“2/21/2010, 1:00pm EST”
papayaaaa: Cats massaging cats
As always, the lesson I take from this kind of thing is that other animals feel pleasure and pain that is very similar to ours. It is not enough to recognize this and go back to business as usual, where other sensitive animals are tortured and killed for profit — 50 billion of them annually, in fact.
Of course, it’s pretty darn obvious anyway that other animals’ pleasure/pain sensations are very real and intense, just from interacting with them. But here’s one for all the pseudo-intellectuals and “reality-based” thinkers who yet find a way to rationalize their chauvinism when it comes to assessing the interests and lives of non-human creatures: the single binding theory of all modern biology, evolution, entails that (a) we are very similar to non-human animals, and (b) other animals must have extremely sophisticated sensory systems to survive in nature. Meanwhile, targeted biological study confirms what should be obvious: other animals have neural systems that are more than sophisticated enough to process deep sensations and emotions, and hey, they just so happen to approximate the human pleasure/pain/emotional (fear, delight, anxiety) apparatus.
Humans have a little thing called the pre-frontal cortex which, as far as I can tell, most consequentially allows us to hold all sorts of false and vile beliefs. Newsflash: that doesn’t make us better than other animals.
Never leave home without it.
