Swan dies of broken heart after eggs smashed, knew that her chicks had been killed

I was watching a news clip about a swan who died of a broken heart after her eggs were destroyed.


Swan 'Dies Of Broken Heart' After Teens Destroyed Her Eggs With Bricks

Some teens threw bricks at the nest, resulting in the eggs getting smashed.
Out of distress and grief, the swan refused to eat or leave the nest, until she was finally found dead.

Swan 'dies from broken heart' after heartless yobs smashed her eggs with bricks - Mirror

Why did the swan suffer depression and grief, grief that was so intense it led to suicide of the poor mother animal?

Somehow, some way, the animal knew that those were her offspring growing & developing inside those eggs.

Now, if a swan has the sense to understand that her offspring exist even though they have not hatched and finished developing, how much more should a human mother?

Fun Fact: A swan egg is about the same length as a human fetus around 13 weeks gestation.
Swan eggs are about twice the length of a typical chicken egg.
When you eat chicken egg, they are unfertilized. Meaning sperm were not involved. "Conception" did not happen.

Swan embryology is a little bit different from humans.
Swan eggs take 35 to 41 days to hatch. (That's about 5 or 6 weeks)
In birds, the egg is laid within only about 1 day after fertilization takes place.
The yolk inside the egg is like the equivalent of a placenta in humans, only it contains enough nutrients for the chick and does not need to be attached to the mother's uterus. Necessary life-giving oxygen diffuses in through the shell of the egg.

You know what else is interesting? From conception to hatching, swan chicks can develop and be ready to hatch within only 5 or 6 weeks.
This is about the same time the majority of human women get their abortions!
If you want to ask the question how much fetal development is possible within 6 weeks...


However, humans do have one thing that birds do not. Humans are the only animal capable of lying to themselves.

 

this is why the government should not decide who has and doesn't have children - it's a personal choice only the potential mother can make

this is no different from forcing a woman to have an abortion - that is anti-choice

be pro-choice

 

You're trying to make this all about the mother - how she feels.

But if a mother is feeling grief and devastation, what does that say about the thing that happened?

You think the mother swan in this story was only devastated because she wanted to have a brood of chicks and get to experience being a parent, and now won't have that opportunity?
You think that's all this incident was about?

 

That is what this story was about, someone taking the choice away from the potential mother - they were anti-choice - sad!

Taking away her choice... killed her

 

So let’s make it illegal for swans to have abortions.

 

related threads:
Chrissy Teigen openness about miscarriage gives strength to other women
Looking at the REASON for punishment for killing fetus if mother wanted it

 

forced abortion should be a crime, agree

as should forcing a rape victim to have their rapists baby against their will

in both cases, one is making the choice for the potential mother

 

The rape card always comes up every time choicers feel themselves backed up into a corner in a thread.

 

it's an important component to the discussion, one anti-choicers know is wrong, but have a hard time admiting it

the pro-chocie side is about choice, the anti-choice side is about taking away that choice - this Swan had her choice taken away from her

 

Kind of getting off the topic of abortion for a moment, but the incident happened in Manchester, U.K.

55% of the teens in secondary school in Manchester are non-white, parents from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, or Afghanistan, as of 2019.

source: mgConvert2PDF.aspx (manchester.gov.uk)


I'll let you come to your own assumptions, guesses or perceptions, whether you think that is at all relevant to this story.

 

And some people want to turn every thread that is in any way about abortion into an argument about the issue of rape. Every thread!

Then these same people are conspicuously absent, or want to derail the topic into some other area, when I actually start a thread specifically discussing the issue of rape.

 

Humans can be so senselessly cruel, so stupidly destructive. At least a lot of them can, anyway. I think it has to do with inborn differences in our natures, though it is, of course, possible that parenting/environment plays a role. But I think some are just more naturally empathetic, than others. I remember when I was a kid, others in my neighborhood, when we took walks, would club these huge bullfrogs to death, for no reason other than just to kill them. Less inexplicably to me, and perhaps less destructively, albeit sadistic, all the same, was this gladiatorial game that my uncle, who was just a couple of years older than me, used to play, with different bugs. He used to dig a pit then push two different bugs into one another. At first, they would just each turn to continue on in another direction; but my uncle would keep turning them back into one another, until finally they would begin to fight. Clearly this was entertaining to him, as I never could understand the killing of a bullfrog, with the whack of a stick, to be.

Anyway, my uncle did this enough so that when one of the bugs seemed lifeless, he knew that it was only faking; and knew that if he buried it, shallowly, under the sand, it would momentarily crawl out, on its own-- at which point the fight with the other bug could continue.

Anyway, this is the empathy, which I felt for the poor swan, in your story. Yet I do not feel the same way about a mother who chooses to abort her fetus. We are not swans. We do not live, solely, for the purpose of reproducing.

 

Did you feel any empathy for the little chicks who were inside those eggs?

 

It’s almost/exactly like the other side pretending that most abortions happen after 12 weeks.

 

Clever ending line, but convoluted logic, leading up to it. Swans & humans are very different organisms. Hence, instead of 5 or 6 weeks, a human takes 40 weeks, to be built. So the amount of fetal development that gets a swan chick, completely incubated, only gets a human embryo 1/8 to 1/7 of the way there. This is not yet a recognizably complete person. What separates humans, most of all, from other creatures, what makes us "human," is our brains. This is the reason for our longer time for maturation, in the womb. And this higher brain development is the focus of the latter part of pregnancy. None of our higher brain function exists, in the early developmental stages.


The second weird thing, is that you were mostly arguing not for sympathy for the embryo, or fetus, but for the mother. Yet the situations are not analogous: a woman does not discover that, when she wasn't looking, someone gave her an abortion, which she hadn't wanted. It is a choice that she makes, hopefully after well considering the alternatives, and the ramifications of each.

The situations are in no way comparable. Swans do not "abort" their eggs. Yet, a mother hyena will not interfere with one of her young, killing another one. Every species is programmed with its own survival strategy. And those big brains that make us human, also give us the capacity to want more for our lives, than to merely produce as many offspring as possible-- which is fine, because we are in no danger of going extinct, due to underpopulation. Those big, human brains are also what gives us the understanding that we can end an unwanted pregnancy, through abortion.


I wonder if swans understand irony.

 

True, other animals, such as swans, develop at much faster pace than humans.
But I am just highlighting this to show that extensive development is possible, within a short timeframe. We might not really know entirely to what exact extent human fetuses develop at a given gestational point.

So in other words you are claiming that human fetuses in the womb are equivalent to animals.

Tell us, is a newborn human baby equivalent to a cat?

I've seen scientific studies that suggest a gorilla's intelligence may be equivalent to a 3 or 4-year old's.

 

No, that is not what struck me, though the story obviously focused more on the mother. Yet, those undeveloped goslings, while they could feel pain, and though I would have probably felt bad about them, had I been there, to see it, were not capable of the same emotional agony, as was the heartbroken mother.

Additionally, after all, humans do kill and eat fowl, by the millions. How is that different? Part of what would make the situation in the story, so unfortunate, actually, would be that those eggs went to waste, did not even feed anyone. Though I have not tried it myself, there is a dish in the Philippines, which uses chicks that are fully developed but just not yet hatched. Also, one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten, was suckling pig which, I will admit, is a sad thing, if one thinks about it: it is taking a baby pig from its mother to be slaughtered, before it has even been weaned from her milk.

The raising of any livestock, is full of these difficult moral dilemmas. How do you slaughter an animal that has come to trust you? It would seem much less morally ambiguous, if one caught all their game from the wild, where the rules of the hunters and the hunted, still apply. But all this is really not applicable to the abortion point, of your thread.

 

You completely misunderstood what I'd written, whether accidentally or on purpose. Compare it to your computer, before it has all the circuitry, or any of the microprocessor chips, installed: is it, yet, really a computer, just because it has an (unworking) keyboard and screen?

 

Give him some credit at least he has not found a way to drag Trump into it yet.

Seems that some animals mourn more than humans are capable of

 

Interesting choice of metaphor replying to a post about rape.

 

sorry, that is part of the abortion topic, like it or not

 

yet you just did.. again, sad!

 

Why would you imagine a pregnant woman wouldn't understand the reality of the offspring growing inside her, even if she chooses abortion? Also, why would you care what the pregnant woman understands if you want to remove any agency from her anyway?

Usually, though it can depend on the farming methods where it comes from. If you eat chicken (or any other meat) though, conception obviously was involved yet you don't seem concerned about that. Wouldn't that support the old argument that "pro-life" is only concerned about unborn life?

We're capable of lying to other people too. We're also capable of structured logic and rational conclusions (and irrational ones sometimes). And the very fact that humans are different from animals kind of renders the entire point of this thread meaningless. You can't simple conflate the thoughts and behaviour of animals with the thoughts and behaviour of humans.

 

That tangent of yours, tells us two things:

1) There is roughly a 55% chance that, if a teen did this, it was a "non-white" teen, according to your statistic.

2) You obviously think the chances of this being done by one of the foreigners' children is much higher than that. In fact, I get the distinct impression, you believe that the only reason this incident occurred at all, was because of the presence of these "non-white" people. IOW, you harbor a clear racial prejudice. There is no reasonable cause, to feel that people whose parents came from central Asia, are more disposed to do something like this, than are white, English kids-- who are known to include their own hooligans. The kids I knew as a boy, who killed bullfrogs with sticks, for the hell of it, were all white. So was my uncle, who liked to force bugs to fight to the death for his entertainment (he ended up becoming a cop-- surprise, surprise). There is no factual basis, to see race as related factor, and yet, because of no possible reason other than prejudice, you feel compelled to go off-topic in your own thread, to point this out.

Interestingly, there is some disagreement over whether Pakistanis, in particular, but also other central Asians, are more closely aligned, genetically, with Caucasians, or Far East Asians. Socially, this is also debatable, because of the lasting impression from the English dominance, in this region. And linguistically, numerous central Asian ethnicities speak Indo-European languages, like those spoken by all of Europe. But this discussion would also be out of place, in your thread.

 

So it's OK if YOU go off topic if you can throw out some RACISM ....

racism and sexism go hand in hand