There Is No Such Thing as a Dumb Animal

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By Jenny Griffin Humans have been purported to be the most intelligent animal for centuries, because we are ‘blessed’ with rational thought. Other members of the animal kingdom have been given a kind of hierarchy according to how close they come to human intelligence, which apparently is a good thing. Consider this from another perspective: that of intelligence borne of millennia of evolutionary transformation that has made all creatures on Earth what they are today. We assume that animals are without awareness or consciousness because they stray further from their wild roots and become domesticated, but what if this is a lesson for us instead? Take the cow, the mild-mannered queen of domesticated livestock. We assume cows are lacking intelligence because they follow each other to their very deaths without too much struggle, yet have we ever really stopped to consider that perhaps the cow has evolved to become more and more docile over time in order to reflect back to us the level of our own lack of empathy? Just how docile do they have to be before we realise the extreme cruelty of mass production and its underlying message that if something can’t speak or rationalise in the way that we do, their value is in some way diminished? How compliant is it necessary for them to be before we discover that we don’t have the right to control the life and death of something else, another soul, simply because we have the capacity to form words and ‘intellectual’ thoughts?
OM Times is a leading voice of the Conscious Community with articles covering the full spectrum of Conscious Living. Click here to see all we share.