Applies to every living thing with a limbic system. So yes, that steak or chicken nuggets...

Unsurprisingly, mammals (not just humans) also fear death and are very distressed when being lead to slaughter and seeing their peers go down before them.

Paper [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s44338-026-00232-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s44338-026-00232-9</a>

Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.

Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.

We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can&#x27;t grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don&#x27;t feel pain.Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.Here is a studying on rats. They grieve. Brain, chemical, and social activity. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC12244160&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC12244160&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we&#x27;re somehow significantly different than any other animalThere are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.

Other animals use fire, while we continue to seem unique in creating it. Fire hawks take burning sticks and alight brush to flush prey.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wildlife.org&#x2F;australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-prey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wildlife.org&#x2F;australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...</a>

Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages that technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called &quot;homo ignis&quot;; the fire ape.Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...</a>

It&#x27;s like that time when they &quot;discovered&quot; that babies can feel pain.

So by your logic we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals?

&gt; Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we&#x27;re somehow significantly different than any other animal.But we are significantly different, and there&#x27;s always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That&#x27;s why the paper calls for more study of &quot;post-mortem attentive responses&quot; in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.

I am surprised not enough people are talking about the philosophical implications of these inventions. AI is the biggest attack on religion&#x2F;human-centralism since Newton and Darwin.

&gt; do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time.And you don&#x27;t have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and&#x2F;or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren&#x27;t going very well for the majority.

I know the point you’re making is half facetious—do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?

Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”.There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley

Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these &quot;Im-good&quot; self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult.These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.

We are not different. Whales exhibit culture too.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Animal_culture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Animal_culture</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;evolution&#x2F;comments&#x2F;rduhmx&#x2F;does_any_species_other_than_humans_have_culture&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;evolution&#x2F;comments&#x2F;rduhmx&#x2F;does_any_...</a>

&quot;People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture.&quot;— Daniel Dennett<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;now.tufts.edu&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;our-brains-our-selves" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;now.tufts.edu&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;our-brains-our-selves</a>&quot;One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much.&quot;&quot;Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too.&quot;&quot;A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture.&quot;“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right&quot;

You can give them emotional signals, but I feel like it&#x27;s cruel to do so and would recommend against it.

Insofar as grieving is an inherently, fundamentally a very particular chemical process, the answer is a resounding “no”.

do humans? or is it only because we&#x27;re the ones doing the research and so we say we do?i think most people are automatons and can be programmed.it is the most moral thing to program people to operate in ways that causes least harm to everyone else around them that has to live with them.people like certain foods, outrage, and gambling&#x2F;fomo.

Nope.They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can&#x27;t feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren&#x27;t really grieving.

Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we&#x27;re somehow significantly different than any other animal.Sure, we&#x27;ve got them beat on language and planning, but we&#x27;re currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?

Ahh I appreciate that but I’ve not experienced it personally though I know friends who have.

I’m sorry, my thoughts go out to you.

Any parent here who has known this loss can relate. Didn’t think I’d see this on HN but yeah this is heartbreaking.

&gt; indicated an inherent, strong maternal attachment to the calfYeah, that&#x27;s not grieving.

Orcas have also been seen to carry their dead calf&#x27;s around.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fisheries.noaa.gov&#x2F;feature-story&#x2F;southern-resident-killer-whale-calf-dies-days-after-birth-second-newborn-appears" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fisheries.noaa.gov&#x2F;feature-story&#x2F;southern-reside...</a>

The key word is possibly. Any statement with possibly in it could be true or false, it is speculation.

I&#x27;m confused by how that is speculation.

But they need to explain why the range is so large. Did they witness whales at the site on day 2? It&#x27;s unnecessarily ambiguous.

I&#x27;d say it instead makes it more precise, indicating that they are uncertain but the range is from several hours to days.

I disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that.What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.

Your pedantry and rigid lack of any insight is not representative of science just your own intellectual flaws

&quot;She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days.&quot;
Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.

Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented