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The Furryites were a bit meandering storyline in the first series, in case you missed it. I recommend reading the whole thing. 🙂
Apologies. For the next two weeks (through the 20th) I’ll be posting the comics like this: the finished final b&w sketch before inking. I did manage to finish the inks for Willowweep II on schedule for March 1st, but then didn’t quite manage to get enough done between then and driving east to visit family for spring break (since I didn’t get to visit during the holidays). But will try to ink them before April! I hope! Honest I hope!
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Rodrigo, Knox, Picknar, and Thoos sat in Mateo’s pub and looked at the menus. Knox said, “these menus have our food options listed.” Picknar said, “what are these things? Eggs? Cheese? Ham?” Knox turned to Rodrigo and said, “this conversation couldn’t get any more idiotic.” Rodrigo said, “eggs are unfertilized ovum of chickens. Cheese is curdled milk from cows. Ham is meat of pigs.” Smiling, Thoos said, “sounds delicious. They’ve all been tested for sentience of course, right?” Knox replied, “‘tested’? Of course not. It’s not like we have a way of talking with them. They’re just dumb animals.” Picknar and Thoos stare at them, horrified. Picknar said, “by Kaylid’s Pits, it’s the furryites all over again.” Thoos said, “um. What products are not made from these animals, or their excretions?” Knox said, “I don’t know. Dry toast? Salad? Soda?” Picknar said, “I’ll have a bowl of the dry toast salad soda.” Knox turned to Rodrigo again and said, “correction. We are in the good plane “idiotic” and we’re in a death spiral.”
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It’s possible that domesticated chickens might not be sentient. Cows and pigs definitely a problem. We already know that kangaroos and coyotes are sentient.
Cows also might not be sentient. They exhibit some herd behavior but it’s marginal.
Pigs absolutely a problem, we already know they’re smart.
I’ve heard stories about cows. Still disturbs me.
Cows make friends in the herd; hang out and play with those friends.
I have family who grew up on farms. They insist that “One pig can be a pet. Two pigs are dangerous.” They liken pigs to land sharks: voracious frenzy feeders. It’s not unheard of that dogs get in the way of a feeding trough and just … disappear in the rush.
One cousin explained, “That pig’d eat me if it could. Fair’s fair.”
It’s certainly one way of looking at it.
How do you define sentience? Pedantically, it’s a much lower threshold than people tend to think, and plants have sentience too. Too bad about the salad option.
Really the problem is that we don’t have an easily-defined cut-off point. It’s a long continuum. Chicken are capable of learning things, too — from experience, I can tell they’re perfectly capable of learning to distinguish between potential threats (like humans, dogs, cats) and specific individuals from these threat groups that have proven not to be dangerous.
Do they make an exception for edible sentient robots, though?
In general there’s a big gap for robots, who seem to be generally very sapient but also property. Similar to Star Wars in that aspect.
Not convinced that a creature that tests out as sapient / sentient WITH the translator implant is in fact sapient / sentient. Seems almost as if the implant carries much of the hardware that makes you sapient / sentient, rather than existing before hand.
Suspect that using the existing standards, there would be hundreds or even thousands of sapient / sentient species on earth.
That was my thought as well. Coyotes may be clever, but they don’t have a sense of self enough to recognize their own reflection. The translator seems to add to the mental capacity of the recipient, adding to the memory capacity until the subject has enough intelligence to understand the received language.
I suspect the inventor created it to speak to its pets in the first place.
What’s a “reflection”? I’d ask the guy behind the glass, but he just keeps copying me.
Has the comic shown what happens if YOU have the implant, but the animal does not? None of the characters in this comic have an implant.
Cannot edit. This arc of this comic. This page.
That’s a very good question. I remember only one incident, when Emily returns to Earth, and a coyote pops up behind her and says “I wonder what she’s doing.” She can understand this. Emily immediately chips the coyote after that, but now we know that the chip lets you understand un-chipped animals.
That said, “I wonder what she’s doing” is a very basic mental concept that I’ve seen real animals express non-verbally, so it doesn’t really answer the question of chip-enhanced sentience.
We’ve seen many galactic creatures that act like non sapients (will be saying sapient only) that have been chipped. The surface version of King’s people for example.
I see several ways to judge a creature as non sapient. If they are non sapient when chipped, that’s good. Assume they are chipped when very young, and raised in a proper environment. Humans will fail under the wrong conditions.
Ultimately, someone is going to have to judge unchipped creatures. If they can’t understand you, that will be hard.
Seems like a LOT of earth creatures will pass the test when chipped.
Plants feel pain and convey info to each other.
We are screwed.
I never eat anything with a face.
No telling why my girlfriend’s so mad.
The test is actually really simple: Can it talk, and use fire?