Milk contains pus?!

There is a lot of stuff in milk, both naturally and due to dairy companies, that we should not be consuming. For example, there is often puss in milk because the machines used to milk cause cause their udders to be chapped and become infected. Do some research of your own and come to your own conclusions. Don't feel bad when people get snarky :flowerforyou:

You do realise that infected chapped udders were around long before milking machines. and in fact the milk supply is cleaner and safer now than ever before

We are unique in our capacity to knowingly care about something beyond ourselves.

As far as we know. Possibly not, though. Dolphins have been known to save human beings from shark attacks. For all we know, they do it consciously and for species preservation reasons. How do they know there are billions of us buggers on land?

Or maybe human proportions and (from their view) clumsiness in the water trigger their "aww wookit the widdew baby" nurturing instincts.

LOL, quite possibly but that very tendency for apparent altruistic behavior seems to strongly associate with species who also show highly structured social systems, potential self awareness and some scientists have even gone so far as to say language and culture.

And for obvious reasons. And it nice to see the word "apparent" in there. An important distinction. But self awareness, language or culture are not necessary as dogs, for example, also produce apparent altruistic behavior without them.

Certainly not necessary, but altruistic behaviors do seem to have some significant adaptive advantages in social structures that have gone beyond tit-for-tat interactions, and given the fossilized evidence of dire wolves in the la brea area that died of old age despite having clearly lived with debilitating arthritis and other fossils of wolves who had crippling femur breaks that had healed and apparently the animal survived for years afterwords, dogs in general certainly qualify as well beyond the tit-for-tat stage.

The problem of course with trying to establish self-awareness, language or culture with animals like orcas and dolphins is there's such a massive umwelt issue going on. We're talking about an animal that lives in a three dimensional environment who's primary sensory system is a sonar system quite possibly better than anything we've been able to develop since we first started working with sonar in the early 1900's. We're probably not even picking up on half of what they're actually communicating to each other and understanding even less.....:ohwell:

If dolphins had a language it would be pretty easy to prove. We don't need to communicate with them, just show they communicate with each other. So take dolphins that live together, separate one, show it a puzzle/problem and give it the solution, then put it back with the others. Then cycle out the next one. If they talk to each other in a grammatical language, they'd share the solution with the next ones and it would be obvious that the first one to encounter a problem takes longer or fails to come up with a solution yet the others immediately come to the solution.

I don't think the puzzle thing exactly has been done but dolphins do teach skills to their offspring:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7475-dolphins-teach-their-children-to-use-sponges.html#.U6hP__ldWCk

That they communicate in some form is actually pretty well established, the question is how and to what extent. We tend to focus on vocal and body language communication because that's how WE communicate. My point was that it's altogether probable their "language" is more complex than we can currently establish because they can use an entire sensory system (sonar) that we're just beginning to catch up on. It's similarly problematic to how bee flower selection used to confuse the hell out of researchers until we realized that bees can see in ultraviolet. It was outside of our own sensory range so no body picked up on it for quite a while.

Also, fun fact, certain species of octopus have been shown to learn simply by observing other octopus solving a problem. Places them well above many mammals on intelligence scales, but if we have a hard enough time working with other mammals imagine trying to interpret behavior on an intelligent invertebrate!

Oh, I saw something a few months ago about scientists observing a group of young male dolphins passing a puffer fish around, squeezing it in their jaws for few moments to ingest small amounts of the toxin, and then spending long periods of time apparently staring at their own reflections under the water surface.....

Yep, and the fact that dogs cannot learn by watching other dogs says they aren't nearly as intelligent as people tend to give them credit for. Our capacity for empathy unfortunately also makes us prone to perceive intelligence/foreplanning/abstract thinking where it isn't happening.

There's also a big difference between repeating an action that is rewarded, learning a task/action by watching someone perform it, and using grammatical language to convey abstract concepts. I can watch someone do something and learn how to do it without speaking with them. But without language they cannot explain to me that last week they saw Bob kissing Suzie and they told Joe, who is now angry. It (among other things) makes possible a much more sophisticated type of social organization/interaction.

Anyway, the point I was making before was that there are two ways to know something: by discovering/observing it yourself, or by having it communicated to you by someone else. You don't need to know what dolphins are saying, or how they communicate, to determine whether communication does or doesn't happen. There is no need for "do dolphins have a language" to be some great mystery.

Dogs absolutely can learn by watching other dogs. I'm puzzled as to why you think they cannot.

Some science hack published a paper a few years ago that said dogs did not learn by observation. That flawed finding is immediately debunked by thousands of years of pastoral dog training (leaving puppies with older dogs to learn the behaviors in both guardians and herders). Anyone who has seen a female dog raise a litter knows that it's nonsense, too. Dams don't get out a blackboard and give lectures on how to eat or where to poo or any of the other things that come with being a dog. Some things are indeed instinctive--puppies learn to eliminate on their own, for example--but they also learn by watching other dogs and discovering beneficial behaviors on their own.

If you are dead set on drinking animal's milk, why not get yourself a goat or a cow of your own?

Oh sure, I'm gonna go buy a cow today and put him in my apartment. I'm sure we'll all be happy!

But make sure it is a her not a him or you wont get much milk :laugh:

that scene from Kingpin

We are the only mammal to drink other animals milk and to continue doing so after we've passed infancy...

Eggs are chicken periods. But damn they're tasty.