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“Because we have viewed other animals through the myopic lens of our self-importance, we have misperceived who and what they are. Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge.”(Tom Regan)

A percentage of human beings don’t have any feeling for nature and any form of life. They are power hungry and not surprisingly, many of them are in the political world and the big money business. “In politics stupidity is not a handicap.” Napoleon and not surprisingly, power hungry peoples are not intelligent enough to realize that they are destroying the only planet that they have to live on.

It was a nice cartoon where a lioness was seat on a mount with her pup on her side. They watched the human world acting in the valley and the lioness said to her pup, “May be, one day, all that will be yours.”  It might very well be; even if the power hungry are minority, the ones who elect them are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught and not educated enough to question what they have been taught.

“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.” (General Omar Bradley) Their, the other animals’ world, might very well be the ones we need to learn from before the “ethical infants” trigger our extinction. Oliver is a mini schnauzer puppy. Max is a feral cat. They meet on the ground of the farm and worked instantly on a friendship. Their relation started with long observations laying on the ground, facing each other. It was a lot of ears movements, paw movements that us humans did not understand. They are different species like us but they found ways to communicate because they were intelligent enough to do not judge. “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” (Carl Jung)

Oliver was stronger and Max was faster. Oliver could have broken Max back with his power and Max could have blind Oliver with his claws, but the next day will be another play and it would be no play if, as we do as humans, one had to show his superiority killing the other. The games are about developing and furthering their athleticism and they are learning from each other. It was interesting to see Oliver trying to turn his paw in supination as cat do. He did not succeed but gained greater speed in his limbs movements. Probably due to his bouncing gaits, Oliver commences the turn before the bounce, as do horses, while Max, as do tigers, lions and others, turns at the landing. Oliver technique gives him advantage as he can corner faster. However, Max learned how to read Oliver body language and is now capable to anticipate the turn earlier. They further challenge each other as a way to prepare their athleticism for the difficulties of life, but they rest together as they share their friendship for all aspects of life.

Max was a feral cat, living on the farm. We feed him but it was impossible to catch him. We caught him once but he found his way out of the guest house in a short period of time. We did not know if Max was worry about Oliver as much as Oliver was worry about Max being out all night. The response came when Max moved in. We build a house for Max outside of our house with heater inside and we knew that Max used it but he decided to move in and this was a deep contrast with his previous intensity in remaining free. Max and Oliver sleep on the bed through the night and Oliver is looking at the door when Max is late coming back home.

Prior his decision of moving in, Max waited for Oliver the morning, seat on the ramp of the deck. He jumped down purring on Oliver as soon as we opened the door. In a world where surveillance camera and other visual technology permit to see what was just reported to our ancestors, animals care for each other and even for members of other species, more than humans. Like humans, they kill for food but at the contrary of humans, they rarely kill for fun. Basically, the specie that is lacking empathy, ethic, respect, care, is the human species. We see a lioness protecting a goat, a female dog feeding baby cats, another lioness adopting an injured fox, an elephant loving a dog, a turtle playing with a racoon, an owl liking a dog, A turkey loving a human child, lion loving a human, a tiger, a leopard. And then as the camera zoom further, we see power hungry humans, killing, starving, deporting others because they are not intelligent enough to protect the only planet they have to live on. JLC