Monday, October 19, 2009

Humans ARE animals

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You animal! He's such a pig. Ugh, she's a dog. These are all true...you are an animal.

Webster's dictionary defines an animal as: one of the lower animals as distinguished from human beings.

That is such bull.

It is not humans AND animals, humans ARE animals. Just because we have consciousness or intelligence doesn't make us better than all the other animals on the planet, just different. We, humans, are classified in the Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata and so on and so forth... our closest living relatives are the great apes and we are primates.

Free will, consciousness, morals, ethics - whatever we think separates us from them is only what we decided as important to make us special. But these traits don't make us any less of a vertebrate.


--Torah Kachur

1 comment:

  1. I like where you are going with this but I fear that you have fallen into the trap that you warn against. You say that humans aren't special just different because they have consciousness and intelligence, as if these traits are exclusive to humans... if anything I'd say these would be the areas where we could learn alot from the animals. You speak of intelligence as if being able to create weapons of mass dectruction is smart or somehow ofset by the fact that some of our species can also write pretty words or play pretty music. As a human you can't be blamed for your humanocentric attitudes (humans ARE just hairless monkies with car keys)but you are defining consciousness and inteligence by human standards. Animals may have a different set of rules, but at least they play by them!
    While you may have a human that isn't a complete waste of oxygen, humans as a species are greedy, ruthless and the most deceitful of the mammals, THAT'S how we really got so far, by murder and betrayal of other species, the environment and each other.
    Just remember that there was a time in the not so distant past when men were saying the same thing about women and minorities.
    If you were an extraterrestrial anthropologist from another solar system and came to observe the goings on of Earth, which species' would you qualify as intelligent... the ones who live in harmony with the Earth or the ones who have been 'monkeying' around with their tools and managed to destroy an entire planet in the geological equivalent of a heartbeat?
    Humans need to get over themselves and open their minds to the possibility that they are NOT in point of fact the center of this universe.
    Watch 'The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy' it'll explain everything.

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