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Even the unborns? So, if God loves them, then shouldn't we follow His example and love/respect them as well? I agree with this.

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All I have to say are two things:
1. It's a cruel world.
2. I'm random and cold when I'm in bad moods.

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God loves all his creatures.

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Are you? Cause unless you are, how can you say for certain what they do or do not do

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Are you a dog or a cat???

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Jamaica: How do you know what dogs and cats and other creatures can and cannot do?

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Research questions

Given the broad programme of animal cognition, of looking for the animal analogues of human cognitive processes, the areas of study in animal cognition follow more or less from those in human cognitive psychology. However progress in the different areas has been variable. Among the fields of interest are:

Attention

Research has focused on animals' ability to distribute attention between different aspects of a stimulus, and on visual search. As in humans, it appears that sharing attention between stimulus features reduces the capacity to detect any one of them, though there are some ecologically relevant visual search tasks at which particular species show remarkable abilities (for example, pigeons have an extraordinary capacity to pick out grain from substrate).


Categorisation

Following pioneering research by Richard Herrnstein, there has been a mass of research on birds' ability to discriminate between categories of stimuli, including the kinds of ill-defined category that are used in everyday human speech. Birds have been found to learn this kind of task easily, and to transfer correct responding readily to new instances of the categories.


Memory

The categories that have been developed to analyse human memory (short term memory, long term memory, working memory) have been applied to the study of animal memory, and some of the phenomena characteristic of human short term memory (e.g. the serial position effect) have been detected in animals particularly monkeys. However most progress has been made in the analysis of spatial memory, partly in relation to studies of the physiological basis of spatial memory and the role of the hippocampus, and partly in relation to scatter-hoarding animals such as Clark's Nutcracker, certain jays, and certain squirrels, whose ecological niches require them to remember to locations of thousands of caches, often following radical changes in the environment.


Tool use

There are some species that use particular tools as an essential part of their foraging behaviour, for example the Woodpecker Finch of the Galapagos Islands. However these behaviours are often quite inflexible and cannot be applied effectively in new situations. Several species have now been shown to be capable of more flexible tool use. A well known example is Jane Goodall's observation of chimpanzees "fishing" for termites in their natural environment, and captive great apes are often observed to use tools effectively; several species of corvids have also been trained to use tools in controlled experiments.


Reasoning and problem solving

Closely related to tool use is the study of reasoning and problem solving. Many of the data on these issues come from earlier comparative psychologists such as Wolfgang Köhler, rather than recent experiments. It is clear that animals of quite a range of species are capable of solving a range of problems that are argued to involve abstract reasoning; modern research has tended to show that the performances of Köhler's chimpanzees, who could achieve spontaneous solutions to problems without training, were by no means unique to that species, and that apparently similar behaviour can be found in animals usually thought of as much less intelligent, if appropriate training is given.


Language

In addition to the ape-language experiments mentioned above, there have also been more or less successful attempts to teach language or language-like behaviour to some non-primate species, including cetaceans, the parrot Alex, and Great Spotted Woodpeckers.


Consciousness

The sense in which animals can be said to have consciousness or a self-concept has been hotly debated; it is often referred to as the debate over animal minds. The best known research technique in this area is the mirror test devised by Donald Griffin, in which an animal's skin is marked in some way while it is asleep or sedated, and it is then allowed to see its reflection in a mirror; if the animal spontaneously directs grooming behaviour towards the mark, that is taken as an indication that it is aware of itself. Self-awareness, by this criterion, has been reported for chimpanzees and also for some other great apes, and some cetaceans, but not for monkeys. However both the interpretation of such data, and the data themselves, remain controversial.


Deception, empathy, and theory of mind

Related to the issue of self-consciousness is the question of whether an animal can show empathy, i.e. can understand what another animal is thinking. It is usually argued that to show empathy requires you to have a theory of mind, i.e. to attribute mental processes to other individuals, and that without a theory of mind it is impossible for an animal or person to show tactical deception. Experiments to test for theory of mind in animals have mainly been carried out on primates. No convincing evidence has been found for theory of mind in any primate species other than the great apes; the interpretation of the data from great apes is currently controversial, but some researchers are convinced that they do show theory of mind.


Continuing controversy

The broad programme of research into animal cognition has achieved a good deal. Nonetheless, its results and philosophy continue to be debated, on a number of grounds:

* Particular issues within animal cognition, particularly the interpretation of language-learning and self-awareness experiments, have generated major controversies both about the extent of the animals' achievements, and about the correct interpretation of the behaviour observed.

* Many non-experts in the field, and a small minority of experts, find the scientific approach too cautious, and feel that it tends to underrate the intellectual achievements of animals by insisting on behavioural evidence. Studies that demonstrate limited intellectual ability in popular species such as dogs, horses, or dolphins are particularly likely to come under this kind of attack.

* Cognitive psychologists interested in work with humans frequently discount studies of animal cognition. To some extent this may be an effect of history - in the 1950s and 1960s cognitive psychology had to struggle to assert itself against the dominance of behaviorism and animal learning, and the attitudes of those days remain entrenched in influential figures in the field.

* Cognitive scientists have been interested in comparing and contrasting human cognition with artificial intelligence or machine cognition, but have been less interested in including animal cognition in the analysis - despite the fact that the common biological origins of human and animal cognition suggest that there might be greater resemblance, at least in some respects, between human and animal cognition than between human and machine cognition. There is also a minority of cognitive scientists who simply neglect accumulated psychological knowledge about cognition, whether animal or human.

* Those psychologists who are committed to radical behaviourism and the experimental analysis of behaviour discount cognitive analyses of animal behaviour. This is not surprising since for the most part they also reject cognitive analyses of human behaviour, and it is perhaps a category error: in so far as the study of animal cognition exposes new behavioural phenomena, it simply provides more that a radical behaviourist must explain without using mentalistic language

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from your posts I've been reading, I can only assume that you are indifferent to murder. I mean, if the person really wants to/deserves to live, then he/she will find a way out of getting killed, right? Am I wrong to assume this is what you think? Please clarify your stance.

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Question: Have you ever seen an aborted fetus? Not a picture of one, but an avtual, Honest-to-God aborted fetus?

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Survival of the Fittest.

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According to luva, she has a book that was written by a woman who was almost aborted but fought back. Judging by that, if a fetus wants to live so badly, he'll fight so that he won't be aborted.

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2. we are the only creatures who can control our minds, our actions (like having sex.....cats and dogs cannot control these)

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3. we are the only creatures capable of understanding

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4. we are the only creatures who are able to analyze problems

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5. we are the only creatures who can make decisions

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Jamaica, why are humans higher creatures?

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Ok, Ikki so then you just said it. Anything living should have the right to live. A fetus is living and should be given the chance of life as well. After all, ALL living creatures should have equal right to life.

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If they can survive.

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Ok, so basically any living creature should have equal rights to life?