Child takes a better look at some bugs
My father was the first to voice disquiet over a preoccupation I developed as a child, the first to warn me that I had taken it to extremes that made the activity abnormal.
It was creatures, mostly small ones, that were central to this preoccupation, so much so I spent hours observing them, and it didn't matter which kinds. I would catch grasshoppers, little insects, birds, millipedes, whatever could be placed into a restrained space where they remained available for close scrutiny.
And I think it was at this point when I learnt to step into their sense of time.
According to my father, this was the point when I would lose my mind. Living, communicating with humans would be difficult from then on, placing me into the category of the mentally detached or mad.
Nothing of this came true. In fact, the very opposite is what has transpired in my life.
I have done an outstanding job of showing I am fitter than most at a whole lot of those activities that can be considered typically human, with a whole string of achievements to bear witness to this fact.
For example, I showed a more than average uptake in the difficult subjects in school.
There was even a time in my childhood years that I parttook in a physics competition in which the requirement was that we go to a place where something technical was taking place, for instance a telecommunications installation, get an engineer working on the project to explain how things worked, understand as much of the lecture as possible to be able to explain it to judges and, if possible, make a model of the installation.
Best if we could somehow create a working model.
I chose for my project the nation's railway network with emphasis on how trains are tracked and how stop lights at railway crossings are engaged. After being given a tour by an engineer there, I built a working model of the main component in the devices that regulated the switches involved, the relay.
Central to the operation of the relay is the electromagnet, and so I didn't see much preventing me from including all machines that used the electromagnet to function in my project.
I built a working model of an electromagnetic motor and proudly showed it off to the judges alongside a working relay, a model train that ran on a tiny railway with names of stations, a switchboard with the same stations next to lights that lit up when the train was at the location so that controllers could monitor its location. I also sketched a small road that crossed the railway line and set up lights that warned when there was a train approaching.
Well, I won the regional and provincial titles. I came first, and though our country was developing, the standard I brought to the competition would have done well in developed climes, I surmise, and if there is any doubting the judging standards, then FYI the judges at the competitions happened to be westerners and indian secondary school teachers.
So much for going out of my way to prove I am a sane, functional human being, at the risk of sounding like I am still just a geek, racially biased, even if by way of academic achievement, which would by most estimates represent overkill, or bragging.
But I digress.
I think this early start in my observation of small creatures has allowed me to know much more about them than would otherwise be possible had I not learnt to step into their sense of time, as such allow me to read their body language more effectively.
All this, in turn, has made me a master at discerning hidden facts about us humans and our bond to other mammals.
I have kept parrots, and observed that they also do much of that which would be considered the preserve of developed, highly evolved humans. They can laugh, and this is not observable through their beak, it is too hard to warp, but through their eyes. They can mock as well and find fun in so doing.
I once introduced a smaller bird into a cage filled with parrots and, to my dismay, whenever it went towards the food and water, it got mocked by way of deliberate and repeated toppling over. The parrots used their beaks to lift it by the leg, causing the small bird to trip, and I started considering putting it into a separate cage for fear they would move on from mere mocking to harming, until something else considered the preserve of human beings started happening.
Firstly, I noticed that each time the little bird fell, its body language spoke of embarrassment and the parrots' was all mirth. But soon, the tiny bird started standing its ground. It would fall but pick itself up and confront the parrots in a manner that made getting hold of a leg difficult. It was standing up for itself, as it were, eventually causing the offending parrots to back off.
And there is more.
I lived with people who kept broiler chickens. Because I do not have the heart, each time they started slaughtering them I would make myself scarce. One day I returned earlier than I normally would to find the slaughter in full swing, only to learn that in the midst of such an event, some chickens, especially the ones being passed by because they are not big enough yet, start defending the others. They can get vicious while at this too, biting at the feet of human intruders.
This particular case, this particular time, I observed that the protecting chicken appeared to be distraught as well. May just be me but the creature appeared to be shedding tears. And there was this unmistakable smell of tears in the air.
Not one to worry about being considered insane, I concluded an activity considered the preserve of humans also occurs in these lesser mammals, and it is not just in chickens, so my experience goes.
Either there was something nearby fooling my nose into smelling tears or the birds were really crying. That this same smell would repeat when my cat cornered and played with a mouse for hours, before finally eating it, sealed the case for me.
My nose could not be the thing that was being fooled here.
These observations have enabled me to make the realisation there is no interdependence between consciousness and brain size, that the size of the brain only points out the amount of work the brains have to do.
Creatures like human beings that do much more have bigger brains to cope, while others, such as apes, that will never require to possess the balance required to pass a thread through the eye of a needle, have the smaller brains to go with this.
Both, however, will posses a consciousness of their surroundings that is as adept at being awake as the other. You see, there is such a thing as sight, and if the wholeness of the viewed image represented the wholeness of consciousness itself, then what of the known fact an image seen by human eyes is never superior to that which a dog's eyes generates?
This is how consciousness works, and the entity within a creature's mind that generates it is small enough to fit inside the head of the tiniest of microscopic insects that displays consciousness of its environment and responds to stimuli as is required to survive and breed under the various circumstances that may arise.
This entity isn't bigger in humans because they are physically capable of much more.
Relative intelligence is a concept that deals with those capabilities that are controlled by growths to the mass of meat in the head called brain matter, not raw consciousness itself that is a generated entity that possesses its own intelligence.
And now that we know so much about other mammals, is it not regrettable that we cause them such suffering? Why, oh why do we make our own kind suffer so much, and eat them after the torture, too?
The issue here, again as far as my rationalisation go, is evolution, in particular the separation made millions of years ago by mammals from plant life.
It is all rooted in survival, in this case a point in time when it must have become necessary for some plant life to move in order to live on.
We all must know that some rare plants can chew prey, meaning they possess a means of digesting what they chew, a stomach, thus, but then these specimens of plant life cannot be considered mobile because the movement from a hot place to a cool one, for instance, is impossible with roots dug into the earth providing the other bit of their sustenance.
In order to become free as a way of escaping the circumstances that portended demise, or chasing after food, the roots have to be removed from the earth and placed in a sack that can be carried along, a sack into which sustenance can be poured as the creature finds it.
As soon as this evolutional change is perfected, nothing prevents the mobile creature from placing its own kind into its food chain because, now, the nutrients it requires can only be found second hand, by consuming creatures getting their nutrients from the earth, and this obviously entails a digestive system capable of taking nutrients out of whole plants, and also of mobile creatures that are of the same kind.
Its all about what you find appetising, and vegetarianism accepts but a limited part of the whole that is dietary.
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