Soma

Sacred Earth => Animals, Birds, and all our other creature friends [Public] => Topic started by: Nichi on September 19, 2010, 03:52:03 AM

Title: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 19, 2010, 03:52:03 AM

"The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality."

~Arthur Schopenhauer

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 19, 2010, 04:22:47 AM

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston - "The Outermost House"

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Ke-ke wan on September 19, 2010, 12:39:38 PM

 :-*

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 19, 2010, 01:13:41 PM

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 20, 2010, 01:55:07 PM

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous. 

~Emile Zola

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Michael on September 20, 2010, 11:23:06 PM

The new dog we are looking after until we pass him off to Julie's brother, is such a smart Collie. He was a trouble dog, which is why he's been serially rejected, so we rescued him off the grid and have been trying to humanise him for Julie's brother.

It is so pleasant to be thrust into another animal being - but his learning capacity is a god-send.

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 21, 2010, 08:40:31 AM

Quote from: Michael on September 20, 2010, 11:23:06 PM

The new dog we are looking after until we pass him off to Julie's brother, is such a smart Collie. He was a trouble dog, which is why he's been serially rejected, so we rescued him off the grid and have been trying to humanise him for Julie's brother.

It is so pleasant to be thrust into another animal being - but his learning capacity is a god-send.

If I'm not mistaken, border collies almost always make it to the top of the intelligence scales, compared to other dogs. So they can learn! 

Back when the channel Animal Planet was getting started, there was a beautiful lady who gave shows on dog training. Can't remember her name. She owned and trained border collies, and would often say that their intelligence gets them into trouble. They like complex tasks, and if you don't give them work and activity to do, "They'll make stuff up .... And you won't like that!"

She also liked to tell the anecdote of a sheep herder in the UK, an old man who would say to his border collies, "Time to get the sheep," and so they would, over acres and acres, by themselves. They pretty amazing.

Edited to add: Patricia McConnell was her name - she shows up in this video:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pORF_PVW8Q

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 22, 2010, 03:38:17 AM

(http://buriedshiva.com.au/vicky/farsh/injustice.jpg)
Injustice by Farshchian

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 22, 2010, 03:58:44 AM

(http://buriedshiva.com.au/vicky/farsh/birdsandfishes.jpg)
Birds and Fishes by Farshchian

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 22, 2010, 07:32:43 AM

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

-Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910)
What Is Man?, 1906

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 22, 2010, 07:42:35 AM

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

-Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Michael on September 22, 2010, 09:58:15 PM

Quote from: Nichi on September 22, 2010, 07:42:35 AM

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

-Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)

yes, good insight. Nice thread V.

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on October 11, 2010, 07:51:07 AM

BLESS THE ANIMALS OUR RELATIVES

 

Does anyone realize
Anymore
That the word animals
Comes from word anima
Meaning soul,
The prime animating force...
Animation...
The life force...
Leaping and jumping,
So alive.

For years
Some have insisted
Animals have no souls.

This cannot be right...
Otherwise animals would
Be named the non-anima
Instead of dear anima-ls.

We can no longer
enjoin debates, rather,
we would spend that time
soul on soul, for we see
Humans have souls.
Animals have souls.
... and we ought mention
also trees and butterflies
and mountains and
starry night sky...
anything that causes us
the goodness of awe,
has a soul...
anything, anyone
who causes other souls
to pour love & tenderness.

A Soul knows a Soul
when it sees one.

Period. The End. Return.

(ENORMOUS affirmative chorus
of bleating, woofing, cawing, mewing,
meowing, mooing, squeaking, huffing,
stomping, singing, winging, roaring
in the background...

and that is just the humans...

thence comes in on second bar
the ENORMOUS affirmative chorus
of calling, talking, murmuring,  laughing,
cheering, yodeling, nattering, chattering,
humming, drumming harumphing, thrumming
of the anima-ls...

so much so,
and in such cacophonous harmony
one can hardly any longer tell
which song belongs to which soul.

Just right.)

 

Poem: "Bless The Animals Our Relatives," from La Pasionaria, The Bright Angel, Collected Poems of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés 

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on November 19, 2010, 03:02:23 PM

(http://buriedshiva.com.au/vicky/farsh/fifthdayofcreation.jpg)
The Fifth Day of Creation

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on November 15, 2011, 04:36:26 PM

"We’re certainly a dominant species, but that’s not the same as a keystone species. A keystone species is one that, when you remove it, the diversity collapses; we’re a species that when you add us, the diversity collapses. We can change everything, dictate everything and destroy everything."

- Michael Soulé, a founder of the field of conservation biology, 2002

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on July 19, 2012, 07:10:05 AM

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

Chapter XXI
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on January 29, 2014, 07:12:53 PM

"One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.”

~ Ben Okri, The Famished Road Artwork

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on July 23, 2014, 07:00:32 PM

“How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings – to foraging black bears and twisted old cypresses – that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world… Small wonder that rivers and forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we walk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us – and if they still try, we will not likely hear them.”

― David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on August 04, 2014, 12:48:36 PM

Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made he (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one...that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

~Mark Twain~

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on August 04, 2014, 02:24:36 PM

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.

 

~~D.H.Lawrence~~

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on March 08, 2015, 01:19:46 PM

"Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is -- whether its victim is human or animal -- we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.”

~Rachel Carson

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on August 18, 2017, 12:12:25 PM

“Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how our bank accounts describe us. What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what’s bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed—we’re finally ourselves.”

~Gretel Ehrlich

Title: Re: The Creatures
Post by: Nichi on September 18, 2017, 12:52:52 PM

In case you thought, still, that humans are the only ones who use tools --

https://www.facebook.com/buffalomonkeyconservation/videos/692653807526659/?hc_ref=ARSntPjX5B6yj4SPFcmldQ-ikQCdbeoM4JKmK7vZtazVbzcSsIPlMjNlogIv4gm3Dro&pnref=story