Animal Minds (Animals)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, May 27, 2011, 18:46 (4928 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: Here's one area where dhw and I have much in common: Animals. The first 15 minutes of this podcast contain one of the most... amazing human/animal stories I've ever heard in my life.
> 
> Matt, I think there are many areas where you and I have much in common. But I guess it's the differences that keep us both on our toes!
> 
> Many thanks for this really amazing piece. Of course the experts have to try and pooh-pooh it, but the divers themselves seem in no doubt of the whale's intentions. Why are so many humans incapable of recognizing the fact that in order to survive, other animals have to have social and communicative skills, to form individual relationships, to feel things both physically and psychologically? These skills and feelings are not human inventions but a shared inheritance from our common ancestors. You could hardly ask for a more heart-warming illustration.-I don't know if you listened to the *entire* broadcast, but when the experts are allowed to move to opinion, they opine that clearly animals possess some kind of sentient consciousness... we just have no way to prove it beyond becoming one ourselves. But that whale story... its making me take vegetarianism seriously for the first time. What right do I have to declare myself superior when I clearly cannot *know?* The actions of that whale are so clearly deliberate. Thanks? Maybe. I think heartfelt comraderie.. attachment... maybe even love? I don't tink its fair to "humanize" in the sense that a whale feels in the same way I do, but clearly this MEANT something to the whale... later in the same show there is an instance where a seal protects a diver. I'd check it out...

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