Animals

One of the longtime arguments for man's subjugation of animals has been based on intelligence.

I don't know if that's our strong suit guys. I mean sure, every once in a while one person in a few million or so comes along and advances our society or our technology or our culture, but for the most part...

Seriously. They say animals can't reason things out like we do. They only have instinct and mimicry. They can only do what they're taught.

Who taught you to tie your shoes? Or did you reason that one out on your own? Maybe it was too hard and you went with velcro. How about reading? Figured that one all out by yourself did ya?

No, you didn't. You were taught.

And you mimicked it as best you could until, eventually, you understood it well enough to do it on your own. If you were smart. If you weren't smart, you just did enough to let the person teaching you see you could do it and left it at that.

And everything you did reason out on your own, you only did because you were taught the fundamentals of how to do it. Do you think you have that same insight about the crappy relationships if you never learned to read? How about if you never learned to speak a language? All of it is taught, all of it.

Well, why aren't animals teaching things, smart ass? I know you ask these things. Well, at the moment we are killing them as fast as we can. Do you think a cow is going to come up with calculus or grammar when we raise them to late adolescence and then kill them for a burger? We take the largest and most muscular and set them aside to breed while we remove any impetus for development by providing food, shelter and restricted sexual opportunity and then demean them for being stupid.

Shows you how good we are at reason.

I want to float an idea here, just being zany. Maybe the Garden Of Eden was a metaphor for a long remembered time when we viewed the other animal occupants of this planet as more equal to ourselves. The evil started when we decided to subjugate them for our benefit and the knowledge we we ate was the understanding that as long as we continue to demean the other animals on this planet, we can never have paradise. Innocence lost, right?

Be nice to animals, they are smarter than you think.