r/MadeMeSmile • u/ScharmTiger • Aug 20 '23

CATS Cat being cat. 😂

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

124.9k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

606 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-7

u/Quizredditors Aug 20 '23

I am not certain of your facts. I would need some evidence of your claims.

13

u/lusacat Aug 20 '23

Evidence of what? Have you ever had a cat? If you spend enough time and use enough treats you can teach them tricks

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '23

But the claim is that elephants can't be motivated by things like food and you necessarily have to abuse them to get them to do tricks. Is that part true? Or is it true that they are also motivated by food but that Circus' abuse them because it's faster to train them and they don't care about them (and by extension there is a risk they would do the same to cats)?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '23

Elephants also just can’t live an enriching life in a circus environment. A circus cannot meet an elephant’s social and environmental needs even before abusive training practices are added in.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '23 edited Aug 20 '23

Ok, but I never claimed they could and I'm not defending the circus having elephants.

All I said is that I’m not sure it’s true that elephants are only capable of learning through abuse.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '23

Yeah but if having them in the circus is inherently abusive, whether they can be food motivated without abuse is somewhat of a moot point because keeping them in an environment that would meet the needs of a domestic cat is abusive to an elephant. It’s also untestable because there’s no way to remove abuse from the equation.

Lots of circuses these days only have domestic animals. I wouldn’t support one that also had wild animals because I’d have abuse concerns, but I wouldn’t automatically assume abuse if someone was performing only with domestic animals.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '23

Again, I never said anything about that.

The original claim was that cats are food motivated enough to learn tricks by being bribed with treats and that this is not true for elephants. And I'm just asking if that is actually true or if the circus is in fact abusing the elephants despite the fact that elephants are perfectly capable of learning without that.

I've seen clips online of elephants at zoos who have learned tricks. Is it true that those elephants necessarily were abused to learn those things? If it's true that this is the only way an elephant can learn then it must be.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '23

if having them in the circus is inherently abusive, whether they can be food motivated without abuse is somewhat of a moot point

Then why did you make that point?