How much time have you spent with animals recently, all the creatures with whom we share this planet?
As we become increasingly enamoured with – or entangled with – AI (my husband just shared with me that ChatGPT now has its own browser that could make my life even EASIER), I am deeply worried that we are losing our connection with each other and with the world around us. And as those connections are severed, not only do we become lonelier, but we also neglect the very things that give us sustenance – physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
As an antidote, I am reading an extraordinary book called How Animals Heal Us, by Jay Griffiths. I’m only on page 19, but I have already learned that 65 creatures laugh while playing, including many primates, foxes, badgers, polecats, mongooses, cats, cows, kangaroos, and elephants, as well as whales and seals. Apparently, even rats love being tickled on their backs and bellies. Crows have been filmed snowboarding down snowy roofs on pan lids, and right whales use their tails for sails for twenty minutes at a time in a strong breeze, for the sheer sake of playing.
Animals apparently also love to play practical jokes on us humans: for example, a gorilla born in the San Francisco Zoo who learned sign language once tied her trainer’s shoelaces together and then signed the word “CHASE”; an Africa grey parrot called Throckmorton could mimic his human family’s mobile phones, getting everyone running from different parts of the house, and when one of them answered the phone the parrot would imitate the flat tone of a caller hanging up.
Stories like these – and there are so many more – remind me of just how much MAGIC is in this world we live in, which most of us are totally oblivious to, most of the time. Dolphins can lead us to a person in danger, and whales have been known to guide a boat to safe harbour. Certain dogs can sniff out diseases. Animals are both a remedy for individual loneliness and healing for society more broadly – if only we tuned in.
If you are longing for more connection or grounding, a reprieve from the online world in which we’re increasingly living, perhaps see if you can spend some time with an animal. Go for a walk and watch the squirrels chasing each other, visit the horses in their fields for a moment of peace, listen to the birds making music all day long. May they remind us of our own humanity, and of our place in this extraordinary world in which we live.
