THE ANIMAL KINGDOM Part 1

I was watching the movie, The Life of Pi, the story of a young man and a tiger who are stranded on a small raft-type boat in the middle of the ocean.  It is a story, in part, of how the young man survives the ordeal.  And, yes, in part he survives by using some of his human intelligence.  He realizes that the first time he blew on his whistle, the ocean was very rough and the tiger became seasick, and by repeatedly blowing the whistle when the boat was rocking, the tiger came to associate the sound of the whistle with feelings of discomfort.  The young man could then generate those feelings in the tiger by blowing the whistle even when the waters were calm.  The tiger was far less threatening when he was so discomfited.

But the major reason for the young man's survival can be attributed to his reverting from a human being to a human animal.

Some time ago, I noticed that the structure of our face..two eyes centered above a nose centered above a mouth, with an ear on either side of the face...is directly similar to the facial structure of so many animals.  Other features of our bodies are similar as well.  Now, of course, I learned Darwin's theory that we are descended from chimpanzees, but that has always been treated as something strange, something spectacularly surprising...almost unbelievable.  The Bible speaks of God creating the animals on the fifth day and man on the sixth day...the inference being that man is something other than an animal.

But he isn't.  He is the human animal.  And that, I think, is what the similarity of his physical features to those of animals was telling me.  True, he has a brain that can do things that the brains of other animals cannot do (to our knowledge):  imagine, create, judge.  But many species of animals have capacities that other animal species do not have.  Yet they remain animals, as does man.

In my view, man's failure to understand that he stands as an animal alongside all the others is responsible for so much of his pain and anguish and unhappiness, his feelings that "life doesn't measure up", and his futile search for greater meaning to his life.

In THE ANIMAL KINGDOM Part 2, I will list some of the specific errors this failure has led man to make...and what he can do, as the young man in Pi did, to recapture the skills and joys of being a proud member of the great animal kingdom.