Animals and Souls

H. S. For Sunday 092808

Hey folks,

I do not know about you, but I have always been curious about something. They say animals do not have souls. Then again, some people do not feel that there is anything special about us either. But most assume, which is really all you can do, that animals are not self aware, they do not have an intelligence that tells them they are special in any way.

These people say that animals are just dumb creatures of habits and learned behaviour. I disagree due to this reason. I have had many pets. I have had Dogs, Cats, Birds, Fish, Ginnie Pigs, Hamsters, even a Chinchilla. Every one of them seem to have had their own personality.

Each of the animals that I have had over the years have shown emotions. You know when they are happy, tail wagging, singing, rubbing up against you ETC. You can tell when they are sad, angry, and even when they are scared. All animals have distinct personalities. So if these animals do not have a soul, then how can they have emotion?

Now I'm no expert on this by any means. Just life observations. I also understand the attachment that many feel for their animals. They become as a part of the family and some even treat them as if they WERE human. But any time I see an article like this, it gets my attention. I just find this interesting. If you don't, that's fine, I'll be right back with the IWA.

Live Science. com - Bees Can Count By Graciela Flores, Natural History Magazine posted: 26 September 2008 03:55 pm ET

Honeybees are clever little creatures. They can form abstract concepts, such as symmetry versus asymmetry, and they use symbolic language — the celebrated waggle dance — to direct their hivemates to flower patches. New reports suggest that they can also communicate across species, and can count — up to a point.

With colleagues, Songkun Su of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and Shaowu Zhang of the Australian National University in Canberra managed to overcome the apian impulse to kill intruders and cultivated the first mixed-species colonies, made up of European honeybees, Apis mellifera, and Asiatic honeybees, A. cerana. The researchers confirmed that the two species have their own dialects: foraging in identical environments, the bees signaled the distance to a food source with dances of different durations.

Remarkably, despite the communication barrier, A. cerana decoded A. mellifera's dance and found the food.

Also at the Australian National University, Marie Dacke and Mandyam V. Srinivasan trained European honeybees to pass a particular number of colored stripes in a tunnel to get a food reward, which was placed by a stripe. When they removed the food, the bees still returned to the same stripe.

Next, they mixed things up on the bees: they varied the spacing of the stripes, and even replaced stripes with unfamiliar markers. The insects consistently passed the same number of markers to approach the former reward site, demonstrating that they could count, up to four.

The studies burnish the impressive list of honeybees' known cognitive abilities, all achieved with a brain the size of a sand grain.

The studies were detailed in the journals PLoS One and Animal Cognition.

This is a Bee. We know that Ants are social creatures, and like I said, I have had many pets. I don't know. I can not prove that the experts are wrong about animals having no soul, but they can not prove that they are right. Do I still think that people come first. Of course I do. However, I also feel that we need to respect all live on Earth, no matter how big or small.
Peter

Sources:
Live Science. com - Bees Can Count