Journal Entry 27: Human v Animal

Are humans and animals all that different? Think about how some animals seem to act as if they are human. What animal behaviors of this kind have you observed? What situations have you encountered animals in, for example a zoo, your home, a farm, or some natural setting? What kinds of animals did you encounter? What were they doing? What qualities did you see that were similar to human qualities? Do animals have personalities? Do they have feelings? Explain what you think about this.

When people ask me about the difference between humans and animals, the first things that come to my mind are that humans have feelings, thoughts, and has the ability to communicate with each other. But, after I think about it carefully, I realized that some animals actually are quite similar to humans. For example, everyone must have heard of stories of how dogs and cats have their own emotions and how they are loyal to their owners and save them from fire and so on. And, some animals do communicate, like bees (by flying in a particular pattern) or insects like ants (who gives off a smell or some kind of trail for others to follow), but I just automatically assumed that they don't have any ability to communicate just because I can't understand their "language" and that there are no names for their languages. I have encountered many animals in my life, mostly from zoos and ocean parks. I've seen about every animal you can see in zoos, from the most common to the most rare and ridiculous ones. I've always loved the sea animals, dolphins in particular (I've even done a research paper on dolphins when I was 8). I thought they were cute and I knew they were very smart because of all those cool tricks they can do and how friendly they are. I guess animals and humans aren't really that different from one another, because we all have our own feelings and thoughts even though ours might be a bit more complicated than theirs. Maybe the only difference is that humans are the ones that are ruining the Earth (with global warming), and the other animals have to pay for it dearly even though it's the humans that are hurting the environment.