What really separates us from animals?
To support publication of her wonderful book ‘How to Be Animal’ by Melanie Challenger. This animation reviews how we think of ourselves.
Are humans unique in that they understand death? But what about elephants – don’t they mourn?
Humans use tools, right? But dolphins put sponges on their beaks to forage in sharp coral. We have culture…fashion? Chimps have cultures too and even put blades of grass behind their left ear.
Melanie Challenger explores these ideas in her brilliant book ‘How To Be Animal’ which inspired this animation. It looks at how and why each of us lives divorced from ourselves and our animal nature and what that costs us, nature, and our planet.
The book asks each of us to re-evaluate our human nature. To listen to what Darwin actually said. There is no ‘progress’ towards us, evolution is blind. That we are clever apes, but not Gods. That there’s beauty and worth in other species – worms to mammals – though we often refuse to see it.
Revising our approach to our planet depends upon revising our relationship to the co-created nature of ourselves and our world.
