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?'
Interpretation
The quote challenges the notion that animals lack emotions and intentions, suggesting personal experience contradicts this view.
Frans De Waal's quote highlights the common skepticism some people hold towards the emotional lives of animals. It implies that those who claim animals lack feelings might not have had the opportunity to witness the deep bonds and intentions that animals, such as dogs, can exhibit. The rhetorical question serves to provoke thought and encourages a reevaluation of our understanding of non-human emotions.
In practice
In a discussion about animal rights during a conference.
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.
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.
I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.
To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false
β¦but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.
Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.
My joy is in your freedom, not your compliance. I do not want your worship, I do not need your obedience, and it is not necessary for you to serve me. Deity has no needs. "All that is" is exactly that: all that is. It therefore wants or lacks nothing, by definition.
No man is above the law, and no man is below it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.