Pets
Pets
I have two cats, four birds, fifteen fish, and one lizard. The cats are called Lucy and Blackie, both male, with quite different personalities (one a rabid hunter, the other a homebody). The birds are parakeets–white, blue, turquoise, and yellow. I have trained the yellow one (she has no name) to perch on my fingers and let me stroke her; the others won’t let me near them. The fish are in two ponds and approach when I bring them food. I have netted the ponds so that the raccoons can’t get to them. The lizard is an Uromastyx ocellata (a North African spiny-tailed lizard): her name is Ramon. She lives in a tank alone and likes to bask on a stone (I actually wrote a song about her). Occasionally I take her out for short excursions—last night, for instance, I placed her on Lucy’s back, to their mutual consternation (but also fascination). So I have a little zoo representing different phyla. It’s nice. I wonder how many pet owners enjoy such variety (I am an “inclusive” pet owner). I do actually believe in interspecies friends, or at least nodding acquaintances.
mainstream materialism still holds the grotesque cartesian picture of animals as nothing but “moist robots” (humans included). Do you think leaving a mechanicist worldview for some sort of organicism in the style of Whitehead and others would do better for us and our fellow creatures?
It’s certainly good to see animals as biological beings, but we don’t want to fall into biological reductionism. My view is that the concept of the biological should be taken to include psychology in unreduced form.