Giving a Struggling Hedgehog a Leg Up

I'd go with the list of animals they consider sentient. Apes, certain birds, dogs, etc. Even then, I think it would only be a second-hand understanding of altruism. They would be thankful for the help, but wouldn't necessarily understand why the human was doing it.Most interesting of all is that while we know what is normally good for these animals given what we learn at school, via documentaries, etc, they somehow just seem to intuitively grasp that we are in distress and need to be taken to shore.Which is scary given the implications. If they can grasp some concept of altruism (aiding a distressed person, or coming to a boat/diver when they need to be freed from a net etc)...what do they think of all the other shit we get up to? Such as when we swoop in and take members of their pod.

I remember my environmental science teacher back in high school commenting that often something like an endangered jungle cat or monkey is often used as the poster child for an environmental movement because they are what evoke an emotional response in the largest number of people. Cute and fuzzy vertebrates are relatable, and if you want to save them, or at least their wild population, then you need to save their environment as well.I specifically prefaced my statement like that because I didn't want it to be lumped in with some "save the whales" political cliche or a bleeding heart, but rather as a more objective "hey there is clearly something different about these handful of species to a degree that we should uniquely revise our treatment of them".

I think the hunting bans are predominately due to conservation/low population. I'm talking about a ban based on the virtue of their intelligence, regardless of a stable population and including capture as well as hunting. I wouldn't wax overly sentimental. Dolphins for example are known for headbutting creatures to death, sometimes I believe their babies even, and sometimes just for fun and when the creature is no real threat at all. While creatures can express behavior and we always want to attribute human concepts to their behavior you have to remember that they don't share the same emotional set we do, they do things for their own reasons and more often then not when we see human like behavior its more coincidence rather then our mental states being overly aligned.

I get where you're coming from. A few years back there was a female Orca off the coast of Cali hunting sharks for sport, just eating their livers. I know that male dolphins are rapey and kill juveniles to force the females to mate again. Chimps wage systematic war and eat peoples faces. I'm not aware of any fucked up things elephants do other than the occasion village rampage. I've read about how difficult it is to compare intelligence across species, and how people are prone to inaccurate projection.I mean, imagine you're out in the wilderness, starving, and a huge terrifying looking bear comes out of the woods right at you, giant scary teeth and claws, and... he hands you a cheeseburger and goes back into the woods. I imagine it's like that.