It’s not all about us!

Animals don’t need no chicken soup for their souls!

There are many things that we Humans think we’ve got a monopoly over. Down the ages, science and religion have loftily agreed on one thing: We, Homo Sapiens, sit on the top of the pile. Anyway you slice it, we come out tops, leagues ahead of all the other creatures on earth. It seems we’ve simply cornered the market on intelligence, motor skills, emotions, relationships, communities, home-building… And now, apparently, we have exclusive rights on soul-ownership too. No other creature has a soul, declare many spiritual leaders and ideologues, with the kind of overconfidence that only our species can display. Read any paper’s quotations from some soul-merchant’s thoughts, flick on your TV to the morning’s outpourings of spiritual haranguers, and most of them – black, white, brown, yellow, pink and blue - are talking smugly about how we’re Higher Beings.

Take this little nugget from a daily paper: "Rejoice in your human body. It is a sacred vessel for the soul (so far so good). It is the only body in the whole of Creation, which is the perfect medium for attaining God. Beasts are not so fortunate; they have no souls." Now my question to this gent (and others of his ilk) is: Who told you this? How do you know? Are the words "No soul" stamped on the underside of all non-human life forms?

On TV the other day, a distractingly handsome (now my soul is really going to rot in hell) godman caught my attention. I began listening. And then I heard him say: "I sometimes wonder, when I look at households which keep pet dogs and cats. What use are they to these people? Why are they keeping them?"

Now I thought this wise and handsome type was calling on the world to stop keeping pets, and asking us to release them kindly into the forest or some such thing. Looks like this guy is cute and an animal lover too, I thought. Wow.

But no. He carried on: "Why surround yourself with these soul-less creatures, these creatures cursed to walk on four legs?" And then with a frown on his noble forehead, inside which he obviously carried all the wisdom of the ages, he railed and ranted at us: "By keeping these animals, are you learning and practising for your next life? Are you practising for when you will be forced to be born as a cat or a dog, without benefit of soul, intelligence, emotions, or the ability to recognize your Maker?" I was spellbound by his supremely smug countenance and the smirk that he allowed himself, when his devotees tittered and murmured in approval.

At such utterances, I can almost hear the bulbul in my backyard clicking with impatience, my older dog sighing in resignation at human hubris. Just because we have the use of language, and can coin words like ‘soul’, is that proof that we are sole owners of a soul and no other creature can have one? What a verbal trap: I Speak therefore I Am!

Then there’s that other much-quoted human construct. The famous question: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Call me over-literal, but my counter-question to that oh-so-clever question is: Hello, when a tree falls in a forest, how can there be NO ONE there? Maybe there’s no Human there, but there are thousands of creatures, who not only hear it loud and clear, but whose lives change with the falling of the tree. That the Human ear isn’t around to hear this tree fall is just one of those minor details in the much larger scheme of things. Not a defining moment for the Universe, for godsake. While humans may ponder this question endlessly, a thousand other life forms will think: Whatever. And they’ll just continue going about their business.

How fantastically human-centric we are! We’re taught to feed birds and cows and crows, mainly so that we build up our credit with our Maker. A sight I once saw in a California park was revealing: An Indian woman walked down to the edge of a pond and plonked her prasad, along with its aluminum foil, for the birds. Right under the ‘Please don’t feed the birds’ sign. So what if the migrant geese choked on the dal, ghee, sugar and aluminum foil? Behenji’s soul needs her to feed the birds, and feed the birds she will.

Many of us actually believe that nature serves no greater purpose other than to fulfill human needs. Only a handful of the wise and the spiritually inclined seem to have the humility and the experience that tells them that we’re not on top of a heap, but that we’re all part of the larger interconnectedness of being. Fortunately, there is also a whole bunch of ordinary people living in close proximity with animals – dogs, cats, goats, camels, lions, tigers, elephants, dolphins, whales - who know better than to dismiss animals as some lower form of life that is living out some kind of sentence, waiting to be reborn in the Kingdom of Man!

So, for all chest-thumping Humans, here’s some food for thought. Firstly, anyone who has interacted with animals for any length of time knows not to ascribe all animal behaviour to ‘mere instinct’. Animals display a whole range of so-called ‘purely human’ attributes: intelligence (including logic and reasoning, planning even); and emotions (joy, grief, jealousy, mischief, hurt, humour, regret…the list is long). And at the risk of being called sentimental and accused of projecting human feelings on to dumb animals, humans who work and play with these animals will also tell you another thing: These creatures have soul. Cartloads of it.

The great thing is that animals don’t need any word or definition for soul. They don’t need to go in search of their souls. They don’t spend their lives fretting over where their souls will be parked once their bodies are gone. Animals simply are. In the here and in the now. And if that isn’t having soul, I don’t know what is.

The next time one of those beautiful lumbering temple elephants is walked by its keeper down your street, hand a banana or a coin, not to the man, but directly to the giant creature. Feel his (or her) soft breath on your hand as he ever so gently takes your offering. Look into those soft, amused, kindly eyes. And then decide, who has soul and who doesn’t.