ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE, TOO “Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and it said to Balaam, ‘What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?’ . . . The angel of the Lord said to [Balaam], “Why have you struck your donkey these three times?” ~ Numbers 22:28, 32 “Animals are people, too.” I used to say this with some regularly years ago – before I ever dreamed of becoming an animal advocate and when I was blissfully unaware of philosophical controversies over what makes a “person” – because it seemed self-evident to me that animals were unique individuals with their own viewpoints on the world and were therefore “people.” Fast f...
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ASK THE ANIMALS AND THEY WILL TELL YOU: A LOOK AT ANIMAL SENTIENCE, PART TWO ANIMALS, EMOTIONS, AND AWARENESS After a year Louis Leakey arranged for me to go to Cambridge University to work toward a PhD in ethology. There I was criticized for my lack of scientific method, for naming the chimpanzees rather than assigning each a number, for ‘giving’ them personalities, and for maintaining they had emotions. For these, I was told sternly, were attributes reserved for the human animal. I was even reprimanded for referring to a male chimpanzee as ‘he’ and a female as ‘she’: Didn’t I know that ‘it’ was the correct way to refer to an animal? ~ Jane Goodall [1] In Part One of this series on animal s...
ASK THE ANINMALS AND THEY WILL TELL YOU: A LOOK AT ANIMAL SENTIENCE, PART ONE ANIMALS AND PHYSICAL PAIN “But ask the animals and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that hand of the Lord has done this? In His hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being. ...