Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'
Interpretation
The quote challenges the notion that animals lack emotions and intentions, suggesting personal experience contradicts this view.
Frans De Waal's quote highlights the common skepticism some people hold towards the emotional lives of animals. It implies that those who claim animals lack feelings might not have had the opportunity to witness the deep bonds and intentions that animals, such as dogs, can exhibit. The rhetorical question serves to provoke thought and encourages a reevaluation of our understanding of non-human emotions.
In practice
In a discussion about animal rights during a conference.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.
Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than _x000D_ bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.
Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.
When there is no mind, you are in yoga; when there is mind you are not in yoga. So you may do all the postures, but if the mind goes on functioning, if you go on thinking, you are not in yoga. Yoga is the state of no-mind. If you can be without the mind without doing any posture, you have become a perfect yogi. It has happened to many without doing any postures, and it has not happened to many who have been doing postures for many lives.
There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.
No man is so great as mankind.
deeds cannot dream what dreams can do
I feel as if I am an ad for the sale of a haunted house: 18 rooms $37,000 Iβm yours ghosts and all.
I remember that throughout history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always...whenever you are in doubt that that is God's way - the way the world is meant to be. Think of that and then try to do His way.
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