I Wanted To Talk To The Animals

Whales, Like Elephants, Are So Social And Intelligent. This Hurts Me To Think Of Them Being Transported, Put In Noisy Airplanes, And Brought To A Horrible Concrete Pen When They're Supposed To Be Out In The Sea.

If You Look Through All The Different Cultures. Right From The Earliest, Earliest Days With The Animistic Religions, We Have Sought To Have Some Kind Of Explanation For Our Life, For Our Being, That Is Outside Of Our Humanity.

My Family Has Very Strong Women. My Mother Never Laughed At My Dream Of Africa, Even Though Everyone Else Did Because We Didn't Have Any Money, Because Africa Was The 'dark Continent', And Because I Was A Girl.

It Is These Undeniable Qualities Of Human Love And Compassion And Self-sacrifice That Give Me Hope For The Future. We Are, Indeed, Often Cruel And Evil. Nobody Can Deny This. We Gang Up On Each One Another, We Torture Each Other, With Words As Well As Deeds, We Fight, We Kill. But We Are Also Capable Of The Most Noble, Generous, And Heroic Behavior.

Words Can Enhance Experience, But They Can Also Take So Much Away. We See An Insect And At Once We Abstract Certain Characteristics And Classify It - A Fly. And In That Very Cognitive Exercise, Part Of The Wonder Is Gone. Once We Have Labeled The Things Around Us We Do Not Bother To Look At Them So Carefully. Words Are Part Of Our Rational Selves, And To Abandon Them For A While Is To Give Freer Reign To Our Intuitive Selves.