Lots of humans kill for the sake of it, moreover, they kill for fun. Hare coursing, fox hunting, badger baiting, stag hunting, grouse/pheasant/duck shooting, fishing... anything where something gets killed but isn't eaten is killing for the sake of it.

Their ability to be the most wonderful kind person and the most vile cruel person,we think we are the superior being,I'm not so sure.

Here,here .

The problem is Niamh I cannot sit my cat down and say to it "you don't need to kill those mice because we have all the food you need. Please stop because I don't appreciate dealing with the result."

It's not her fault and I will not chastise her for it she simply does not understand and she will continue to do it.

Whatever we do we can always sit and logically think whether it's the right thing to do or not and if we aren't capable of doing that ourselves there's always someone else who can stick their oar in and let us know :hugesmile:

Animals do that as well though, cats often hunt for fun, so do dogs, one of my dogs favourite pass times is to get into the field and chase rabbits or rats or birds or anything that moves really......he doesn't eat them after. I don't agree with any of the "sports" you've listed don't get me wrong but it's not true to say animals don't do stuff like that as well

Pets do hunt smaller animals for fun because they're following their instincts, despite being fed by their owners. If they were living in the wild they'd live on what they hunted.

It makes me a bit sad that humans have so much capacity for good but so often turn it to evil. We find out what makes the sun work... and we build a bomb out of it. I'm sometimes surprised we've made it this far.

We aren't out of the woods yet Livia, still plenty of time for us to turn Earth into a char grilled wasteland. :(

But you could say the same for humans tbf, we used to hunt for food at one point in time as well

And now we torture, trap, shoot, gas, poison... we stuff tubes into geese and force-feed them so that rich people can eat their livers, we cut the fins off sharks for soup and throw them back into the sea still alive, we club, poison and gas animals and skin them, sometimes still alive, so some rich tart can wear a fur coat, we chase stags on horseback until they're so exhausted they collapse and we watch while they live on for minutes while dogs tear them apart. It's a little more serious than tossing a mouse around for an hour.

I've not even started on the napalm and mustard gas yet... and the gassing of six million people because another group of people didn't like them.

What makes me laugh is those people that go bear hunting with a ******ing rifle on a raised plynth in the middle of a tree and think they are some sort of warrior. Why don't they try taking on a bear with a kitchen knife, see how many pelts they come back with.

Oh I know and you're right, I'm just saying that animals have tendencies like ours as well, if they were more intelligent and had more capabilities who's to say they wouldn't turn out just like us?

I agree Simple Minds. I just don't understand the mentality of someone who has to kill something to make them feel good.

I killed a spider the day before yesterday, i won't lie.........it felt good :laugh:

Don't you disagree with me or I'll come over there and slap you around. Because I'm human, and I can.

I won't really.

Good job you're not superstitious... I mean, with spiders being lucky, and it being dreadfully unlucky to kill them and all...

Am I the only one on here who likes spiders? I can't be...

http://www.angryasianman.com/images/..._spiderman.jpg

No not even slightly superstitious :pipe:

I do too.

I'm a wreck when it comes to animals, I accidentally strimmed a mouse once when I was strimming someone's garden and it was there having a heart attack I was mortified.

Spiders aren't animals :nono: They're disgusting creepy arachnid bastards

1 mans beautiful, elegant fly catcher is another woman's disgusting creepy arachnid bastard. :hugesmile:

Animals are territorial, but if there's an adequate food source they coexist... we don't.

You see, I think that says a lot about someone... not wanting to inflict suffering on anything is really admirable in my book. If I have to kill something - and I've had to a few times, it being the kindest thing to do - I fret about it for ages.

Unlike Niamh the Spider Slayer.

Oh I quite like that title :D

It does in one way but yet when a family member dies I'm sad but I find it hard to grieve. That's just me being f'kd up though probably.

Animals also tend to establish an equilibrium with their environment and give something back to it. We don't. We just ravage and plunder an area of it's resources then pack up and move on. We're a virus with culture as our operating system at that base biosphere level.

If you're talking about the one thing that separates us from animals when it comes to nature it's obviously industry.

I love spiders. I used to be afraid of them but I got more and more exposed to them and now I find them really, really cool. They're one of evolutions greatest success stories. I was reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami the other other and he was comparing an assassin character in the book to a spider.

A spider is programmed biologically to just stay still for ages in it's web and kill whatever gets trapped in it's vicinity. They don't chose to kill. They don't have a sense of time passing so they don't gauge patience to kill. They just ... sit and wait and kill.

Thought it was kinda neat.