To keep organized the hundreds of clips that I examined, I have divided them into categories such as ’play’, ’care’, ’justice’ depending on what the clip is about. The menu on the right shows a few such labels. I have the ambition to occasionally expand the menu with examples from other categories.
What I hope for is to convey animals so that they could be widely perceived as fellow living, sentient and reflective beings who deserve respectful treatment. I want to suggest to the viewer a view of reality, that brings us closer to the life around us.
I hope for a growing insight that will eventually lead to respect for all that is around us.
When we make new acquaintances we ofyen use previous experiences as a reference and thus many encounters are colored by prejudices. The same applies to all meetings, whether it concerns the neighbor's new dog or the herb that is about to invade the garden.
I hope that my selection of videos will also convey a moral and ethical question: how do we treat our fellow creatures when we turn so many into products in industries where they only gain value when they are dead?
Can a civilization that hosts death camps where 70 billion animals anually are killed, can it really be viable? Man and the animals he imprisons to be killed make up around 96 % of the earth's vertebrates. Thus a major part of the earth's vertebrates live in the animal industries' windowless barns.
When there is no common language, there is still a possible path to communication, understanding and meetings: feeling, empathy, the will to understand and empathize.
Marc Bekoff has said it well:
“Lacking a shared language, emotions are perhaps our most effective means of cross-species communication. We can share our emotions, we can understand the language of feelings, and that's why we form deep and enduring social bonds with many other beings. Emotions are the glue that binds.”
Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Life of Animals: A Leding Scientist Explores
Donald Griffin, who explained how bats echolocate in the dark and was one of those who opened up the possibility of talking about animal consciousness in academic contexts, has said much the same.
“I have always found small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.”
It is all about encounters, knowledge that arises from meetings. Subjective experience is a valuable source of knowledge.