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I once had a patient who was a zoologist. To say that this guy loved animals is to say that water is wet. He knew everything there was to know about what seemed like each and every one of them, having grown up in the mountains and oceanways of his native North Carolina. He treated the natural life in New York City with as much reverence and curiosity as in the southeastern nature trails. He was more devoted to his dogs than anyone I have ever known, including me, and I’m a serious dog lover. My respect for his respect for living things was through the roof.
Once, we were talking about evolution, and what it means to be evolved, and he blew my mind wide open by saying that humans think they are more evolved than other species, but they’re not. We’re not. Evolution isn’t a hierarchy where some species are inherently better than others. It’s not a linear progression toward complexity or intelligence, and it’s definitely not a competition where one species ends up better than the other.
Ask a person if they think they’re more evolved than a slug and I bet they’d say yes. And yet, like us, the slug is at the height of its evolution with its optical tentacles, its sensory tentacles, its respiratory opening (called a mantle), and its perfect foot fringe, which generates rhythmic waves of muscular contractions that allows it to move. Its vestigial shell is internalized and serves as storage for calcium salts, and works in conjunction with digestive glands. I could go on! You, reader, are an animal, a perfectly built bipedal primate, and the slug is an animal, an exquisitely constructed shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusk. You see? Same plane.
With precious exceptions, we live today in a world of presumed human preeminence. What does it mean to be human? Resisting that. Being conscious of that, and then resisting that. Staying aware of how the pernicious fiction of human superiority undergirds not only the way human animals brutalize other kinds of animals, but how humans