Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Humans and Animals

Mother and Child (by espion)

Saw a documentary on TV today. It was about scientists studying chimpanzees.

In an experiment, a tray of food was put beside the cage of a chimp, accessible to it through the bars. But a rope was attached to that tray whose end was in another cage where there was another chimp.

What happened next was this other chimp pulled on the rope and brought the tray of food to himself, and making it inaccessible to the first chimp. The deprived chimp then became enraged, or seemingly so, and started screaming and acting violent in his cage.

One interpretation is of course that the chimp is enraged because the other chimp "stole" his food, and that chimps have a sense of justice and fair play too.

Then the experiment was repeated, but this time it was the human experimenter that moved the tray to the other cage. The chimp expressed no outrage and remain entirely indifferent to what the human experimenter did.

There is a possible parallel in such a behaviour in humans too.

When a city gets destroyed by a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a storm, humans accept it without complain or rage or sense of injustice. But when a single building is destroyed by some other human beings, a country goes to war with another nation.

Animals' perceptions of us humans, and the gulf and gap between us, is possibly a glimpse of the separation and distance between us and God. And animals are created for the sake of mankind, that we somehow can have a glimpse of God's perspective of his creation, and what it is like to relate to someone "lower" than us.

And also if we can have compassion for animals, whom we did not create, how much more is God's compassion for us, whom he has created above the animals.