“The Wild World of Animal Prostheses”

The title “The Wild World of Animal Prostheses” attracted my attention as I had never, at least in person, seen an animal with a prosthetic body part before. The article did an excellent job relating non-human animals to humans. One thing I found interesting is that at the beginning of the article I talks about how humans have the better prosthetics and that animals usually get the shoddy ones if any at all, yet at the end it is explaining how these new, better prosthetics were given to the animals first. Unfortunately, my guess is that the purpose of this was mainly to test them out rather than to help the animals first.

One thing I found odd in some of my classmates posts is that they seem to say that the animals look happy. First off, we discussed in class that we can’t really tell if an animal is actually happy, except maybe if we were an expert. Secondly, it’s not like a human couldn’t be happy without a leg and still be unhappy about missing their leg. Thirdly, I believe happiness for animals is a slightly different concept for animals as it is for humans.

While I have never seen an animal with a prosthetic limb in person, I have seen a few with a missing leg. My friend has a couple cats and one of them is missing one of their legs. While I can’t say whether it was happy or not, it seemed to be used to it and had no apparent trouble getting around most of the time. If they are able to live just fine with only three legs, I would say it is certainly not worth thousands of dollars just to get them an extra leg that they will have to get used to again anyway.