Ob-Jecting

It started this week with a teacher talking about her student’s objection to her defining a noun as pertaining to a “person, place, thing or idea.” The student, a Buddhist monk trying to learn English, asked: What about animals? Her suggestion that animals are nouns because they are “things” The monk objected to the teacher considering an animal an object.

Temple Grandin, in an article entitled, “Animals Are Not Things” discusses the neurological complexity of different animals and that a key differentiator for contrasting a thing, such as a screwdriver, with an animal that is not a thing– is feeling pain or fear.  For her that is the line of demarcation between a thing and an animal. Dr. Grandin is known for her work with cattle and minimizing their pain and fear—the article reflects her advocacy for protecting the rights of animals (albeit ones with nervous system complexity) from suffering.

Dr. Grandin raises a further interesting question about the human notion that animals are property. What seems to motivate this line of inquiry is her sense that humans own things. So, if animals are indeed not things, then how can we own them? She cites a movement to shift language used from pet owner to pet guardian but acknowledges that we have been buying and selling animals for millennium and that animals are seen as property, not only legally, but in our human narrative—our sense of dominion over nature (falsely) calls for ownership.

As a first step in addressing our attitudes toward animals it would be useful to not treat them, as Dr. Grandin suggests as things. Why not add to the dictionary definition of noun: “a person, animal, place or thing?” We then can enlarge the list further by adding much more of nature that does not fit into any of those categories.

This week ended with a story of the love of a child for her dying pet. The pet might easily have been considered a thing, but for the child, her pet was a friend, her pet was not an “it”, she was a she; a loved one, a member of the family. Perhaps the shift from considering ourselves owners to guardians of animals is a step forward in our spiritual growth of being less objective and treating all of life with the sanctity it deserves.

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts

Tearing Up

by Dr. David Sanders “Tears are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance short-circuited.”

Time flies.

by Melanie Gruenwald At Kabbalah Experience’s Time and When are you? classes, we explore the concept of time as a construct. We agree we’ll meet at 3:30pm. Three-thirty of what? Mountain Time? Eastern time? It’s

It’s About Time

by Dr. David Sanders It’s about time.  (For the first time, in a long time, I am teaching the course on the Kabbalah of Time. When I revisit a course, I want to update it).

Omer Reflections

by Melanie Gruenwald The period between Passover’s Second Seder and Shavuot is an auspicious time of counting for the Jewish people. We call this seven-week period, ‘Counting the Omer’ Kabbalists have connected this journey to

Languages of Freedom

by Dr. David Sanders It surprises me whenever I ask a couple if they know their “love language” and I am met with a blank stare. It becomes a welcome opportunity for me to enumerate