“7/22/2009, 10:47am EST”
“Animals don’t behave like men… If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill, they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.”
— A different, desperately needed definition of dignity courtesy of a character in Richard Adams’ Watership Down. Note: Humans are animals, as vehemently as they might like to deny it when it suits them. So I take ‘animality’ here to mean embracing one’s animal nature and one’s qualitative and interactive relations with other animals. Additionally, “men” here refers to most civilizational humans and is not used to evoke all humans who have ever lived.
Never leave home without it.
