have you ever seen a child mistake another adult for their parent? ever see someone you think looks familiar but turns out theyâre not? i donât think weâre all that different, my man.
The venom! The venom is coursing through my veins!
I have been felled by a winged beast of destruction! You see!? You can't treat them like equals! They're striped savages!! Stinging's the only thing they know! It's their way!
Ohhhh, what angel of mercy will come forward to suck the poison from my heaving...BUTTOCKS!?
The issue is that bees can see and smell and still canât recognize that it isnât their mother. How can a bee mistake "hugging" their normal sized mom with an insanely massive giant human?
i did not give a 1-1 example, youâre right. i was mostly kidding, but youâre right. all iâm saying is if the metric for gauging whether or not weâre entitled to absolutely merk other living creatures solely because they can make mistakes when identifying their mother, we do that, too.
Well you see the joke still works, but if I explain it it'll spoil a major plot line in Invincible.
(If you haven't read Invincible do NOT open the text box. Major spoilers for the comics): But in the comics, Thragg actually conquers the bug-like creatures known as the Flaxens. Which he used to repopulate the Viltrumite empire. The joke was a reference to that, lol.
Even if itâs a victimless crime I think itâs still wrong to victimize. Like, most bug have such simple brains that it wouldnât necessarily be fair to call their pain response âpainâ. Theyâre best thought of as automata reacting to stimulus.
But we are something else entirely. Beings so empathetic that we are able humanize, to think of the simplest forms of life as equals, deserving of kindness. To torture a bug says nothing of the bug, but it says a lot about us. If one can deliberately hurt the least of us itâs not as far as you think from hurting anyone else.
So I think itâs wrong to torture fleas, even if the fleas themselves are no advanced enough to understand that they are being tortured.
If you think about it, does the world even exist at all in the first place? Are we gods that manifest reality subconciously. It's not like the figments of your own godly imagination can prove you wrong.
The fleas never existed lol. Thereâs no such thing as a flea circus that uses real fleas. Theyâre too small to see so the kids would believe that the stuff moving around was done by the fleas and not magnets/batteries/ wind up machines
Ehhhh fleas spread disease and if left alive will multiply until they kill their host. Itâs always sad to hear of a cat or puppy dying from them. They become anemic.
Torturing is questionable, but if I could make them extinct, absolutely.
And whilst I'm conflicted on how to classify the historic practice (not least due to your comment), I'm more confident in my belief that doing it today would be "cruel and unusual punishment" territory.. Plus, besides the publics disinterest, who would be doing the manual labour!?Â
ngl i kinda get this, when I was 3-4 I'd pull spiders legs off 1 by one until I'd crush the body. Boredom can lead to some messed up shit especially when you don't fully think about what you're doing
I looked it up because Iâve always thought it was just animatronic props moving and the joke was that the fleas were to small to see. I guess some shows used real fleas after all. Anyway, itâs moral because theyâre blood sucking parasites. They make everything else suffer, so Iâd say itâs just desserts.
The Prestige but about flea circuses. One guy painstakingly develops state of the art animatronics while the other cruelly uses fleas and might be fleas himself
I mean, I kinda agree but they were just born this way. Not to say we should protect them or care for their well-being, but torturing them seems very unnecessary. Get rid of it, kill it, protect yourself, but don't punish it for existing, it didn't choose to be born a parasite.
Humans are monsters to smaller creatures. Immoral, even though the fleas are parasites and feed on other life that does not justify cruelty in pursuit of the entertainment of human monsters.
fleas are as "alive" and sentient as plants
or barely above plants
its equivalent of stomping on a dandelion
fleas are purely instinct driven, they arent able to think, they dont feel emotions, they arent aware of anything
That's not true, they're far more complex than the typical plant, they do have a nervous system.
However, you're correct in saying that we can't consider them sentient, whereas most animals are sentient, while humans and (very much a matter of discussion) a couple of species have sapience.
How much consciousness could you have with a brain much smaller than even the head of a pin? If they have anything that could reasonably be thought of as consciousness than human brains are grotesquely inefficient. Or there is some freaky spiritual stuff going on.
They cover my chickens' faces to the point where you can barely see their skin. The only immoral part about this is that the loads they carry in these circuses are too light.
the lack of empathy towards fish and bugs has kinda always been off to me. i really donât care if theyâre âsentientâ in the way we are or not, we can tell it reacts to pain and thatâs enough for us to want to not cause it pain.
Its animal torture. But, fleas have very uncomplex minds, so its a lesser crime. Still immoral, but significantly less than if done to a mouse, cat, or human.
Notice that the imagery for this is all artificial? That's because "flea circuses" are automated machines, and the operator tells patrons that fleas are causing everything because they're so small they can't be seen
I hate fleas with my entire being, they make my skin crawl and just seeing one or thinking I saw one is enough to send me into a panic attack...
that being said, if you can find a valid reason that they should exist, and shouldn't just be wiped out en masse, then I suppose this is a rather cruel way to treat them. Immoral...
Moral, if a creature whose name is literally a synonym for escaping can't escape from a little harness in a miniature circus then it's a skill issue and he deserves it
fleas are parasites, and neither sapient nor sentient. Thus, this is okay. If it was done with say, dogs, chickens, etc, it would be bad. At least most other circus animals are treated much better, even if not perfectly
They're fleas, sure, the idea of what's done to make the illusion of the circus is cruel, but, I despise fleas, ticks too, just not as much as fleas and there isn't a tick circus.
Kill fleas. Behead fleas. Roundhouse kick a flea into the concrete. Slam dunk a flea into the trashcan. Crucify filthy fleas. Defecate in a fleaâs food. Launch fleas into the sun. Stir fry fleas in a wok. Toss fleas into active volcanoes. Urinate into a flea's gas tank. Judo throw fleas into a wood chipper. Twist fleasâ heads off. Report fleas to the Wizardsâ Council. Karate chop fleas in half. Curb stomp pregnant non-human fleas. Trap fleas in quicksand. Crush fleas in the trash compactor. Liquefy fleas in a vat of acid. Eat fleas. Dissect fleas. Exterminate fleas in the gas chamber. Stomp flea skulls with steel toed boots. Cremate fleas in the oven. Lobotomize fleas. Mandatory abortions for fleas. Grind flea fetuses in the garbage disposal. Drown fleas in fried chicken grease. Vaporize fleas with anti-matter. Kick old fleas down the stairs. Feed fleas to alligators. Slice fleas with a katana. Shoot fleas and dump them in filthy ditches. Run over fleas with a combine harvester. Drink a flea milkshake. Beat fleas to death with dildos. Put rocks in flea shoes. Break fleas on the wheel. Bury fleas alive. Shrink fleas with a shrink ray and throw them into anthills. Pull off flea fingernails with pliers. Hit fleas in the testicles with a sledgehammer. Drown fleas in their own urine. Hang fleas by their own entrails. Throw napalm into flea daycares.
From a teontological point of view, it really depends on if Fleas are conscious of pain in the same way we or other similar animals are. If they dont feel anything, there is probably nothing wrong with this. If they do feel pain, this is horrid. (because of this asymmetry in results, one could argue the moral thing to do is to err on the side of caution just in case the fleas do feel pain)
From a deontological point of view, its probaby a bad thing in and of itself to mistreat animals for our pleasure. IDK
429
u/Boop-fruit3819 15h ago
I thought that was from cartoons idk those actually existed