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Animal Sentience
I love it when a plan comes together. I love it when science catches up to my childhood ideals. It’s getting more and more difficult for anyone to use the catch all dismissal that human are ‘anthropomorphizing plants and animals.’ Trees communicate. They make sounds. Mushrooms have 50 words in their vocabulary. Dolphins have names for themselves. Koko spoke sign language, and used abstractions beyond any previous belief that animals could do so. Recently, science says fish can do math and hold abstraction. Octopuses have cities, and they are much more social than scientist previous observed. And now, this just in, orangutans have dialects! Mind you, not too long ago orangutans were seen using spears to fish, emulating the humans they saw doing that very thing! Symbolic language acquired vicariously through observation? It may be time to have this come to Jesus meeting on the fact that plants and animals are doing much more than we have ever acknowledged.
This 1967 movie, Doctor Doolittle, is so underrated and likely so far ahead of it’s time that people just glossed over it. It was a call for an existential change in human relationship with nature. This movie was a call to being more spiritual, in tune with the world we share. Not own, share. Not recognizing that fundamental piece of information has made us bad stewards, and bad life…
