Recently, a friend mailed the link to a 14 minutes video in which Anna Breytenbach talks with a black panther in a South African wildlife reserve. Since its rescue and arrival in the reserve six months earlier, the panther was unmanageably aggressive.

Persuaded by a common friend, a very skeptical reserve caretaker invited Anna Breytenbach, an animal communicator, to make contact with the panther. The result of Anna’s half an hour conversation with the panther shook the caretaker to the core, and changed forever the behavior of the panther, who became quiet and peaceful. So much so, that the panther got a new name: ‘Spirit’, instead of his old name: ‘Devil’.
Intrigued by the video, I gave the matter some thought, supported by more recorded conversations with animals on YouTube, old documentaries on the lives of animals and two – three books and articles.

What follows is the result of my musings, readings and movie watching.

The word ‘animal’ comes from Latin ‘animalis’ and means: ‘breath’.
All organisms that breathe belong to the kingdom called in Latin ‘Animalia’. This encompasses human animals and animal animals, yet in day to day language, we use the words ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ as if the organisms they designate belong to two distinct orders of being.
In reality, humans and animals have a broad common base:

Both are born, age, and die. In order to survive, both need to eat and eliminate waste; both need a favourable climate and both need to reproduce for the continuation of the species. The senses are similar too: both see, hear, taste, smell and feel emotions, including pain, fear, sadness, grief, anger, joy, jealousy, love and happiness. Both need company, guidance, protection, safety. Both have an innate intelligence which enables them to live a satisfying life. Irrespective if one has a naked skin, feathers, fur or scales, or if one is small and the other comparatively large, we all share these basic features.

Of course there are many differences as well. A cat can jump ten times its height, a dog possesses three hundred million olfactory receptors and can therefore whiff a rotten apple in a million barrel (we possess six million), marine crustaceans see the spectrum of our visible light and of ultraviolet, infrared and polarised light, sharks detect half a billionth of a volt, beetles sense fire tens of miles away, elephants hear infrasonic sounds, smell water at great distances and sense seismic activity, iguanas detect in sand temperature differences of two degree Fahrenheit, birds are endowed with GPS’.

But human beings have social skills. Isn’t it this that sets us apart from the other animals?

Well, no – overwhelming empirical data reveals that the social organisations of animal animals is often more complex than the social organisation of human animals.

It includes collective deliberation, division of labor, ritualised conflict resolution, diverse forms of cooperation, educative punishment, self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, rules for being recognised as a leader, sophisticated courtships.

Many animal animals, among other rats, monkeys, elephants, bats display more mutual solidarity than humans.

Vampire bats don’t let another bat go hungry: they regurgitate ingested blood in order to feed the unhappy fellow who that night did not find food. Yet they recognise each other and remember the past, which makes cheating a perilous undertaking – the cheaters are soon identified and punished.

Lack of cooperation ends too in punishment: monkeys who fail to call other members of the colony when they find food, are hit when discovered.

An elephant Matriarch has to have the discernment and strength to follow her head instead of her heart in situations of great peril. Only one who knows the great caring heart and the depth of elephant love can appreciate the immense wisdom and strength they display when leaving a dying calf behind in order to save the whole family.

About self-sacrifice: Jules Masserman investigated how macaques respond to other monkey’s suffering in a laboratory experiment in 1963. How would they behave if they knew that securing food would give an electric shock to another monkey?

Masserman’s monkeys often prolonged their hunger rather than seeing a fellow monkey receive a painful electric shock. One monkey refrained from taking food for twelve days. The monkeys’ behaviour demonstrated beyond doubt their empathy, compassion and aversion to cause pain.

The same year 1963, Milgram did his first famous experiment with human animals: 65 percent of the participants administered to their subjects increasingly stronger electric shocks, including the final massive dose of 450 volts.

I find the results of these two experiments, Masserman’s and Milgram’s, disturbing.

What I learned in school as hard facts, and heard countless times in conversations – brutish or simply dumb humans pejoratively called ‘animals’, appear to be prejudices and self-serving biases.

The mind-body-spirit of each species leads to different sense acuity, perceptions, world views, behaviours and languages, as well as to different kinds of knowledge.

The intelligence of the animal animals is the intelligence they need for their lifestyles. The intelligence of human animals is suitable for our lifestyle. What would we do in New York with the intelligence of a hippopotamus living on the banks of the Nile? What would my cat do with my intelligence of an urban academically trained working woman?

Besides being intelligent, animal animals are prescient and wise, as has been demonstrated in many experiments and reported by many human animals in documentaries, non-academic and academic books and research papers.
You doubt it? Then read: ‘The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World’ by A. Merrifield.

Actually, animal animals can be more prescient and wiser than human animals. Human animals can be, and too often are, more primitive and ignorant than animal animals.

Primitive humans are not primitive because they are ‘more animals than humans’ – no, they are primitive because their humanness is not developed. They are stuck at the bifurcation between humans and animals, they have only a rudimentary ‘animalis’ base, and this makes them primitive.

The concept that human animals are superior to animal animals is wrong. It is a fallacy, thousands of years old.

Human animals have befriended a number of animal animals – cats, dogs, horses, cows, sheep, donkeys, goats, elephants, camels. These animal animals with whom we live close, who help us in many tasks, are our friends. We have moved them away from their natural habitat and bound them to us. We are responsible for them. We have to protect them and care for them. We have to work together in harmony and gratitude. Everything else is a perversion.

I rebel against the notion of ‘the animal in us’, often conceived as our ‘lower side’.

We do not have any animal in us. We are animals.

We share a common base, an ‘animalis’, with the other living beings on this earth. Animal animals are as evolved as we are, and often more. There are individual differences both among animal animals and among human animals. One cat may be wiser than another cat. Only one female elephant is the Matriarch, not all female elephants. Not all human animals are sages, and not all earn a Nobel price.

But any elephant is wiser than a primitive human.

You doubt this? Well, read accounts of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, D.B.E. 1992 UNEP Global 500 Laureate.

We, human animals, can communicate with animal animals and they can communicate with us. Right now only especially gifted people can do this, but we can all achieve their skill.

We can learn to breach the language barrier between our two species. This barrier we have built ourselves millennia ago. We can learn to translate from one language into the other.

It seems to me that the language of the animal animals resembles the language of unconscious parts in our psyche, of human animals. When the unconscious is addressed, for example, during a hypnotic trance – during an alternate state of consciousness, these two languages display the same structure, the same pattern and have the same flavor. The language of the unconscious is much more sensorial than the language of our daily consciousness – it consists of images, feelings, emotions, smells, tastes, and acoustic signals. The same is valid for the language of animal animals – it is sensorial, it consists of images, feelings, emotions, smells, tastes, acoustic signals.

In order to be able to communicate with animal animals we have to silence and bypass the language of our daily consciousness – which is much more abstract, and we have to anchor ourselves in the language of direct experience. This language of direct experience is the language of both our unconscious and of the animal animals, and carries meanings.

Concisely, the language of the unconscious in us and other animals is the sensorial language of direct experience carrying meanings.

By learning to communicate with animal animals, we learn to communicate as well with ourselves, on a deeper, hitherto unconscious level.

We may be convinced that we consciously shape our lives with our daily consciousness, but this is far from truth. The level from where our life is shaped is in the unconscious, in the hidden meanings it carries.

You doubt the possibility to communicate with animals? Well, look up on YouTube videos with Laila del Monte, Olga Porqueras, Anna Breytenbach, Martha Williams, read their books, talk to people who have worked with them.

‘We need another and wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals’, wrote Henry Beston, described as a man ‘in search of the great truth’ on the plaque dedicated to him by the National Literary Landmark.
I agree with him.

The lives of ‘domestic’ animals are constrained by us. Yet our lives are also constrained by collective deeds of our own species, like social and economic upheavals, natural phenomena such as climate change, earthquakes and floods, and invisible forces which make events turn unpredictably.

Under the overt domination of animal animals by human animals, there is a covert undercurrent of domination and constraint for our species too.

We stay all under the sway of Destiny, whatever definition and name we may give to it. We may call it Dharma, Moira or Tyche, Parcae, Adonai’s Will, Quadar, Nature, Karma – whatever the name and its definition, its meaning is the same: there are invisible unfathomable forces out there who detain the ultimate power over our lives.
Any given moment the fabric of our lives ca be torn, stranding us at the edge of an existential Abyss.

Just as we constrain the animal animals, invisible forces constrain us. If we want these invisible forces to have mercy on us, we have to have mercy with the animal animals, whom we have befriended long ago and whom we have misused and mistreated.

In the face of Fate we are all equal.
In other words: we are fundamentally equal.

It is written in Buddhist texts that only human animals can reach liberation from the ordeals of Fate, suffering and death. And that human animals can also come back in a ‘lower’ state, that of an animal animal.

It is stated in the Bible that God gave human animals the right to dominate the animal animals.

Well, I don’t believe this anymore.

I think that these scriptures are wrong, or have been adulterated with time by ignorant scribes and passed from generation to generation as Gospel truths. I believe that to conceive of animal animals as inferior to human animals, sanctioned by fallacious religious dogma, was the first step in our process of alienation from the ultimate metaphysical truth of existence, and thus the first step to an existential downfall.

It may be bold to assert that both the Bible and Buddhist scriptures are wrong in this regard, but this is what I think. I don’t forget that the Bible asserts that the woman was born from the man’s rib, being thus his inferior – pure bunkum, but through millennia the cause of injustice, pain and huge loss of human potential.

Besides, there is the legend that in a previous life Gautama Shakyamuni had met a hungry tigress with cubs, and offered his flesh as food to her so that she could feed herself and her cubs – a deed in contradiction with the assertion that Gautama Buddha considered animal animals as lower to us.

Back to the ultimate metaphysical truth, which is this: there is no ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’, there is only equality. We are equal with everything surrounding us, and everything surrounding us is equal to us.

Between us human animals, there are differences only in the degree of grasping and enacting this ultimate metaphysical truth.

It is often stated, both by natural and metaphysical sciences, that the ultimate truth is that everything is One. Well, physically, on quantum level, this is certainly true. But as soon as we leave this level, things take a shape and a corresponding content. The quantum level is the closest physical level to the metaphysical level of the ‘unborn, pristine, undifferentiated’ consciousness. Yet without shape and content, no manifestation.

Creation may be One, but it is One in Many. And, from the point of view of Creation, the Many are mutually equal. One of the reasons why it is so is the fact that there are no phenomena with an independent existence. Our Sun exists due to electromagnetic, gravitational, intra nuclear and decay forces, due to Helium, Hydrogen, and the surrounding cosmic configuration. I exist due to my parents, due to the physical food provided by the Earth and plants, by animal animals and human animals, and by the culture the human animals have created. The Sun in our solar system is what it is because everything else in the Cosmos is not it. I am who I am because none of the six billion human animals who inhabit the planet are me. Everything exists and is defined by everything else.

We are all different, interdependent and equal.

This is the ultimate truth regarding Manifestation. To deny any aspect of it is to estrange ourselves from it.

There is no scale along: ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’, there is only the scale along: ‘primitive’ and ‘evolved’ in relation to the ultimate truth.

Yet is seems that we can barely think in categories which do not employ ‘superior to…’ and ‘inferior to…’

By severing the communication channels between us and animal animals we have found it possible to ignore their pain, anguish, grief, despair because of the way we treat them.

Modern animal farming and vivisection in ‘scientifically advanced’ laboratories tell the tale of how primitive, how wretched we are.

If we have ever been in Paradise, then human animals were expelled from Paradise not because they ate from the Tree of Knowledge but because they ate from the Tree of Ignorance. The whole history is upside down.

In order to grasp better our predicament, with such severe consequences for ourselves and our animal animals friends, I did two thought experiments.

In the first one I imagined that all animal animals have left the Earth. I saw endless processions of wild and tamed animals, endless shoals of fish, from giant to tiny, endless flocks of birds, myriads of insects disappear one after the other into the unknown. The biggest and final migration ever. The last to leave were the bees. No paw, tail, wing, fin, fur, feather was any more to be seen, and a deep silence descended on Earth. Their absence had immense practical consequences – no wool, no cotton, no eggs, no buttermilk or cheese, no fruits, no vegetables, no nuts, no grains, no coffee..…..only the products offered by grasses pollinated by wind. No pets. But worse than that, almost impossible to bear, was the pain caused by their departure. An abyssal grief, loneliness, feeling of abandonment, despair overpowered me.

In the second thought experiment I conjured the opposite: human animals conceive animal animals as equal. As a consequence, they understand their language, communicate with them as naturally as among themselves. The ensuing experience is difficult to describe. The Earth became indescribably more alive, more abundant, more felicitous. I heard, sensed, saw, even smelled and touched, and understood, elephants, whales, bears, horses, grasshoppers, spiders – they played with me, told me jokes, explained things to me from their perspective, complained to me, consoled me. I felt loved, accepted, understood, and part of a much bigger, warmer, safer, and more supporting environment.
For a short while, I was in communion with all living beings on Earth. It was blissful.
There is a way back from the estrangement: recapturing step by step a worldview underpinned by the concept of equality.

Human animals and animal animals are equal. If we can conquer this concept, and live accordingly, we take a step in the ascent to Paradise. The Earth ceases to be a place of bloodshed and sorrow, it gains, or re-gains, its quality of the Garden of Eden.