"You know how much you love, respect and want to protect every dog and cat in the world? You know how much your heart breaks when you see a picture of a dog in a shelter who is going to be killed? You know how you feel when you see photos of piles of dead dogs and cats who are going to be used for fur? You know how enraged you get when you see a photo of a dog or cat who has been beaten to death? That’s how vegans feel about all animals. Every animal who is exploited and murdered for food, clothing, entertainment and “research.” We don’t distinguish between dogs and cats and other animals. If you allowed yourself to feel the deep suffering that billions of animals endure for your pleasure, you’d be vegan, too. And you might understand why vegans work so hard to end the animal holocaust." —Gary Smith

Besides how cute it is, and it is super cute, I just want to understand what is going on here.

So animals have emotions or am I anthropomorphizing? It's amazing to me when I see inter-species animals connect this way. This mare being so patient and nurturing. Dogs adopting kittens etc. I don't know, the more I think about it, the more I think I should go vegetarian, but I do love a juicy steak. If dogs and cats and horses have emotions, don't cows?

edit .. I probably shouldn't include cats. Jury is still out on if they have their own agenda in all this or not.

edit 2 .. not saying we should eat cats.

This is a great video of our dog, Buddy, and a rescued baby deer. They were just playing together when this video was taken. As the deer (a buck) got bigger, he went to live on his own in the woods, but still comes back to visit our dog and cats and us every now and then. I'm sure we will eventually not see him any more, but it's nice to know that we saved him from death. When he was first found, he was dehydrated and near death on a 100+ degree summer day in Texas. After treating him for deydration and bottle feeding him daily, he eventually became strong enough to live on his own. We caught the little deer and our dog playing with the soccer ball on a few occassions before this particular day. We had to film this, as they were having so much fun running around together. Our dog loved this deer and the deer loved the dog. We often found them laying next to each other on our front porch when we awakened in the morning. Please know that the buck has now gone on to live in the wooded areas in the hill country around us. He seems right at home there. Enjoy!!!!

Today I was in my philosophy of religion class. My professor began to talk about religious figures trying to separate animals such as chimps and Bonobos from humans. He said that every reason they have given has crumbled in their hands (he mentioned things like emotion, use of tools, problem solving) He brought up Pope John’s claim that humans are different from Chimps because God gave us souls. Since there is no proof of a “soul” per say, he asked the class of other differences. I put up my hand and said “many people use the defense that Chimps do not have self awareness and humans do.” To this he mentioned a study which as conducted on Chimps. What they did was they put a blue mark on a Chimps forehead. Then they put him in front of a mirror, and the Chimp stared…and raised his finger to his forehead touching the mark. He knew that that was him in the mirror, he was aware of his body. They did this to monkeys and other animals like dogs and cats, and they just thought the mirror was another animal. I found this super cool and interesting as evidence that Chimps are self aware of their existence in the sense that they know who they are when they see themselves, they know their body (unlike other animals mentioned above) now in the sense of questioning their existence, that’s probably a level only humans have achieved thus far.

i dunno, i'm thinking the sound it generates would be pretty Low, or very much just a base line. their frequency might be a little low for us to hear, that is a maybe of course. dogs and cats and birds would hates us tho. i wonder what kind of music a hillside off of the coast would play with all the changing wind speeds... you could build them like lego, tak a bunch on the side of buildings downtown where the wind tunnel effect is pretty strong