Wednesday Afternoon

Why is it that we claim that animals and even insects can sense fear, yet when we suggest that an animal is showing a certain emotion we run the risk of one thinking that we are somehow humanizing them? When I was a little girl I had a beautiful cockatiel that used to console me, and listen to me cry and even wipe the tears from my face with her beak. Skeptics would say it was because my tears were salty. Ants bury their dead, bees fall to the ground in devastation upon arriving to find their nest ruined by honey thieves. I think that animals and insects feel deeply and that we are a little arrogant to think that because we are more advanced, our brains a little more developed, that we are capable of greater emotion. I think of it a bit like children, they have fewer words to use to express themselves but their feelings are just as powerful, and sometimes their few words more powerfully express a thought than an adults complete sentence. Our relationships with animals are powerful and our connections are deeply emotional. We are here together to learn from one another, not to control, and I know with every bit of my four chambered heart and my complex brain that we are more "animal" than we know and that they are more "human" than we think.

A beautiful story Wesley the Owl.