The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.
Interpretation
Children often find a pure and joyful connection with animals that is simpler than their interactions with other people.
Frans De Waal highlights the unique bond that children share with animals, emphasizing how this relationship can provide immense joy and comfort. Unlike the complexities and challenges often encountered in human relationships, the love from pets is unconditional and straightforward, allowing children to experience a deep sense of connection and happiness.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation about the benefits of animal companionship for children.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.
Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'
Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than _x000D_ bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.
Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.
Typically, we get annoyed when our spouses complain. We get defensive. But, really, when your spouse complains, he or she is giving you wonderful information about what would make him or her feel loved.
She was disappearing a little more each day, so thin, so frail, a wisp of smoke. One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her.
A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.
Somebody close to me once said, 'Oh, no man will ever accept your children.' And I just thought it was the most horrifying thing someone has ever said to me in my entire life. I was determined to find somebody who would make that not true.
I try to open up my heart as much as I can and keep a real keen eye out that I don't get sentimental. I think we're all afraid to reveal our hearts. It's not at all in fashion.
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