Animals have senses that we don’t. They are perceiving realities in our world that we don’t. But if you’re with an animal, you’re kind of seeing that reality. Seeing with new eyes. For example, tarantulas can taste with their feet. One time I was holding a tarantula, and it was a nice tarantula, but we hadn’t met before.
And the animal had never been handled before, to my knowledge. It started picking up its feet in a way that I know that’s often a threat gesture. They rear up, like a horse, you know, and often they show their fangs. It wasn’t showing its fangs to me. What was happening was, I was standing in a warm place, and my hand was sweating. And it was going, “eww!”
So there I was with this animal who was tasting the world with its feet. Same thing— any bird that you ever meet, that bird sees colors that we don’t even have names for. Their eyes, and their brains are different from ours, physically different from ours. They see all these colors that we don’t know, and they probably shimmer the way that iridescent feathers of, say, hummingbirds shimmer for us.
And elephants, they can hear infrasound. So can whales, they can make infrasound. Sounds lower than what we can hear. Sounds that can travel, in the case of whales, halfway around the globe. So they are perceiving the same world that we live in, but in a way that we can’t access. But we almost access it, being in their proximity. And we’re sharing that same reality.
So your reality really opens up when you’re in the presence of an animal. It’s like you’re being invited into their world, which is really our world, and in that way they expand our world in a way that a person doesn’t. And so, I feel very lucky that so many of my friends are animals. And to restrict your interest, I think, to just one species, is cutting yourself off from this great green world in a way that a lot of people may not appreciate.
It’s almost as if
Imagine a person who only listened to one kind of music, or only ate one kind of food. If you ate nothing but hot dogs, or if you were surrounding yourself with only the color pink. Well, when you have friends who are other species, that is mind-expanding, and world-expanding. And you feel much more at home, I think, on the earth.