Here is an inspiring video of a dolphin basically asking a diver for help – and then getting it. Events like this confirm to me that animals are not different in kind from humans. I know that religious people like to say that God made the animals, and then he made man and woman. We also like to rationalize that somehow we’re the crowning of the animal kingdom, and therefore we have the right to use and abuse animals as we see fit – and hunt and kill them when it pleases us.
There are so many examples of animal intelligence, the video below being just one of them, that clearly illustrate thinking, planning, collaboration, interspecies trust and interspecies communication. There is nothing that we have that dolphins don’t have, other than – we grew up on land and developed digits that we can use to manipulate things, like tangled fishing lines – and dolphins grew up in water and developed advanced echolocation techniques at the expense of having digits.
Watch this video and then tell me again that a dolphin is “just an animal.”
Lovely.
Lovely?
Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog magazine, wrote an editorial several years ago noting how man’s definition of “intelligence” kept changing as animals were discovered who met the definition. For example, intelligence used to mean “tool-user.” Then a monkey was seen pushing a stick down an ant hole and pulling the ants out to eat them. So the definition had to change. But Schmidt’s editorial wasn’t really about that. It was about WHY humans felt the need to distinguish themselves from everybody else.
Reblogged this on momi74siddhirgonj.
This really touches my heart. Thank you for posting it. My VP character, Johanna, feels like an outsider because she strangled a Chimp who attacked her brother when they were kids. It looks to me like Dolphins might be more human in the good sense than even Chimpanzees. Sometimes I get the feeling that dogs have the highest emotional IQ of any species, including humans.
Talmage
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