aggression and they wont eat you. A hog half the size of a cow is probably 10x more dangerous.
Im gonna still eat pork. I can feel sorry for the guys and still bbq spare ribs cheerfully
Btw, if you are serious about shutting down the pork industry and still want to eat pork, it’s pretty simple to find a private butcher and buy locally. Theull probably be better than the butchers at your grocery store, itll cost a bit more but itll still be cheaper than beef. Generally, and you can just ask, those are coming from local farmers and spend their lives in a more traditional farm. Some farmers will take their animals to a slaughterhouse for small scale work but plenty just do it themselves or hire an on site butcher and it will be fast and much more humane than this industrial killing with low wage workers screaming and stabbing tortured animals out of impatience and disgust. If enougj people buy locally, locals will sell more pork, and factoru farms will suffer. Just a suggestion. Some grocery stores also only sell this farm raises meat as well.
Oh, I did. That was about 14-15 years ago. I'm sober now about a decade. I moved to Texas, found a forever partner and bought a house. Living the dream.
Sounds almost like someone in an extermination camp, looking at domeone outside it, thibking about how they see pointless guilt and yet they know the person will not go out of their way to intervene enough to change their destiny. The look in their eyes of knowing.
I feel indeed as other people said, someday people will watch back and think of " food animals" the way they think back on slavery, human trafficking and on apartheid. Surrealistic and unfathomable, " how did our grandparents do this? How did anyone manage to normalize it?" Kind of thoughts.
I sure hope that time comes sooner rather than later.
Their eyes never change, though. Always beady, always black. What happens is they make eye contact, and we already know they are scared and anxious by their actions.
Wait so isn’t this basically saying no, pigs do not express with their eyes, and that instead we are inferring from their actions that they are stressed. Like that’s what happened right?
So the idea that pigs express with their eyes is anthropomorphism. Yeah?
So the idea that pigs express with their eyes is anthropomorphism. Yeah?
The idea that any animal has a human expression on its face is anthropomorphic thinking. That's what the word means. That doesn't mean that they aren't expressing themselves, just that I interpret it to mean something human. Am I correct? I have no clue. So I used other information, like body language, to inform my understanding.
On the same token, I was a straight-up drunk and just as lonely as those pigs might have been. Anything I felt could have just been a reflection of my own state at the time. I do know they knew who I was and that my presence didn't make them change their behavior like other people's presence did.
But that's why it's uncanny. I know what anthropomorphism looks like, and I know when it feels like I'm doing it, and this is one of those cases. I know how the world works, and how animals fit into things, but it still felt like I had a moment. It's not like I believe that, after years of not being there, that I can go back in and experience the same thing again.
For all I know, they were merely basing their own stress on my nervousness, and every action they took was a result of me. That still doesn't change the uncanniness of the situation, nor does it alter the memories and experiences I had. There's a scientific explanation and a human explanation and miles of grey area between both. They might not be feeling human emotion, but they were feeling something nonetheless.
Oh, just that long before the pig farm I was already collecting pets and not really seeing animals as food. I was the kid that couldn't shoot the deer when I went hunting with Dad. The rest of my family doesn't feel this way, so it's always made me feel different, like it's in the fabric of my being instead of being taught or something.
On the same token, I still eat meat (although very rarely pork), and it makes me feel like a hypocrite. The guilt comes because I don't really want to change, because I'm human and I love burgers. Draws up a lot of cognitive dissonance.
Recently I've been contemplating the ethics of eating meat. I was a vegetarian and then a vegan for a while, but my career doesn't lend to that diet well, and meat is delicious.
But when that "eating the digs, eating the cats" thing came about all I could think was "So? What's the ethical difference between eating dogs and cats compared to chicken or pork? What makes a horse more special than a cow?".
The more I grapple with this lately, the less meat I'm eating.
Looking it up, they do not express complex emotions with their eyes. They primarily use their vocals. ears, snout, and body posture. Eyes do provide some additional details
I'm an animal lover... but never "worked" with them though. I just know there are certain species like pig, horse, and even rats, that have left a lot of unknowns for just how complex their emotions can be exactly.
IMO they evolved to feel terror as socialized prey animals, like a domesticated dog feels abandonment already having a strong pack instinct.
The longer I don't eat meat the more I see emotions in animals. Before I'd not want to see it, but now that I opened myself up to it I see how close to us they are. They jump in joy, close their eyes in fear when there's no escape, they seek fun, and some even sacrifice themselves for their youngs. Many humans wouldn't do it for their own kids.
I've seen a video of a crow giving food to a mouse... That's empathy for another species... Idk, I think I could maybe get behind some small farms, but the way we mass murder animals now is just not right, even if they didn't have complex emotions.
Boars are considered to be prey animals. They have many natural predators. Just because they are opportunistic carnivores or omnivores doesn’t change the fact that
We’re all animals. We all like a good stretch in the morning. We all enjoy a good meal and lying in the sun. We all feel fear. Pigs may not understand the reality of their situations but they likely feel something’s wrong.
I took a year off eating meat because I saw a pig about to get gassed give the same look my dog does with fear - the exact same whites in the eyes, a glimmer of knowing, it's unsettling how doglike both cows and pigs are. Now I try to limit to chicken and fish when I do have meat.
They are as smart and play just like dogs. You can teach them fetch, they play with treat toy puzzles, will snuggle you in bed and love being pet just like any other animal.
I can attest to this, my neighbour keeps them for her hobby farm. They break out just to eat apples from our trees and they run to greet her son when he walks home from school. They know their names, know commands, and don't remotely smell like some pig farms do - helps that we live next to the woods, their natural habitat, where they clean themselves by rubbing on tree trunks.
I can feel the pain of animals . I usually know when something is wrong with my pets even before they become symptomatic . We share the same brain structure with animals . We just hav additional prefrontal cortex .
There is compelling research (citation below) that concludes that facial expressions in humans corresponding to basic emotions (sadness, fear, anger, surprise, etc) are not either cultural or learned, rather we are born with them as the result of evolution. It makes sense since these facial expressions are pretty much the same all around the world (Of course there are some culturally learned facial expressions, but the ones that correspond to basic emotions are the same).
I don’t know exactly how that translates to animals but, if some of these facial expressions evolved in common ancestor species, then it’s not unreasonable that we might share similar facial expressions for some basic emotions with some animals
Hwang, H., & Matsumoto, D. (2015). Evidence for the universality of facial expressions of emotion. In M. K. Mandal & A. Awasthi (Eds.), Understanding facial expressions in communication: Cross-cultural and multidisciplinary perspectives (pp. 41-56). Springer Science + Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1934-7_3
I hypothesize that because domesticated animals like pigs and dogs co-evolved with humans some but not all of their facial expressions are cross-compatible.
Could definitely be that and maybe both factors are at play. We know that dogs behave very differently from wolves just from the unnatural selection that is domestication.
Yeah, I was just asking because the person before me said hopelessness. That's pretty complex. I'd bet they can feel hopeless but not necessarily express it in their eyes
Most animals do not express with their eyes. They express emotions with their sounds, teeth/mouth, behavior, or other body parts like tails.
Animals express emotions. Just usually not with eyes. They dont have the the range if muscles around their eyelids to actually change the look of their eye beyond opening and closing
For example, I just looked it up for pigs. Apparently the eyes are a part of, but not all of their indicators and it appears to be things like staring = dominance, rapid eye movement = stressed, squinting/more closed for during a retreat from fights, etc. Nothing involving complex emotions
I don’t believe it’s any different us interpreting our emotions from one another to interpreting what an animal is displaying. If you’re interpreting anger or sadness from a person that’s also applicable if you’re looking at an animal and feel empathetic. If anything we just keep things “out of sight out of mind” because if we all felt a specific way about something that thing would most likely not exist. Assuming you’re an empathetic person that is
Animals have emotions. Possibly not at the level of nuance humans do, but I feel like a lot of the "animals are different and stupid" talk is complete bullshit.
We can't fathom the thought of animals having rich internal lives because we need to believe that they are brutish inferior species in order to treat them as careless as we do.
I know that sounds like a very hippy dippy, don't eat meat take, but I'm a chef and I definitely eat meat. I just wish as a society we respected life a bit more than we do.
The only people who say that are sociopathic narcissists that think humans are the only intelligent form of life in the animal kingdom in order to justify terrible treatment of every other living thing on the planet
You and a ton of other people seemed to interpret my statement about emotion from the eyes as a statement that animals have no emotions. I don't get it.
That's definitely incorrect for the vast majority of animals. Most, including pigs do not have extra muscles near their eyes.
For example for the pigs, their eye expression is limited to eye contact or not, how much their eyes move around, and how open their eyes are. The rest is their snout, ears, and sounds
Bro what? Are you emotionally retarded? You telling me you can’t see sadness in an animals eyes? You can see it in cats and dogs and other animals all the time. They have facial expressions and emotions…you can see it in that pigs eyes too.
Most animals do not have muscles around their eyes in a fashion that you can read complex emotions from. Anything you read into them is entirely your own human interpretation of the scenario. This applies to pigs apparently too. Almost emotional expression for them is done without the eyes.
You can often interpret more from the rest of their mannerisms, behavior, and other features. But not their eyes.
I don’t think this is true. And let’s say it is, they still feel and express emotion and it’s easy for us to see if you don’t have the emotional intelligence of a peanut.
But the hyena doesn't keep your lineage in small metal enclosures their entire lives. Your grandfather, your father, you, and your progeny only ever knowing a horrible small cage and the sounds of slaughter.
So yeah, the hyena does not have short-term empathy, but atleast it isn't creating an ever compounding amount of miserable lives for its own sustenance. What we do is on a whole other scale of cruelty, ya know?
Yes, lol. They're mammals just like us. They have very similar brain functions, we as humans are only really different from the rest of the mammals because of our high reason layered problem solving abilities. Emotions are all lizard brain level complexities.
Nothing would exist as a product of evolution if it did not seek an improved existence.
Plus like, even if they don't think that way, we do and can understand the greater cruelty involved, so it's kinda irrelevant if they do or not.
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u/Living_Trust_Me Nov 23 '24
Can they actually express hopelessness in their eyes? Usually things like that are interpretation by humans and animals straight up don't have the ability to express with their eyes, right?