Humankind sucks.
We are afflicted by money. We scam, exploit and blackmail people. We spend prolifically and worse yet, unequally, and worse yet, insatiably. Basic necessities such as food, shelter, sanitized water and health have a price? Even if we have money, we are trapped by our finances in that we must shape our lives’ paths within the limits of our pecuniary ability. And it breaks your heart to know that you cannot devote all of your money to worthy causes, even though people out there are impoverished and undernourished, dirty and suffering, even though you are not a callous person.
We, as humans, commit the sin of cupidity. We have the liberty to waste our days away sitting on a couch, stare at a useless contraption known as a television all day, and eat nothing but greasy takeaway pizza. We adorn our homes with non-biodegradable plastic ornaments and toxic paintings. Decorations… jeez, we are vile.
We can never agree upon anything, because humans are a bad species that are cursed with the ability to admire, to envy, to fight, to harm each other for reasons other than survival, to cheat, to lie, and ultimately, to hate.
And that is why I admire animals.
Squirrels are clever planners in that they save their food, selectively, so no food is leftover and wasted. In the same way, camels are able to survive happily on their own in vast, expansive deserts with a mere storage of water in their humps. A potato bug, although is mildly depressive, seems to function pretty well living where they live. A cheetah, copes with its environment by being fierce and speedy, and hunts hard to earn their food, unlike us, who lazily input numbers, regurgitate our literature, and press buttons, and push and pull joysticks for our daily bread.
Although a turtle is slow, it is self-reliant, well protected and peaceful. Dogs are known for their loyalty. Cats don't need environmentally unfriendly soaps and shampoos to be fastidious self-cleaners. Birds know how to be free. Elephants are wiser. Pigs are humbler. Monkeys and gorillas are better communal primates than we are. Ants are more hard-working. Dung beetles actually make use of feces, while we just throw all our crap into landfills.
Boy, why can't we be like them? We shouldn't lose some of our animalistic qualities. With a little inspiration from the animal kingdom, I think the world would be better managed, and better lived.
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Oh, by the way, Dad's postponed until Sunday.
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2 comments:
Having spent my adult life working with both exotic and domestic animals, I too, admire and respect them.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
-Henry Beston-
Each of those animals (with an exception or two) are also "prey" for another animal. Humans are outside the food chain. We are parasites. Learn to appreciate that, to revel in it.
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