Rattlesnake Roundups Should Be Banned: Change My Mind

Subjective sensation, consciousness and intelligence in nonhuman animals is a slippery issue Thomas Nagel scraped when discussing the private nature of such phenomena. That is, no one can directly experience what another mind does, except that mind’s owner; outsiders are denied access. Human languages acknowledge this boundary by having first-person pronouns which speakers use to talk about their own mental states, desires and sensations such as pain or the sight of a rose’s red color. We then use 2nd- or 3rd-person pronouns to reference these experiences in other people. Because of the complications, I must spend my entire reply on it, for it’s relevant to the ethics of hunting and animal slaughter. By reason that we have a thing called “empathy,” we make pretty accurate guesses on what another person is feeling, even when our contact is entirely nonverbal, through gestures, facial expressions or tone of voice. We do this by assuming our subject’s experiences are like our own. The red you see in a rose is the same red I see, goes the theory, although I have no way to verify if that’s true. Maybe you see what I’d call “blue,” but we both agree the color is red because we see it in the same rose. Nagel pointed out the difficulty of applying concepts of empathy when we analyze the feelings of a bat. We’ve never echolocated moths in total darkness, so we have no idea what it’s like to do so, even if totally informed of the mechanical details—such as the fact that bats’ brains have two-dimensional maps of direction to target which resemble our own maps of the visual field. Is echolocation therefore like eyesight? Nagel said we’ll never know; the mechanics is as far as we’ll get. He opposed reductionism for this problem, declaring it intractable. Animal behaviorists have devised a test for consciousness that requires only painting a dot on an animal’s forehead while it is anesthetized and then putting the critter in a cage with a mirror to check whether it notices the dot. So far, only apes, elephants, dolphins—and curiously, magpies—pass this test, with certain ants being candidates. Yet we can ask how appropriate the test is. It certainly measures an aspect of consciousness, the kind of self-awareness involving a vision of one’s own body as an outside observer would see it. Pain, however, is a fully conscious experience that doesn’t invoke any faculty of displacement. Rats hurt when their tails are clipped. At least we think they do. We must base that conclusion by external signs such as vocalization, widening of the eyes, or the rat’s seeking to escape the person who injured it. We have no more “insider” access to its mind than we have into Colonel Sanders’s, or even less, as they smell pheromones in rat urine which are odorless to us. We therefore apply a conservative ethical principle which assumes experience in nonhuman animals resembles a person’s as closely as observational constraints permit. Under this conservatism, we needn’t believe that rats can read Tolstoy’s Crime and Punishment, but we must take it that the blue of the sky is as different from the red of a rose for them as these are for us—and that painful stimuli evoke the same feelings of anguish and fear in rats they do in people, given they’re noticeably sensitive to them. Unfortunately, the fact that a rattler’s disembodied head can bite tells us nothing about whether it’s conscious. This might be a reflex action. The human arm-withdrawal reflex relies on a spinal nerve circuit bypassing the brain, so it functions in persistent vegetative states, or when the arm’s sensory nerves are numbed by lidocaine. In the latter case, test subjects report no pain when their fingers are briefly touched by hot probes, but their arm jerks back toward the body nonetheless. Generally accepted practice in hunting forbids the infliction of unnecessary pain on prey. I confess I don’t know how or where to draw this line. We can legally shoot a buck, but we cannot use a foot trap to catch it because prolonged agony follows. Yet again, we allow archery hunts despite the slower death from an arrow wound, as opposed to gunshot. Approval of hunting method depends more on aesthetics and custom than on the animal’s feelings. All agree, however, that death must occur promptly. While bear and beaver trappers once operated in Utah, foot traps, now considered inhumane, are no longer a permissible way to take any wildlife in this state. Killing venomous snakes we discover in yards or houses is paradoxically less urgent than controlling their overall populations on a hotspot basis; for it’s the snake you don’t see which might strike. Animal control departments handle snakes on private property by catching them for release into the wild. Pain is definitely a concern with any vertebrate, so snakes are often dispatched by breaking their necks with heavy, elbow-length gloves on. Shooting one is surprisingly tough; the target is small and moves rapidly from side to side. Birdshot is sometimes used, followed by delivery with a .22 fired point-blank at the head. Just as you said, amateur attempts to kill or capture rattlers are dangerous. It’s best to call police non-emergency or animal control if you find one in an area where people or livestock could encounter it. I’m a bit unsure here, but I think venom is today obtained mostly from captive rattlers. Species and freedom from disease must be ascertained before the venom is administered to horses for the manufacture of antivenin. It’s an expensive product in limited supply. Many hospitals don’t stock it, and those which do will refrain from using it if at all possible, due to price and risk of adverse side effects. What is it Like to Be a Bat?Thomas NagelPhilosophical Review 83(4), October 1974, pp. 435-450University of Warwickhttps://warwick.ac.uk... Neurobiology of echolocation in batsCynthia Moss and Shiva SinhaCurrent Opinion in Neurobiology 13(2003), pp. 751–758University of Marylandhttp://ling.umd.edu... List of Animals That Have Passed the Mirror TestAnimal Cognition bloghttp://www.animalcognition.org...; A final aside: The bloody handprints are a strawman even if they do exist. Serial killers haunt the city, yet their infrequency makes comparison of ordinary homicides to the acts of Ted Bundy misleading. Motive, the experience of killing itself, is different for the “average” murderer who lashes out in anger than it was for Bundy. Serial killing is a type of addictive behavior offering a pleasure and a sense of frustration when it goes unfulfilled which the average murder doesn’t face. I take it finger painting with snake blood is relatively rare, too. I’ve never tried it, nor seen anyone else’s work in this medium. In other words, organizers of the Sweetwater Miss Snake Charmer contest CNN reported on aim to make their event a sensation unique to rural West Texas. We don’t have similar parties out here in Utah. But we don’t have as many rattlers, either—they’d go extinct if we destroyed them at the rate the CNN piece shows.Unfortunately, rattlers don’t always rattle before striking and the whirr is soft as well, a thing my aging ears can’t hear unless background noise is absent. Copperheads, cottonmouths and coral snakes lack rattles.