AND
I listened to the girl say: animals are cute
; then to the little brother: Animals are cute and they are good
…
Has anyone seen a herd of tigers fight to the death against another of lions in a territorial or power dispute? Well no. Animals do not make war. The king of the jungle does not exist. Between animals of different species (interspecific) fighting is regulated by survival and food chains between predators and their prey. Ethologists – biologists who study animal behavior – assure that among the thousands of species that fight, only man kills to kill. The human is an insatiable animal, and while in the intraspecific fight (between animals of the same species) it is avoided to kill the rival, the human is even the only mass murderer. The fight between animals of the same species is usually very equal or balanced, and all species have as a natural rule to solve their disputes without killing each other; in fact bloodshed is rare.
The aggression of the man served him to hunt in the fire dispute (when he still did not know how to generate it), to protect his territory and defend himself from stronger animals. But language and culture, with which humans have created science, greatness and beauty, are also the origin of war, since they have disrupted their instinctive design, if they ever had it. The human descends from primates, but is also heir to the behavior of wolves, lions and hyenas. All animals are our relatives.
For Nikolaas Tinbergen, who received with Konrad Lorenz the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973 for their foundational work in Ethology, humans are in many aspects of their behavior unknown to themselves
. The effects of our behavior are endangering the survival and worse, of all life on earth. “There are reasons -says Tinbergen- to think that the limit of human adaptation has been exceeded by cultural changes, that is why the human is already a misfit in his own society”.
What does it really mean to be very human
in the face of war and crime? Can we educate for peace? Should we first review the notion that we are higher animals?
(The hell are the others
… JP Sartre)
