CERESUltra

Music Nerd, Author, Yote!

  • She/they/it

30s/white/tired/coyote/&
Words are my favorite stim toy


jeroknite
@jeroknite

I don't know how anyone could spend any amount of time with non-human animals and not think of them as a type of person. They have thoughts, emotions, and needs just like everyone else. They're just as alive as you are.

Look into a cat's eyes, and you can see it. That thing they claim is "humanity". The thing that's supposed separate "us" from "them". The thing that makes "us" "higher", and "them" "lower". There's no separation, it was always a lie.

But I guess I shouldn't expect better from a society that doesn't even treat other humans like they have "humanity"


Cania
@Cania

this is not unhinged, it is simply true. our dog was a fucking clown. he literally did stuff to make us laugh, and he would do stuff that he thought was funny simply because it was funny.

his favorite trick was to go under a blanket, and then when we'd call him he wouldn't come, and we'd have to go find him. and then once we got in the room he'd start wagging his tail under the blanket but he still wouldn't move. it was a game to him!! he loved it!!

one of our two cats likes to sic the other one on us. if J is hungry, she'll go harass her brother W because she knows he'll start bugging us if he's annoyed, and he's much more persistent than she is. so she just sits on her tower and watches him annoy us until they get fed. it's so "human" that it hurts.

like, there are two completely compatible ideas about animals: animals have alien intelligences, and what makes us "human" is not special to humans. animals can be mysterious creatures that we don't always understand, but our "spark" is not at all unique.

the idea that we are "above" animals can (probably (i'm not a historian)) be traced to the same ideas that create eugenicists. making a hierarchy of creatures based on "intelligence" and "humanity" is not a useful metric and only leads to very stupid ideas.

anyway long post to say "YES, YES A THOUSAND TIMES"

edit: censored my pet names, realized that is sort of identifiable info lol


1-811005161
@1-811005161
This post has content warnings for: animal death.

Noxulous
@Noxulous

This is why i wanna befriend crows, squirrels and other animals, i like them, and i want them to like me too.


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in reply to @Cania's post:

they are!! i commissioned a drawing of all three of them together for my wife because they never got to meet. i got a tattoo for my dog after he passed, very good dog that i will never forget

We are "above" animals in the same way we are "above" children, that being we actually aren't but have a responsibility to respect them, care for them in the ways they need to thrive, and to not bring them harm with our actions.

"Intelligence" isn't a single number that goes up and down depending on the creature. It's a collection of different faculties and ways of understanding the world that are often unrelated. I am less emotionally intelligent than most dogs. They will pick up on the emotional state of humans, other dogs, and even cats (in the case of a few I've known) and respond to it, while my dumb ass will blunder into making someone's bad day worse by not being able to read the room. A squirrel will bury food in some nondescript spot in the woods and then be able to come back for it months later when the ground is covered in snow and any visible markings are hidden, while I will lose track of the glass of water I set on the counter for 5 seconds. A crow remembers faces better than I do, and is able to describe people to their children so that they too will recognize them without ever having seen them.

Just because the average human's intelligence ended up being in linguistics and tool usage doesn't mean we're better, just that we happened to be given the means to fuck things up for everyone else and need to work to prevent that.

We are "above" animals in the same way we are "above" children, that being we actually aren't but have a responsibility to respect them, care for them in the ways they need to thrive, and to not bring them harm with our actions.

I think this is the best way to put it. It's a power dynamic thing, basically.

I've had three cats so far in my life.

The first seems pretty standard in hindsight, but because we didn't know what to do and just fed him whenever, he got into the habit of always begging for food at all times. We would also let him outside sometimes and he'd always come back eventually, even that time it took him like five days.

Second cat was fed at extremely specific and regular hours so he isn't constantly bugging us for food. He also absolutely hates being picked up and will whine the entire time he's in someone's arms, unlike the other two mentioned here.

Current cat is a fun and energetic tiny fluffball whose favorite bed is someone's lap (unlike the other two mentioned here), and she's the sweetest thing.

All three of the cats I've closely interacted with in my life have had radically different personalities. None of them were just running Standard_Cat.exe. Anyone who thinks animals don't have the ability to have different emotions and personalities either hasn't spent any time caring for one or is as emotionally stunted as they think the animals are.

Our minds aren't special, our brains just focused on that stuff in particular. This is like if an olympic sprinter started claiming that no one else can actually run because no one can catch up to him. Nah bro we're running too, you just do it better.

in reply to @1-811005161's post:

Yeah a lot of people are talking about pets and it's the duality of having had several pet rats and also understanding snakes gotta eat.

It's also how we treat livestock we are going to eat. I like eating chicken, I do not like seeing chickens raised en masse with 2 square feet of space and a thousand neighbors to get sick from