I was just reading a review of Wild Justice that included the sentence: “Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of ascribing morality to animals because it seems to threaten the uniqueness of humans”…

Nothing could more succinctly demonstrate how neurotic a species we are. How amazingly insecure are we, the Rulers of the Earth, the ‘paragon of animals’? It used to be that we relied on an absolute division between us and ‘them’ – a distinction insisted on by our holy books – for are we not, after all, made in the image of God…? When Darwin punctured this conceit we regrouped behind other barricades – our language, our culture, our tool using, our ‘reasoning’ – as researchers have brought down each of these in turn, we have scurried to a new defence… All of them seem to me to be something akin to: but do whales sit in rocking chairs smoking pipes and reading magazines? Thus we move the goal posts to make sure we always win!

Isn’t it about time that we grew up – that we started finding confidence in what we are within ourselves, and accept that we are one animal among many…? The sooner we do that, the sooner we will stop behaving like spoilt children…