Guys at work have been feeding this huge spider for a year

they really ought to work on their videography technique.

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Feeding it will not keep it from killing you, should it have an opportunity to do so. sgtcrispy is mistaken.
This will prove to be his undoing.

I dunno. They’re arthropods, sure. And they’re definitely more closely related to each other than either are to any chordate.

But there are still some pretty practical differences a few hundred million years introduced between decapods and insects. I’d be cautious about assuming a derived feature is likely present in another, different group. (A bit like expecting minnows to have thumbs because primates and fish are relatively close, evolutionarily speaking.)

Possibly my single favorite GIF.

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Players handbook?

used to work at a coastal hotel that had an infestation of crickets (oh the noise)
so I’d feed them to the reptile shop as a reckoning

Admittedly, the spider will have to either eat live insects or die. I think what really surprises me is the psychological compartmentalization of: This is charismatic megafauna and I would never hurt it and whosacutlittlepuppy? v. It’s just an insect, let’s capture it and feed it to a predator for fun.

I’m not blaming anyone here, ultimately there isn’t a whole world of difference between actively feeding a spider and just letting it live in your shop, catching prey on its own. But some curious behavioral switch seems to flip here.

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Sure. But feeling and learning from pain does have distinct evolutionary advantages, and very few disadvantages. The question then is whether sentience (the ability to suffer and feel pleasure) follows from a demonstrated ability to learn from pain. I’m not advocating for all rights to all types of animals or even suggesting that the guys in the video definitely did something wrong. But I’m very interested in the implications of this research and in giving animals the benefit of the doubt rather than treating them as disposable objects.

Charismatic is pretty subjective, since the predator being fed here is a spider. Even though both spiders and puppies are (or were, in the puppy’s case) predators, I don’t really see how this is is significantly different from keeping any other spider as a pet and feeding it crickets.

I don’t think any research implications are necessary to promote that. That’s just good sense.

But maybe feeding an animal with another animal it was evolved to eat should not be problematic, independent of how sensitive to pain the prey animal might be. (An example that is problematic is human beings who boil lobsters alive—or boiling anything alive, really.)

(It just now occurs me to wonder how fried crickets are made for human consumption.)

Australian resident here. That’s not a huge spider.

THIS is a huge spider.

image

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The hypothetical puppy also eats animals, they’re just most likely mashed up and served from a can.

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Knife, spoon, etc.

The huntsmen we had when I was in Japan weren’t that big but they were sizable and also fast as hell and prone to popping up from behind my computer desk where MY NAKED LEGS AND FEET WERE AAAAUGH!

Sorry.

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I watched the video. Ffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuu…

And then I got to @infinitejones’ post.

…ccccccckkkkkkk off!!

Sometimes I hate being 'Strayan.

Agreed!!!

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I thought in Oz the smaller the spider the more deadly?

Yep. 1e. By the inestimable Dave Trampier.

Don’t care. Hate them all. Except daddy long-legs, they’re ok.

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But do you let opilionids get close enough for identification?