Wikipedia Ambassador Program assignment[edit]

This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Mount Allison University supported by Canada Education Program and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2012 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

Above message substituted from ((WAP assignment)) on 14:25, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Introduction to Policy Analysis[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 March 2022 and 30 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Harleensarai688 (article contribs).

Sentence added to lead[edit]

In my view, there's no possible balanced treatment of the lead which doesn't:

Thus I added the following sentence to the lead right as the second sentence:

Note that individuality is an anthropomorphic concept, which is least stretched when applied to other mammalian species, but becomes problematic when applied further afield to social insects, sponges, fungal organisms, or bacteria.

I'm a realistic person, so I doubt this survives the night, and hence I'm posting it here, mainly for posterity.

I'm the kind of person who roams far and wide, and I have a pretty good idea I've read somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 different wikipedia leads over the past 15 years (I can presently list 30,334 explicitly).

I'm struggling to recall any other lead of this caliber of involvement with this level of innate bias.

I didn't even wade in to deal with the problem of the undefined word 'exploit'.

To what extent does "exploit" include regular predation, such as also practiced by all the other predatory mammals? In organizing our predation (i.e. farming) have we somehow implicitly crossed over from natural predation to exploitative predation?

No properly balanced article would not at least address the existence of these semantic concerns, not least because if you conduct a survey asking people about their attitudes, how the survey takers interpret the language used in the survey questions is central to whether their aggregate response means any damn thing.

Not all that long ago, I watched an entire documentary about the treatment of horses in WWI.

As beasts of burden in the UK, I did not regard them as particularly exploited, preferring instead to think of this as a symbiotic relationship with an inherent power asymmetry (asymmetry in biology is universal, and fails to shock me). The horses get a lot back from the relationship in care and feeding, though they don't end up living their charismatic lifestyle as wild animals. Imported into WWI, it was a different matter. They were still cherished by many of the common soldiers, but nevertheless they surely got the worst end of every stick. Hundreds of thousands of horses who managed to survive were finally turned into horse meat when the war ended, to spare the cost of shipping them back home (also to expand the available food supply to help feed starving people in France, if you're into that old-fashioned brand of misguided humanitarianism). But it's also true of WWI that every living organism in every direction suffered collateral damage as we created—at colossal expense—a vast new ecosystem best suited to cockroaches, rats, flesh-eating worms, and septic soil organisms.

Fortunately, times change. We're back in the business of churning up European soil to best suit cockroaches, rats, flesh-eating worms, and septic soil organisms, but at least the horses are not faring as badly in Ukraine as they did in WWI.

Did we treat our horses as more expendable in WWI than we treated ourselves? Yes, but not by a large margin. As I see this, tragic as it may have been, it wasn't precisely exploitation. (In our mortal dander, we clusterfucked everything, almost indiscriminately.)

If this lead is going to lean on sociological surveys of exploitation (undefined), then for reasons of avoiding bias, it needs to make clear the different lines that different people draw concerning what constitutes exploitation. While my own lines are perhaps slightly idiosyncratic, my lines are far from outside of the mainstream. — MaxEnt 02:36, 2 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The article does not mention vermin[edit]

The article talks about philosophical positions and species that are more appreciated by humans. It does not mention rats, mice, roaches, fleas, lice, ticks, weevils, corn borers, tapeworms, etc. These species are not addressed and defended in this article. Fun to speculate why these species are not defended.Pete unseth (talk) 01:37, 23 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The very purpose of defining speciesism is to explain the human exploitation of non-human animals. Thus, self-defense or other defensive acts (such as killing a fatally attacking lion or snake or even a human) doesn't involve speciesism. Killing vermin are primarily considered acts of defense, although animal rights activists oppose these as well. Nevertheless, speciesism applies when any of these animals (rats, mice, etc.) are exploited by humans for their body parts, scientific research, and so forth, the reason why research involving these animals are opposed. And the article very much talks about animal research. Rasnaboy (talk) 06:18, 23 October 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Mammals have higher status than other animals?[edit]

The article still needs to wrestle with definition(s) of speciesism. It mentions the idea of some animal species being treated differently than others. However, the article is basically concerned with humans vs. other species. But there are huge differences in the way humans value various species, which is clearly "speciesism". Mammals are generally thought of as worthy of more value than insects. And a very small set of often-domesticated species are widely thought of as worthy of more value than other mammals. These are also examples of speciesism. The definition(s) and example should reflect this more, not merely human vs. non human. Treating some animals as more worthy than others absolutely undermines the whole concept of speciesism. Pete unseth (talk) 15:40, 9 May 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

This article has a few problems. It tends to assert that "scholars" say X, and per WP:RS A statement that all or most scientists or scholars hold a certain view requires reliable sourcing that directly says that all or most scientists or scholars hold that view. Though it's not policy, it is a guideline. I couldn't check every source in this article to see if that's the case, but I have a feeling it's not based on what I have read. It also makes claims without properly attributing them, such as using PETA as a source. While there's nothing wrong with that, it's undeniable that PETA is a heavily opinionated and biased source, and when used, it should be mentioned that the preceding statement may have been made by PETA. Maxx-♥ talk and coffee ☕ 12:36, 3 August 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
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