Cohabitating With Animals

Spend some time actually learning about animals and a pattern shows up: far more of them are smart and social than we tend to assume. Dolphins are the ones I keep coming back to. And that assumption, the one that paints them as dumb creatures, is convenient. It makes it a lot easier to injure an animal, or to kill one and cut it open, if you have already decided there's nobody home behind the eyes.

What pushes a person to prove their power by taking a life, or by dictating exactly how another living thing gets to live? When I first went into psychology, I simply accepted that experimenting on animals was part of the deal, one of the standard uses we had for them. I never questioned it. People who follow Christianity, and people who hold to reincarnation and karma, tend to carry a different sense of this: they expect to answer, somehow, for the way they treated animals.

The book of Genesis hands humanity dominion over the rest of creation. But the arrangement reads as a benevolent dictatorship, not a license to wreck things. Many American Indian traditions frame life alongside nature as a duty rather than a possession. The land and its creatures are on loan, given over for safekeeping, and abusing them breaks the terms.

So much gets handed to us over a lifetime, and the way we look after any of it says plenty about whether we actually value it. Pausing to say grace at a meal is one small, ordinary way of acknowledging that.

Research is starting to suggest we can cause harm to plants too, something that mostly went unexamined until recently. Our obligation runs wide. We share this universe with a great many others, and that comes with weight.

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