#2 - It's hard to be an animal

Last class period, we watched some excerpts from a documentary of Timothy Treadwell called "Grizzly Man".

 

Mr. Treadwell spent 13 Summers with the bears, protecting them and spending the rest of the year trying to convince people to support them. And then a bear ate him.

My point is not to be cynical about his death - it is difficult to write him off as crazy when he did survive for so many years. Rather, I find it an intriguing situation to see how we are like animals, and how we are not. Not least, religion plays into this, both as a motivation to try to live with animals, and as something that distinguishes us from them.

It is difficult to imagine someone closer to animals than Mr. Treadwell. He lived, often with no human companions, with the bears, for months at a time. He was willing to die for them (and he did), he talked to them. And yet, the gaps he breaches between humans and animals are much fewer than those that remain. He films the bears, he considers himself their protector, he studies them - all of these things set him apart from them in significant ways.

Evolution says that we are animals, and yet our entire nature denies it. Even when we live in the midst of them, our psychological make up denies that we are the same - whether we truly are different or not, I will not discuss here.

It seems impossible to really think of oneself as an animal. Even the awareness of being an animal, or the attempt to be one, are something that would never occur to an animal. No other living being discusses whether or not it should be considered the same category as other beings, so the discussion of the matter alone is enough to separate us. I suppose there may be people who really are like animals - but if they are, they would neither be aware of that fact, nor care to defend it, so it's unlikely we'll ever hear from them.

At the center of the question of our difference from other animals (our "dignity", perhaps) is the desire to know our purpose, who we are, why we exist. This is also a central motivation behind religion (and Religions), and one of the main questions they seek to answer. While Hinduism in a sense puts us on a similar plane as animals, most Religions give humans a special role - as something specially placed by God, or as those whom He has given the rest of nature to as a gift and a responsibility.

And really, if it were relatively normal for a human to consider themselves on the same level as animals, people like the Grizzly Man probably wouldn't attract this much attention.

I guess it's just really hard to be an animal.

Moo. (Or as a human, do I consider speaking my mooing?)