How Can Animals And People Help One Another?

Jonas Vincent/Unsplash

Source: Jonas Vincent/Unsplash

A famous survey conducted in 2004 showed that our social networks are decreasing dramatically. In fact, the #i reason people are seeking out therapy is loneliness. The New York Times calls information technology an "epidemic of loneliness." And however loneliness has powerful repercussions, including earlier mortality.

The Healing Power of Pets

Those often-repeated statistics hibernate something important: the elementary fact that animals are often the ones healing the wounds of loneliness in our society. Pets are often lifelines—fulfilling not just the need for visitor, non only the need to be loved, but our own profound demand to love. Of grade this applies not just to people without other people. So many of us who have plenty of man companionship likewise feel a special bond with a pet.

Such feelings are real and appropriate. Research shows that just looking into the eyes of your pet can lower your heart rate. Their presence alone is enough to calm you down, to give you warmth, to let you experience loved and soothed. One wonderful example is companion dogs trained to recognize an oncoming panic set on who help veterans in their struggles with feet. Equine-facilitated therapy (therapy using horses) is doing wonders for troubled teens and suffering adults. Companion animals help all kinds of individuals with special needs—providing care that we humans can't or won't give 1 another. More and more people - with or without anxiety or special needs - are feeling the need for "emotional support animals." Close encounters with animals soothe usa.

Our View of Animals is Scientifically Inaccurate

Despite the power of animals to benefit mental health, nosotros employ language like "end acting like an animal" - as if animals were somehow below united states. Such language is scientifically inaccurate.

No other animal destroys its environment equally we do. In fact, in their natural country, each creature contributes to the overall ecosystem, helping maintain balance on the planet. The merely time you see a species destroying the environment is if a strange species has been introduced and becomes invasive, creating an ecological imbalance. And so the real question is: Do we go along to take part in the human destruction? Or practice we start acting like other animals and create remainder?

We oft think of animals as unsafe. But if yous look at the most dangerous animals on the planet, those that have human lives —the ones nosotros fear nearly, the sharks, wolves and bears—they are nowhere nearly the top of the listing. At the very peak is the human being, ahead of even the disease-carrying mosquitos.

Animals Take Feelings & Morals

Why is it that we don't think of other animals every bit equal to us? Why is information technology that we consider information technology animals' duty to feed or serve us in some fashion? Why is information technology that we find sport in killing them? I reason may be that we consider animals to exist "base." Nosotros couldn't be more wrong.

If you lot really look at the psychology of animals, y'all come across that they don't crave more than they demand, they don't accept more they require, and they don't destroy anything unnecessarily out of greed. In fact, they don't reverberate our basest instincts and so much as our finest qualities.

If you have had pets in your life, you know that each animal has its very own distinct personality, and an immense capacity for dearest and gentleness. Protective, caring, playful, deplorable, angry—all of the emotions nosotros encounter play out in ourselves we likewise come across in our animals.

Our most noble faculties—altruism and compassion, moral states we agree in such loftier regard—are also nowadays in rats. A rat will go out of its fashion to assist some other rat that is injured, research shows (don't believe me? Scout the video). Franz de Waal, renowned primatologist convincingly argues in his book The Bonobo and The Atheist that animals have deep-seated morals and altruism. Virginia Morell, in her book Animal Wise, interviews hundreds of scientists and persuasively argues that animals can think and feel in similar means to us. Perhaps it will take witnessing the nobility in animals to tap into the nobility in ourselves.

What We Stand up to Learn from Animals

Ironically, our greed for consuming animals is one of the major ways we are destroying ourselves. Animal husbandry is the 2d-greatest source of greenhouse gases in the world. The state of the world, with its enormous human population, will drive united states to i end—the need to stop killing animals. In a style, our electric current overpopulation is forcing us to go more empathetic.

Information technology takes boldness to go confronting the grain, to alive with compassion, to encounter nature and the animals in information technology equally deserving of life, non just every bit bolt here to serve us. But most of all, it takes heart. Animals have an incredible ability to empathize with 1 some other, to help one another, to feed one some other. All of our most cute characteristics—pity, kindness, and love—exist in animals too. It is we who stand to learn from them, not the other way around. Volition nosotros?

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