The animal instinct in me
People are animals but not exactly. In fact, we’re actually really bad at being animals. We can’t run very fast. We don’t have fur. We don’t have claws. We don’t have venom or horns or any natural weapons. We couldn’t take most animals in one-on-one combat. Strength-wise, we get body-checked by so many animals that it’s a true wonder we managed to be the surviving species of our homo erectus ancestors.
Fortunately, we’re smart and have thumbs and that happened to be the winning combination to ultimately make smartphones and shoot rockets into space and that gave us the collective arrogance to decide that, since animals lack the capacity to use smartphones and shoot rockets into space, we’ve surpassed every other animal by leagues. We also decided that we’re superior to animals in every way so we eat them and farm them and ride them and hunt them out of extinction because using smartphones and shooting rockets into space wasn’t enough of a flex, we apparently needed to show animals that we could single-handedly be the next big mass extinction event.
Do you reckon we’ve hyped ourselves up a bit much? I’d say so. I think maybe there’s some animal attributes that we could subscribe to more. Have you ever seen animal documentaries? There are some animal behaviours that I think are genuinely inspirational and could be a good blueprint for us as a species that evolved to make smartphones and space rockets.
For starters, we put way too much emphasis on spending our lives working and not enough time enjoying the fact that we’re alive on this planet. The average lion sleeps 16-20 hours a day. Tigers sleep 18-20 hours a day. A lot of animals in the wild spend a few hours a day hunting to eat and sustain themselves and the rest of their time lounging around. Why don’t we mimic this? After all, we don’t have to worry about predators sniping us anymore and modern medicine keeps us healthier than we ever expected to. Perpetual productivity isn’t something animals do and they have constant threats around them but we, in our cozy air-conditioned shelters and food supplies, can’t destress and live life a little?
Animals, being unable to speak, are also really good at facial cues and unspoken communication. We’re not the worst but we could be better. For example, therapy dogs have consistently shown to be great for children growing up with autism. Dogs have empathy levels so high that they’re able to sense the feelings of people much quicker and more accurately than most people can and, as a result, are able to connect with kids with autism in ways most people struggle to.
While we’re talking about dogs, I’ve always loved how unabashedly a dog will ask for love. They aren’t self-conscious about being perceived as too needy. They don’t worry about how they look. They aren’t worried about their reputation. Animals, generally, have no concept of shame and it’s so admirable – can you imagine? If something scares you, there’s no bravado, there’s no posturing, there’s just a tail between your legs and a mad dash towards the opposite direction. If you want love, nudge your head against each other and ask for it. There’s an honesty to how they express that we could really benefit from and it’s something I appreciate so much. We could benefit to being less image conscious and more honest with how we express our feelings.
I used to have a cat and, one day, his kidneys shut down and he was nearing the end of his life. My first thought was dialysis because that’s what I would have wanted and I’d want to live another day and see another sunset and have another meal but I did some reading and realized that animals don’t perceive life the same way we do. They don’t have dreams of the future. They don’t have a sense of self or a maddening pressure to accomplish. If they’re in pain, they want to be free from it and death is an acceptable solution to it. They don’t care about sunsets or food in the future. They care about the now. They’re so in the now that they have no regrets or feelings of melancholy over their lost futures. They exist in the now so much that putting them out of their misery is exactly what they want. We choose to live in suffering, we have the capacity to make choices like that, but I don’t know why. We need to be more open to prioritizing quality of life over quantity of life.
If I had to be reincarnated, I’d still choose to be the dominant species of the planet but I’d hope that, by then, we’ve worked out how to be the best version of ourselves. We could learn to be more empathetic. We could learn to live in the now. We could learn to relax more and not waste our lives in perpetual toiling. We could learn to be kinder to each other and understand each other more. We could be more honest with our feelings. What good is human intelligence if we can’t value some of the best parts of our animal nature?
Writer: Abhay Gupta