Do you consider animals more important than people?

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I saw an ep of The Simpsons recently where Homer was driving through an ally thanx to the GPS & he had to chose between hitting his dog or hitting a bum. He chose the bum & then he got sued by the guy. He won the court case & the mayor decided to make new laws benefiting dogs. The dogs realized they were the top alphas & they started acting very mean to people.

of course there are snakes where i live. the thing is..i am not an outdoor type of a person. i lived my whole life in 2 houses. and i have never traveled before.

I can understand being creeped out by a creature,I was terrified of spiders as a child.If I saw one,I'd start screaming,same for wasps.Im not afraid of them now,in fact spiders are cool.I learned not to fear them by observing and learning about them.Scorpions scare me,one showed up on the house and was on the floor heading right for my bare foot. I caught him in a glass and tossed him out but that night I was so paranoid that I stripped the bed and shook out all the blankets and throughly inspected the bedroom.
If there are bugs by the light,it could attract a gecko.When I've left my porch light on at night there have been tree frogs hanging out near it,and even a few toads on the porch.
Once I had a snake get in the house,luckily a harmless one.Pretty sure it came in a hole under the sink where the pipe goes thru the floor.I sealed it up extra good.Most snakes just want to be left alone,they are very secretive and don't really like it when they run into us.It's really snakey here,so far this year I've seen a timber rattler,copper head,speckled King snake ,black snake,blue racer,rough green snake,garter snake,ring neck snake and a spreading adder.Only two venemous.

wow i'm missing out on a lot of things. if i were to live my life to the fullest, those "scary in a fun way" things would be a part of my life.

it sure feels good/confidence boost when one overcomes their fear.

im not really closed-minded when it comes to loving lizards or even snakes, but a lack of friends in real life sucks big time sometimes.

the scorpion story,though.

/\I think of the creatures in the yard as friends,except for the scorpion.Not sure about it.
Animals are just easier to understand,humans I'll never get.They sure can fool one.

look at this.. what a clever little creature!

I voted "Depends on the human" to cover the fact that it might be the person who is curing cancer that I'm rescuing, but I'm very inclined to have voted "animal."

But now I actually want to change my vote.

My reason? Humans really are creatures who let you down. Deliberately and even with glee. Animals don't pull s**t like that.

Nothing an animal ever did to me was out of spite, glee, and other meditated reasons to hurt someone.

But humans ARE capable of that. I would not even rescue a partner over rescuing my pet, because one of these days that same partner is going to cheat on me, turn on me, be some kind of a**hole to me, whereas the pet won't.

I would rescue my pet before ANY human.

I stand corrected.

How would you have known, it's not commonly known by foreigners unless they have visited here (do come! I'll happily show you around

However NZ is not the only country that doesn't have a snake population:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... nd-nation/

One of my travelling highlight experiences was seeing my first snake in the wild (in East Texas, I was wandering through a bird sanctuary and happened upon a Water Moccassin, who was terrified of me and fled (perhaps I'm more scary than I know, lol).

Last year I stayed with people who live in a rural, snake infested part of Australia, and the first question I asked them was "do the brown snakes (very aggressive species) ever come onto your property?" And their reply was "Oh yes, often, but don't worry, we just kill them with the golf clubs). At first I thought they were joking about the golf clubs, but they weren't. The clubs stood ready for use just outside the doors!

^^^

If it was a choice between a scumbag who committed a violent crime and an animal, then the animal. In all other cases I consider life that is known to be sapient more important than life that is not known to be sapient. Beyond that I consider all sapient beings equal, human, alien, AI, etc.

Being that the concept of being sapient means to have the ability to act with wisdom and discernment and judgement, if I were you, I wouldn't be so sure that other animals do not have sapience.

Part of an animal's survival depends not merely on "instinct" but also on an ability to assess a situation and make judgements and decisions based on the assessments.

Research is ongoing on this, and they are discovering more and more that many species studied do in fact evidence such sapience as applied to their lives. Crows, elephants -- there is increasing evidence that a process of discernment and decision making based on past learning is something an animal can employ.

It never really ends what we discover looks more and more similar between "animals" and our own species, in terms of what our respective brains are actually doing. It's being proved that many species do indeed have a thought process or an ability for sapience, not just instinctive action.

Because after all, we are animals too.

If my house was on fire I would get the animals out because I know my Husband is not an idiot and can take care of himself whereas the animals would struggle getting the doors open with their little paws.

You can't measure the value of people or animals

But some people treat their dogs like children

Put clothes on the dog

Off leash

Let the dog bark and stand there with a ingratiating smile and say "hey hey"

Some owners do not deserve to be called "people"

The dog is always "she" or "he" never "it"

That would be an extremely tough decision for me. I value both human lives and animal lives equally, and would do everything in my power to save both. If I had absolutely no choice but to choose one, I suppose I would probably end up saving the animal - or debating for long enough that I couldn't save either.

Dog owners could claim Species discrimination because dogs have to be on leash and cats don't

It seems egocentric to say that people are more important than animals. Because the speaker is a person

But maybe animals find themselves more important than people