"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds"

You know what bothers me? movies like the lord of the rings trilogy that make us yearn for an imaginary a more magical time.

We are living in the end days of that magical time right now. We don't need fantasies about walking/talking trees when there are 'magical' animals we share the planet with right now that we haven't bothered to get to know.

Some have already been wiped out, and the others, well we are working on it...

Nobody yearns to live in those imaginary places, they yearn to talk about them and think about them. The real world is far more dangerous and scary than the most treacherous fiction.

At the beginning of Dune, someone differentiates humans from animals like this:

> You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

The idea is recognizable, at least. It's antelope individually scattering from a cheetah, rather than forming a tight group that wouldn't be attacked a second time. But it's sad, and kind of funny, just how wrong it is to draw that line at 'humans'. Gorillas disarm traps instead of avoiding them. Elephants defend their friends, even across species, and bury their dead. Dolphins proactively kill sharks, and hold injured dolphins - or humans - at the surface to breath. Even octopuses, not usually understood as a social species, display clear theory of mind.

It's not just the endless redefinition of "tool use" that feels like hubris anymore. Just about everything we consider deeply meaningful, emotion and intellect and teaching and even ritual, is not a uniquely human experience.

My pet theory is that most animals know they’re conscious and know they are part of one consciousness.

Humans evolved an illusion that we are alone in an individual consciousness because it was an adaptation: the mistaken belief makes it easier for us to kill, and kill in large numbers. Which happened to work well for us. It let us kill off any humans who thought there was anything wrong with carving out a new world without regard for the cost to other creatures.

Without that adaptation we never would have created civilization.

We're very highly tuned for amplifying differences in humans. You get to know some people, and you see them as completely different. People also judge children as different from adults, when from a more objective perspective, the differences are fairly minimal. Animals don't stand a chance.

Beautiful and true

We don’t “look away”, we grant large mammals a huge degree of respect. They are just old foes in a war we resoundingly won. Allowing them a degree of parity without restarting the conflict, is just challenging.