Spinoza's Dominion

quote from wikipedia Spinoza site

Animals can be used in any way by people for the benefit of the human race, according to a rational consideration of the benefit as well as the animal's status in nature.[

unquote

The Happy California Cows commercial is on...

I dont mean to single out Spinoza...or how animals are regarded in the Bible..but it's from the philosophers and the theologians that a topsyturvey regard for Nature...and the animals...has developed!!

Spinoza made breaks with traditions..and one was admitting animals were 'sentient'...a quality that didn't change their being in the dominion of humans in his philosophy! But it was better than regarding them as unfeeling kinda non entities.

I've skipped over a lot of history, and not included a lot of other views from all over the world, of the regard for animals.

I cant read Pearls before Swine in the funnies with out a kinda morbid curiosity...the crocs are always yakking about eating the zebras! For dark humor of this sort I prefer Herman's Lagoon...where the hairless apes are on the menu!

Children of all species, if set aside one another, wont eat or harm one another...there's this magic time in the early moments of life where creatures are in some kinda state of grace...they dont harm or hurt one another...and are likely to show affection for one another...

It's something of a mystery, it's said, why Edward Hicks always included a child in his Peaceable Kingdom...well, I think he was trying to get at this and show that magic time of childhood.

One might call it, I conjecture, Paradise, or The Garden of Eden.

Of course, this state doesn't last, and it's our fate to know it's loss, and question.

Pic by Erastus Salisbury Field snagged from here http://www.all-art.org/history564_naive_art.html

Well, wait...let me qualify "all species"...some of the little ones have it seems nothing on their minds more than eating whatever first comes available!!

But...but there are stories like that of the Mother Tiger, who, having lost her young, and mortally disconsolate, was given a litter of piglets to nurse...and was made happy.

Lions can be made to lie down beside lambs, if they are introduced early enough in life...I think too here of the pet hippo story on TV the other night...but in that story...and everyone who's had a pet dog knows this...there was concern that the hippo might "revert" to it's more natural state....this to say there's a wild streak that runs through...everything!

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door