End of Week 2

There has always been a blurry line between me and my relationship with animals. I do not have any pets in my life. However, I have always wanted one, but my parents think they’re too much work to take care of on top of all their other responsibilities. I also do not regularly visit any zoos. I feel as if there is a gap between us through the glass.

Overall, my perspective on animals have definitely changed. I just how intelligent they are. In Jeffrey Kluger’s Animals have brains, but do they have minds?, he states, “With or without smarts some animals are so adept at grasping abstractions, particularly the ideas of sameness and difference,” (17). I also realized just how strong their capability of thinking is. In particular, communication. In the TIME article, Animals Talk Even If We Don’t Understand Them, by Jeffrey Kluger, animals need to communicate for survival. “But animals communicate in ways that are suited to their worlds, that keep them fed and safe and alive long enough to reproduce and rear their young,” (78). I find it fascinating how animals are able to communicate to each other.

In the prologue “Into the Mind Field,” Carl Safina talks about the animal mind and asks the question, “Who are you?” Following this question, Safina slowly realizes that humans are not so different from any other species. According to one of the TIME articles, Animals Aren’t Supposed to Feel Grief. But if this isn’t Mourning What is it?, by Jeffrey Kluger, animals also mourn and have feelings just like us. “Animals are social creatures just like we are. They form relationships that for them appear to be every bit as important as ours are to us, which means at one point they must experience the end of them,” (60). Animals have feelings just like us.