Biology Week Four: The Pattern of Lfie

The damage done by the idea that animals are mindless, soul-less "stimulus-response machines" is terrible and far reaching. We hunt them to extinction for convenience or sport. We breed, cage, and slaughter them by the millions for industrial farming. We torture them into amusing us in circuses and fights. In the case of the first two examples, this leads to massive devastation of our environment.

The animal automaton/enlightened human duality hurts us in ways I see as a profound soul wound. It is a cornerstone of the Western drive to dominate nature. One result of that old belief that we are set above the earth and its inhabitants (who exist to serve us) is that we are conditioned to repress our most basic animal urges and taught to feel shame for what comes natural. And incidentally, as a result we also construct specious experiments to measure animal intelligence inadvertently designed so that the animal will fail, thus confirming our superiority.

It is encouraging to see examples of how researchers have started to recognize and address that bias. More and more studies have begun to show that animals routinely use tools, have languages with which they communicate, live in a variety of social structures including cooperative communities, have the ability to understand human body language. And maybe most importantly, have evolved specialized traits that surpass our own, the cuttlefish with the seeing skin being the most exciting (and creepy!) example from the reading.