My entire life I’ve struggled to justify my supposed superiority as a human being in this world. I was a church-goer (for a time), and aside from trying to understand how Jonah was supposed to survive being in a whale, I didn’t get why people were so separated from the rest of God’s creatures. I know that’s a very controversial opinion to have at a school like Notre Dame, but whenever classes would try to thoroughly distinguish human rights versus animal rights, or human love versus animal love (etc.), I’m at a loss. I can’t think of any unbiased reason as to why my version of life is better or different. At the beginning of my bio-anthropology class this year, this same question was posted and I had the same answer: I don’t know.
Zoobiquity as a book kind of confirmed my hesitations and ideas which was genuinely exciting- and not even a “I’m right your wrong” kind of exciting which is when you know it’s real. There were finally concrete connections between animals and things people perceive to be *uniquely human*. It makes a ton of sense if you look at any evolutionary tree because yes, even though there’s more than one solution to any problem, there are only so many ways to get to the answer, and we all started at the same place.
