I've always found it fascinating to hear people argue that animals don’t think or have genuine feeling, and that they are merely preprogrammed for their behavior. From my experience, this claim can be made only by those who have never bothered to watch animals, to learn about them and see the complexity of their behavior and emotions.
For the sake of honesty, I don’t know if we, humans, do have true thought or feelings, or if we are simply machines programmed to believe we do. But, if we do, animals do just as well.
Any dog or cat lovers will swear that not only their pets have personality, but that they are actually human. Behavioral researcher, on the other hand, would swear that dogs believe that we behave just like them.
But feelings and emotions are not limited to our beloved pets, for any animal watcher, birds, rodents, and even reptiles all have their own personalities. No two lizards behave the same, each has its own preference, its own liking, its own emotions. Each is a unique organism with its own idiosyncratic personality.
The picture below is of our two Bearded Dragons: Mr. Spoke and Lieutenant. They both have their likes and dislikes. Mr. Spoke likes Grapes and will hardly touch his veggies. Lieutenant, on the other hand, likes green veggies and will happily snatch it from Mr. Spoke, he doesn’t mind, as long as she leaves his grapes alone. Mr. Spoke has no sense of humor when grapes are concerned.
Mr. Spoke is lazy and would wait unmoving for his crickets to come and enter his open mouth. Lieutenant chases them relentlessly. Mr. Spoke loves being handled and played with, Lieutenant prefers to be left alone.
It wasn’t so long ago that women were considered without real thinking power, or that some ethnical minorities were considered ‘animals’. This was only the reasoning and the excuse behind so many atrocities. So if you believe that animals are nothing but machines, be honest with yourself; how much of it is simply an opinion based on lack of knowledge and observation? How much do you really know about them? How much of it because it gives you excuse not to think what we do to them?
2 comments:
This was a very enjoyable post. We do not have pets because we can't bring ourselves to inhibit their lifestyles. Caging or controlling an animal seems to my husband and I, so unfair. It bothers us even to see fish in an aquarium.
I do feel that animals think and feel. We regularly feed the squirrels at our home and sit back and watch them. Each one seems to have a different personality, each one acts and reacts in it's own way while retrieving and eating the nuts we leave them.
I think it's a bit unreasonable to think humans are the only ones that think and feel.
releasing cage animals to the wild does not make them free. It makes them food
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