A Quote by Donald McCaig

I do not believe you can work with animals - certainly you cannot train them - without deciding that if humans have souls, dogs do, too. — © Donald McCaig
I do not believe you can work with animals - certainly you cannot train them - without deciding that if humans have souls, dogs do, too.
Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.
I think the default position of humans is to be terrible, and we have to train it out of our children. That's just part of survival, right? Predator animals don't survive by being nice; humans are basically predator animals.
From a distance, a clone's luminous eyes are meant to draw in humans and make them feel safe. Up close, the eyes appear hollow. Because of that, humans tend not to look into our eyes too closely, which I've been told is socially preferable, as eyes without souls behind them can be frightening.
Never believe that animals suffer less than humans. Pain is the same for them that it is for us. Even worse, because they cannot help themselves.
When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.
You don’t have a soul, so you can’t be baptized. All animals are like that. I think it’s unfair and sometimes I don’t believe it. After all, what would heaven be without birds or dogs or horses? And what about trees and flowers? They don’t have souls either. Does that mean heaven looks like a cement parking lot? I suppose this is what the nuns call a theological problem.
Humans are something very different from animals, and the numbers required to get cloning to work in animals are completely prohibitory with humans.
It's not that humans and non-humans are identical... but the lack of understanding that led to the slave trade is the same lack of understanding many people have about animals today. When slaves were brought over from Africa, many people believed they were not humans, that they didn't have feelings. Many people believe that primates and other animals don't have feelings, too, but they do.
Dogs have found themselves in an odd predicament by living with humans. In the wild, dogs don't need humans to achieve balance. They have a pack leader, work for food and travel with the pack. When we bring them into our world, we need to help them achieve balance by fulfilling their needs as nature intended. This takes exercise and discipline before affection, and always maintaining your calm, assertive pack leadership.
The animals certainly like to be close to humans, especially as humans go through the shift in consciousness.
I think all animals have souls. I feel certain that if we have souls, octopuses have souls, too. If you grant something a soul, it demands a certain level of sacredness. Look around us. The world is holy. It is full of souls.
It has been an obsession of human beings to create a hierarchy that places the human species on top and lumps all the "other animals" together beneath us. The resulting "speciesism" allows us to look upon animals as less deserving of all manner of rights and considerations than humans. To support this lower status, humans have argued that animals act instinctually; don't have souls; don't feel physical pain like we do; and lack self-consciousness, cognitive intelligence, emotional feelings, morality, and ethics.
In the grand scheme of nature, I believe that it is very natural that animals eat animals, and that humans eat animals. It is only in the last couple of decades that meat-processing factories have come to rise, and I believe we should take time to reflect on that reality.
I love animals, especially dogs, as I can have them as pets too.
Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.
We believe we're seeing, in other animals, a process, or an attribute, that isn't fundamentally different from what we see in humans, so it seems to us to be spurious to call them different things. Now there are aspects of human culture that we don't find in animals, and that's really interesting, but there are also probably aspects of animal cultures that we don't find in humans, and that's really interesting.
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