dianaiad
Well-Known Member
Only in the sense that the chimpanzee is 'all one collectively' with a sea slug, psychoslice. Now don't get me wrong here: I think all life has value and deserves respect. One should not go about pouring gasoline down an ant hill and setting fire to it just for kicks and giggles.
However, the incontravertable FACT is that humans have the ability to wipe out almost any other species of living critter off of the planet (perhaps not cockroaches...but pretty much everything else)...AND we have the ability to both understand that we can, AND to appreciate the consequences AND to do something about, oh....not doing that.
We can alter climates. Make fertile farmland out of deserts, and deserts out of farmland. We can stop rivers and make canyons into lakes. We can drain swamps and destroy inland seas...and we have. No other animal can conceive of that, though there are animals that can actually DO that....at least some of that. We are the only animals who can see ahead to consequences....
And we really are the only animals who can truly talk to one another. Dogs do not speak to one another. They can SIGNAL one another, but that's not language. Whales sing...but that's not communication the way we do it.
Human ability to communicate and 'do' things is so far above that of any other animal on the planet that if we are like them, it is only in that we are born, we live, breathe, eat, mate and die. WE can decide whether any of the other animals are born, live (or how or where), breath, eat, mate and die. We have the power to do that. Whether one believes that this ability is given to us by Deity....or we just somehow stumbled into it through evolutionary adaptation, the result is the same; BECAUSE WE CAN, we are now responsible, and we ARE different.
Those who don't take that responsibility, and acknowledge the difference, are abandoning their responsibility TO all those other animals.
There seems to be a following of 'eagle watchers' online. I'm one of 'em....we have put cameras on bald eagle nests in several places in the USA. Everybody is very careful simply to watch and see the eagles mate, lay eggs, hatch the babies and raise them until they fledge. The idea is that we just...observe and don't interfere.
Except of course, we do. Last summer it was seen that one of the nests was unstable, and likely to collapse this season...so after the eaglets fledged and the family left, the forest service repaired the nest so that it would not only remain stable this year, but for many years to come.
That same year one of the nestlings in another nest suffered a misfortune; it fell out of the nest. Now in the 'wild,' that nestling would have been toast; dead within a day or two, but the watchers went in, rescued it, took it to a rescue sanctuary, fixed its injuries and released it to the wild at about the same time its nest mate fledged.
Could a dog do that? A Chimpanzee? A whale? ANY other animal on the planet?
No?
Well, there you go. WE CAN, and therefore it is our responsibility to deal with that power responsibly, whether any of us like that or not. We are NOT just part of the 'great chain of life,' because our brains have put us pretty much in charge of it.
Sure, I'd like to go dancing sky clad and feeling the togetherness with the universe, but we...just ain't one of 'em any more. We are RESPONSIBLE for them BECAUSE we can alter their lives so drastically.
