Sam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
l33tminion) wrote2025-07-19 07:35 pm
l33tminion) wrote2025-07-19 07:35 pm
Watching the Rabbits and Bees
I finished reading Watership Down to Erica, reading to her over video call in the evenings while she was on her trip. Great book, I'm very glad that I got around to reading it. It is simultaneously:
On a possibly-related (but definitely a pretty big jump of a tangent) note, one of the thing that's been bouncing around in my head is some of the discourse around wild-animal welfare, centering around this recent post arguing against beekeeping and responses like this. It's interesting, but personally I think that post has intuitions that are wildly off from mine. Bees' lives seem like they'd be full of stimuli that would be particularly pleasant and non-aversive for bees. They routinely store surpluses, which gives them flexibility about when they gather food. Kept bees lose some of that surplus, but seem to gain quite a lot in exchange for that, and compared to most domesticated animals they're uniquely able to just leave if conditions are bad. There was also some discussion arguing the post was emblematic of the pitfalls of negative utilitarianism. Seems like there are a lot of contexts where it's easy to add (or multiply) up pains and sorrows and decide it would be preferable to succumb to the call of the void. I was also reminded of this good but really odd sci-fi short story, which took me a while to re-find based on my vague recollection and I link to without further context.
Also, it is really pleasant to stop and watch bees harvest. I've definitely spent a lot of time doing that this year.
- A fantasy story where the main fantastical conceit is "what if rabbits had mythology?"
- A war story centering around the Battle of Arnhem with the twist that the protagonists are rabbits.
- A Tolkein-esque story told in the style of something translated from another language, pieced together and recorded from an oral tradition. (And that in large part as an extremely elaborate setup for a climactic bit where one of the protagonists gets the last-minute "you could give up and join me" speech from the big bad and rejects the offer in a way that otherwise would not be getting past the censors in a book intended for children.)
- A book where prose description of flowers is a surprisingly high percentage by volume.
On a possibly-related (but definitely a pretty big jump of a tangent) note, one of the thing that's been bouncing around in my head is some of the discourse around wild-animal welfare, centering around this recent post arguing against beekeeping and responses like this. It's interesting, but personally I think that post has intuitions that are wildly off from mine. Bees' lives seem like they'd be full of stimuli that would be particularly pleasant and non-aversive for bees. They routinely store surpluses, which gives them flexibility about when they gather food. Kept bees lose some of that surplus, but seem to gain quite a lot in exchange for that, and compared to most domesticated animals they're uniquely able to just leave if conditions are bad. There was also some discussion arguing the post was emblematic of the pitfalls of negative utilitarianism. Seems like there are a lot of contexts where it's easy to add (or multiply) up pains and sorrows and decide it would be preferable to succumb to the call of the void. I was also reminded of this good but really odd sci-fi short story, which took me a while to re-find based on my vague recollection and I link to without further context.
Also, it is really pleasant to stop and watch bees harvest. I've definitely spent a lot of time doing that this year.
