Hominids and other species

From her behaviour I know she is a complex individual with different moods, capable of feeling sad and elated, tender and caring. She can also be obstinate, self possessed and cocky, oh and willful. She clearly has ideas and puts them into operation in her own way. I can't know if she thinks in the same sense as we know the word because I know little of her language, but she certainly dreams, and experiences REM just like us. As with humans, other species only know what it is to be a member of their species. This may sound like a truism, but it's at the centre of the mind trick most humans play in order to put their species at the centre of the world and so diminish all other species.

We can speculate, and we can observe closely, like chimpanzees have been observed, but to dismiss all other species as incapable of experiencing pain or distress is dishonest and clearly wrong. Our view should always be 'why wouldn't they feel pain?' rather than a convenient assumption that they don't. Pain is, after all, a mechanism to enable the individual to protect itself and survive; a pretty basic instinct really. In the case of mammals, we know they share just about every organ we have, and also have a complex nervous system.

At the root of our obsessive self worship is the sheer admiration of our cleverness, which enables even inadequate individuals who would never survive in a real jungle, and barely survive in the concrete one, feel superior to other species, even though they have no knowledge of how the digital watch on their wrist was made or works. It still makes them feel superior to a dog who knows what time of day it is from the angle of light, the calls of birds, the smells in the air, and a lot else we'll never understand. My close relationships with dogs over decades have taught me that they possess powers we barely know exist, such as telepathy. How else would both dogs get to their feet and come and stand by me expectantly when I had a passing thought on looking out at the sky of maybe taking them out for a walk down to the river? How else would my dog suddenly turn, run back to me and nudge my pocket other than I had just noticed the ball in it banging against my body?

These are but two examples of a common occurrance. Just because we think our verbal languages so expressive and refined, so superior, we dismiss any other language as basic, enough for the creatures survival needs. But a German Shepherd we once had, called Breca, was so tunefull and sad when she crooned along with music, you could easily imagine her emotional response was pretty similar to a human listener. Her preference for certain operas and Gregorian chant might be dismissed as containing similar note sequences to the ones wolves employ, but the same could be said of a human response. Considering our species' long association with wolves/dogs [same genome despite all the nonsense about wolves] it seems strange that so many of our species understand nothing of theirs, yet all dogs seem to have an understanding of the relationship and what makes us tick.

They have guarded for us and herded farm animals, given warning of danger and saved individual humans from death, found both live and dead bodies, carried important supplies and messages in wartime, helped control out of control crowds, guided blind people about their daily lives, told deaf people when they have callers, detected explosives and performed for us. Is it perhaps the fact that they lick their gonads that makes some people think they are superior to dogs? But they lick their gonads, and everything else, because they can and to keep themselves clean and healthy. They are obvously equipped intestinally to cope with that or they'd have succumbed to the 'not fittest' fate long ago from widespread dysentry.

Too many people are obsessed with 'cleanliness' and hygene and go to ludicrous lengths to distance themselves from the natural world. These artificials douse their bodies with smells to mask their natural body odour, de-odourize and sanitize everything not moving, attempt to zap everything living and then they suffer from gastric problems because the natural flora and fauna of their body has been zapped and is no longer doing its job. Trouble is, our species developed a ludicrously large brain which we still barely use, an opposed thumb that enabled us to join the species that use tools, and then along came a palate capable of producing more subtle sounds than previously. The rest is, as they say, history. All the bad stuff as well as the good is the result of the over-endowed brain's boredom with mere survival, and spare capacity to indulge in other things.