http://www.cracked.com/article_19191_7-bizarre-advances-in-animal-cyborg-technology.html
This article is highly relevant to our discussions of animals being used and manipulated for the benefit of humans. In We3, the dog, cat, and rabbit are given exo-suits that weaponizes them and their instinctual behaviors in order to create killing machines. Although we currently do not have such an extreme example, there are many instances in which we’ve taken nature’s elegant and efficient designs and used them to our benefit. One example shown in the article is the use of bees’ olfactory systems to find certain scents. Bees are trained to extend their proboscis to specific scents, then put in different compartments. When a bee detects the odor it is trained to respond to, we can observe how it extends its proboscis and can infer that a certain odorant is present. The exploitation of animals demonstrates an interesting and thought-provoking idea that as smart and as innovative as humans are, we often simply cannot best nature’s designs. This idea is demonstrated in Descartes’ Animals as Machines. Although Descartes says that humans are superior to animals because of their ability to use language and to think critically, the fact that animals often have biological advantages to humans demonstrates that this superiority that we think we have may only be based on our biased view of what constitutes superior. Why should the ability to think make us superior to animals that can smell, see, sense, and survive better than us? Although it may seem obvious that critical thinking is more important than any of these facets of life, we cannot forget that this belief comes from our biased and limited perspective of being human.