Imagine

            Some people will say that humans are superior to animals in the sense that people have an imagination.  They can imagine things that are not there, they can plan ahead and look back, and they can create something that is completely new. 

            While watching a show on Animal Planet that tracked a lion pride in Africa, I noticed how a lion cub, after having eaten her mother’s kill, started playing with the leftover flesh and fur of the carcass, pouncing towards it, running from it, and attacking it as though it were prey.  Is this an example of imagination on the lion cub’s part?  I think so.  Clearly the animal is training for the future, for the days when she will be the one on the hunt for food, but what’s also clear is that the cub has the ability to imagine that that piece of animal skin, once belonging to the animal she just devoured, is something other than itself.  In the cub’s mind, it is something alive and it is a prize to be had. 

            Anyone who owns a pet can probably attest to their animal’s imagination as well.  A young cat chasing a string or walking away with a toy mouse in its mouth, acting as though it has just had a triumphant kill, clearly knows that the mouse is not edible, yet pretends as though it is, in much the same way that a little boy will play with “army men” toys, yet in their minds be right in the thick of the action.  Doesn’t that count as a form of imagination?  If the animal couldn’t imagine, then the toy mouse would simply be a toy.  For both the human child and the animal, it is all a part of growing up, of training the mind and body for the future, for survival.

            Just because animals may not feel the need to build skyscrapers or travel into outer space does not mean they lack imagination and creativity.  They build their shelters differently, using the Earth and nothing more.  They don’t have labs to create synthetics and break down materials into their simplest, elemental forms to be recreated into something different.  Perhaps they don’t bother re-evaluating the way they do things because they’ve been doing it with such a high level of success for hundreds or thousands of years, sometimes longer than humanity has even been around.  Why fix something if it’s not broken, right?  They evolve as they should, with least effort; and with the changes of the planet, not against it.  So a bird species may build a nest the same way over and over again, but it’s because that species has already spent the time perfecting it, and it works. 

Humans, on the other hand, misuse their imagination and creativity.  Missiles and weapons used for destruction; irradiation of food, land, and sky; poisonous building materials; prescription drugs and vaccines laced with chemicals that alter the body’s natural processes and create more disease; waste in outer space; and plastics that never break down---these are some of the things that human imagination has created.  I’m not sure we should be so proud. 

            In the end, there is not much differentiation between the human animal and animals of other species, if you truly observe their behaviors and don’t simply attribute it all to instinct.  I think there is a level of intuition, imagination, and connection to the Source of Life that animals understand on a level that we have not yet touched.  They look too different, and they don’t speak our language, so we automatically assume that they are dull and mindless creatures, following deeply embedded instinctual codes of survival.  But I give them much more credit than that.  Our horrendous laboratory testing of animals may yield results that prove they dream as we do, or that they have cognitive abilities beyond what we first imagined, but all of that is unnecessary if only we stopped and observed, truly observed with an open mind and heart, just how perfectly adapted other species are at surviving. 

            And I’m sure the caged animals being exploited by humans imagine themselves free, or they wouldn’t be fighting to be back in their wild habitat, they wouldn’t be sad in their isolation, they wouldn’t cry, and they wouldn’t go mad.  I’m sure the elephants, who visit the spots where their kin were laid to rest, have the ability to remember the past.  I’m certain that the ape who keeps holding her baby, imagining that it is still alive days after its death, can remember and can wish that it isn’t true, just like we do when we lose a loved one.  And I’m sure all the animals of this planet that we are quickly destroying, thanks to our “imagination,” can envision a future, if only in their minds, of the way it should be---maybe because they can remember, in their soul memory, what it was like before we creatively began to take the world apart.   

- Lisa Selvaggio

(Originally Posted 2/20/10)