Hey i know some of you out there must be familiar with the work of John Lilly. What are youre opinions on his theorys of whales and dolfins being on the same level or of higher intelligence than humans. If i remember correctly he stated that for another brain to model the human brain it would have to be larger than the human brain it wished to model. It would take a certain amount of the brain to actually match the processing of the human brain, and then have extra brain mass left over to run the whole modeling process or something like that.. and that whales and some dolphins have this capacity.

Its been a while since ive looked into his work, but was drawn to it because my fathers cousin actually works with dolphins in califoria, shes been on TV a few times talking about interspecies communication, and was involved in some project years back training the dolphins to put some sort of device onto wild sharks out in the ocean for study. Interesting stuff

Ive always been into biology and used to volunteer at the vancouver aquarium about 10 years ago until i came to realize that animals deserve rights as well... anyhow I once spent the night there in the killer wale viewing area, and found my self just mesmerized by these amazing and beautiful beings, so gracious and when they sing it sounds like angels, so sad they're forced to live out their lives in prisons... Im going to try to find some links to this and when I do I will post them

People have performed experiments whose results can be interpreted to show that dolphins (as well as Macaque monkeys but not mice or rats) display some aspects of cognition (i.e. knowing themselves). Actually this is very difficult if not impossible to practically demonstrate directly, however I attach a review on the experiments performed in order to assess cognition.

As far as the animal rights is concerned, well I also believe that plants should have rights. Can you imagine, many people force them to leave confined inside pots, hindering their root growth and disturbing their shoot-to-root ratios. What is more, many people do not even take good care of them, usually depriving them of water or nutrients. Even worse, people force many of the crop plants to grow in very stressful conditions by overpopulating the fields, something analogous to chickens in chicken factories.

Oh yes I totally agree with you about plants having rights. I took environmental philosophy last semester at college and we had many interesting discussions on this very topic. I read a study a while back that hadsomehting to do with waves. Like scientists discovered some sort of communication going on between plants which took place through the gravitationl field or something. They hammered a nail into one tree and recorded gravitational waves between the tree and other trees around it at the time of puncture. Heres an interesting link..

http://www.vetmed.wsu.ed.../v63%20p19%20Wagner.PDF

I stopped harvesting my salvia plant cus i just love her so much I want to let her grow into a beautiful sage tree like this dude seamacs... google seamac salvia to see pics. She dropps enough leaves when she ready to get me by anyhow. Also have 20 peruvian torch cacti I started from seed about a yr ago and vowed to them that i would make sure they all get to enjoy loooooonggg lives together. I dont plan on everkilling any of them, maybe a dose here or there when they are really large. I think the most amount of plant neglect has been toward cannabis. makes me want to go plant all my badseeds in the wild this summer and just let em be. Also very weary about my cappi and chali connections cus I hate to see these amazing plants slowly being decreased in number from their natural habitat, so I try to be very conservative with how often I go that route.

heres another link..
http://mindprod.com/animalrights/intel.html

Wow, thats really interesting.

If plants have rights how do we research them? Do scientists need to get a permit from an ethical committee every time they want to study a plant? Sorry but SWIM has recently heard that this kind of thing is actually on the table and was very pissed off about it. This will slow research nearly to a halt. I can see about genetic engineering at least when its going to be released into the wild obviously you need regulation but to just do research no sorry I am 100% against that.

You need to kill plants to eat them the whole notion of plant rights is really wacked out environmentalists gone wrong nonsense. I should add there is a big difference between killing a plant and respecting a plant or any other organism. Should we respect out natural environment of course! We must or we will die.

What next are bacteria going to get rights too? Please seriously consider this stuff before accepting or even promoting it as you may unwillingly be messing something that is very needed right now which is more research about plants and our natural environment. That work is almost impossible to do if we consider that plants now have all these extra 'rights'. If you want to survive on this planet don't support this total bullshit.

The same goes for rats and mice. Sorry but there is sometimes no way to avoid doing animal tests in certain kinds of research. Should we use monkeys dolphins? No way they are very intelligent and probably have the same if not similar emotional capacity as humans. Back in the day (before SWIMs day) it was very easy to do studies on rats and even humans. Nowadays its very difficult and some kinds of research is seriously slowed down by this. Especially drug research. Nowadays the only people who can afford to do those studies are massive pharmaceutical companies so anyone out there who is trying to studying things outside of their agenda gets f%cked over (like me) big time when they want to try to develop a new drug or study something alternative like herbal medicine (despite thousands of years of human self research).

Anyway to get back on topic Lillies research on dolphins was very fascinating and there is no doubt they are intelligent. Same with whales.

Oh dont getme wrong I def agree that we NEED to eat plants. I think that what imtrying to say is that all we need to do is look into where and how we fit into the equation. Right now humans seem to act as if they are the only important species on the planet, we are very human centered. we should conserve as much as we can on this planet while still surviving, and try to limit our footprints. Noone need 4 fuckn cars and a mansion with a frickin zoo to top it off. Allimsaying is we need to live within means. If the planet meant us to not eat we wouldnt have stomaches, jsut as well, if we weren't meant to study life we wouldnt the have advanced brain function that brings about such curiosity. I do think that plants and most life can feel pain and suffereing tosome degree, and think we should limit the research we are doing. Ive read well documented reports of scientist putting live monkeys heads into pressure machines to test the ammount of pressure their skulls would handel, all to make fuckn bike helmets. Cant we jsut use heads of recently deceased ppl, I mean they are dead?

sorry should have edited that post , mind the spelling, anyway yeah lets get back to the dolphins..