[theblackalchemist]

With the recent technologies coming up, Researchers are able to imitate animals, and create robots that closely resemble animals
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If Such things Happen

The natural heat signature of the robot may be lost, and thus other live animals, who are bred with such robo's, may loose their sense to identify the heat signature, consequently, they loose the ability to identify the dead from the living.

If such things happen eventually to the animal kingdom, rats may start to chew on the living, and then the thermal signature, unique call signs may be lost

Is it right to intervene in such cases?


TBA

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by theblackalchemist

With the recent technologies coming up, Researchers are able to imitate animals, and create robots that closely resemble animals

As I was reminded today as I watched various little birds demonstrate their complete seeing-through of human trickery in the form of a cheap plastic owl on a fuel station roof, we humans have a long history of attempting to alter animal behavior with decoys, scarecrows, and robots of varying levels of sophistication (I’ve seen a possibly more effective version of the owl or hawk bird-scare-er with wind and motor-driven mechanism to move their heads in a hopefully realistic manner, and with speakers to play recorded hoots and cries – though none as sophisticated as Partan’s robo-squirrel).

Originally Posted by theblackalchemist

Is it right to intervene in such cases?

So far, none of these have lead to an animal behavior catastrophe anything like TBA suggest (or Daphne du Maurier wrote about in her famous story, ”The birds”), so I doubt we’ve anything to fear from The Rats and The Squirrels, or any other animal we attempt to fool with robots. Encroaching on their territory, or hunting them, is, with a few top-of-the-niche species such as elephants, occasionally a somewhat different story (see, for example, this archived National Geographic story), to the extent that I might give longer thought to aggravating elephants with robots, though unless injured or killed, I doubt even these proven aggressive animals would react in a dangerous way.

As for the wellbeing of the animals, given that the traditional human intervention with nearly every animal large enough to catch our attention is to run it down and eat it, or accidentally grind it under the wheels and other engines of our various transports and industries, I doubt any of them would, if they could express themselves to us in such terms, have any misgivings about such recent meddling as robots. The footprint of ordinary humankind on other animal species is large and heavy, next to which that of scientists studying them is tiny to the point of insignificance.

Originally Posted by theblackalchemist

The natural heat signature of the robot may be lost, and thus other live animals, who are bred with such robo's, may loose their sense to identify the heat signature, consequently, they loose the ability to identify the dead from the living.

If such things happen eventually to the animal kingdom, rats may start to chew on the living, and then the thermal signature, unique call signs may be lost

There are several reasons why I don’t think any of these risk are significant.

In the case of Squirrels and rats, neither sense prey or predator using heat signatures. If a robot were made to interact with an animal that did, such as a pit viper, the robot would have to simulate natural heat of whatever it was simulating, so no significant change in that regard would be present. There will likely not be many animal research robots compared to the size of the populations they’re used to “infiltrate”, nor will individual robots interact for long periods (for some time, I expect, making a self-powered, long-running robot will be technically impractical, and an unjustifiably expensive to any research budget), so I wouldn’t expect most animals to have much interaction with the robots.

In the case of rats, and surprisingly, their cuter-looking relatives, squirrels, they already chew with enthusiasm on each other and other animals, including, sometimes, humans.
WARNING: POSSIBLY DISTURBING GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION

My parents were ER clinicians, for some years at ERs serving poor inner city slums, and spiced up my childhood with horrible true stories of hungry rats attacking infants in their cribs, and the appalling injuries such attacks caused, as rats would instinctively nibble at an infant’s most exposed parts, the toes and fingers, sometimes making abortive attacks for several nights before a parent understood the cause of the injury, sometimes an all-out first attack. Although is seems more like a conversation prehistoric humans would have than 20th century ones, among the best advice given to parents living in rat-infested areas was to adopt a dog.

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