What is it about animals that fascinates us? We can watch them and be with them for hours, and if we work or live with them – we get connected and attached to them in such a way that if something is happening to them – our heart would break.
Almost with all animals, not so with all human beings, not in all situations.
The question is: what is so special about it? Is it the fact that we have it with most animals, or is it the fact that we don’t have it, (at least not to the same degree and intensity) with all human beings?
For example, in hospitals; would we find the same degree of care and personal commitment that we would find at the vet or at the house of a family having a pet (any pet)? And if not, why not?
Well, one reason is the being of the animals; animals have a pure, radiant, uncovered being, easy and free to connect to – being.
While us human-beings – have our being hidden and covered by a conditioned and a conditioning acquired – social personality, which leaves no room for authentic contact.
This causes alienation, which is completely absent between us and any animal, (who’s being was never socially conditioned).
Another reason is humanity, yes, yes, humanity. Apparently, we, human-beings lost the ability to have human warmth and humanity, as a natural communicational quality, for example, when someone comes to his friend and says that he is in a big crisis (for example: the love of his life is abandoning him), would his friend give this most needed quality of: humanity and human warmth and compassion, or like most people, he would give a practical advice: (“get registered to a dating website”)?
Well, in the absence of the pollution of social conditioning (power struggle, subconscious status differences, discriminations of the special, the sensitive and the different and the weak) – the relationship between human and animal would be free of any social pollution, so humanity, human warmth, empathy and care – could flow freely between them.
(More about the power of sociatie’s influence in the essay: “Emil Durkheim’s radical teaching”).
Gabriel