What I Don't Know About Animals, by Jenny Diski

What I don't know about animals
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Animals were before us on this planet and probably some of them will leave after the last human. In the meantime, the neighborhood relationship has turned into a miscellany of coexistence. Integrated as domestic animals or feared as wild animals. Hunted for sustenance or used as work tools. Beloved, why not say it, as pets and admired in their various capacities.

The intellect, the reason is the basic difference with any animal species. And the great derivative of thought is what leads us to subjective interpretations of its function, necessity or dispensability.

A natural law would establish an equality between species, but the differential fact of intelligence ended up subduing some in favor of others. There are animals that take advantage of human intelligence and, once adapted to their habitat, they manage to develop within it with the safety of shelter and food. Others were born determined by the imperative need to be independent and increasingly find themselves in an invaded or destroyed environment.

Meanwhile, the popular imagination has introduced the animal in its different roles, learned by humans from a very young age. But beyond what we pretend to know and know, there are always huge gaps regarding their needs and behaviors, their emotions and their real vision of the environment.

In the end, it is about looking for the history of a complementary relationship, of considering the different relationships established in so many corners of the world. Knowing the animal is knowing more about a natural environment from which we are increasingly disconnected, locked in our cities.

Jenny Diski, a writer who died in 2016, delved into this work on these and many other aspects in an interesting volume that talks about life on our planet.

You can buy the book What I don't know about animals, the latest from author Jenny Diski, here:

What I don't know about animals
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