How Connected are We?
"Intimate contact with animals was a part of daily life in the premodern world. Animals were everywhere" (Classen,93) What has become of our connection to what and who is around us? Is out lose of connection to the animals and nature surrounding us play a role in our increase hostility and fading compassion as a society? How important are animals to human life? Beyond that of serving as food (for some). What have we lost as a people when we cut off connections to animals? Since when have animals become denigrated as lesser than humans? It's despairing that we live in a world where the only way we can connect with the natural world around us via animals has to be sanctioned - but the same cannot be said vice versa. Our regular contact with animals in the Western world is under control and defined by domestication and segregation. We eroticize the exoticism of species of foreign terrain but why must it suffer for our amusement? Is this all connected to our conne...