Differences
& similarities:
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Animals (under the term ‘animals’ let’s include any living
creature as opposed to humans) and humans live in many different worlds that
rarely overlap. Each animal creates
its territory and lives inside this territory on its own, inside its own
community. On the contrary, humans
move from one cycle (one community) to another. He can move this year from Japan to Los Angeles, or he may
become salesman after abandoning his former profession of dancer. The animal world is extremely reduced
compared to the one of humans.
Animals seldom bother each other and continue basically the same life
from birth to death. At the same
time, animals and humans understand little of each other, or at least this is
what we presume, but humans have learned to use animals, not the contrary. Humans
understand things animals cannot understand, and animals perceive things
humans cannot perceive. The dog’s
nose is a million times more sensitive than ours. Dogs can hear sounds that humans cannot hear, and from a great
distance too. It is interesting to
notice that if the animal senses are more developed, their sense of space is
usually much more restricted. A field
for instance would appear like a big forest for an ant. Ants recognize the obstacles and its height
by the vibration on its antennae. So
touching is very important for them, as well as for the housefly that tastes
from its feet. Humans rely a lot on their
eyesight. But again, if humans would
like to see like a hawk, they would have to look through binoculars that
magnify eight times what they see! Humans have a
sense that help them to recognize where is their right and where is their
left, where is up and where is down, where is front and where is back. Humans have three semicircular canals, in
the ear, called cochlea, filled with fine hair and fluid. When the fluid leaves the base of the
‘cochlea’, hair sense it and gives a signal.
This is what humans call the sense of balance. In the ‘cochlea’, there are the ‘saccule’
and the ‘utricle’ that contain cells responsible to gravity and tell us which
way we are. Fish orient themselves
like humans! However, insects have
fine hair all over their body that plays the same role! Humans live in a
tri-dimensional world: they recognize
three plans: vertical, horizontal and
depth. Some animals live in a two
dimensional world like the water strider, an insect that glides along the
surface of the water as if it had air cushion under its feet. The water strider can perceive only a flat
surface of lines: the horizontal and
the vertical dimensions. If you do
the experience of looking at each flat object at the eyes level, you will
have an idea of what the water strider perceives. Therefore, the water strider does not perceive movements coming
from above or from under the surface of the water. It cannot see its enemies, which are birds and fish! It can only perceive the vibrations at the
surface of the water just before being attacked. Usually animals have a better
vision than humans. Eagles or simple
birds can see much better than humans do, and some insects can even see in
all directions at the same time. But
many animals do not even need to see; they send sounds into the air or into
the water to recognize their surroundings or their peers. As the sound waves return to them, they
know with accuracy what lies ahead and how far. The bat uses this device as well as the dolphin that lives in
rivers. Some animals, like the
snake, orient themselves by changes in temperature. The snake has a pit organ under its eye that has more than
150,000 heat-sensitive points, enabling it to detect any prey. Humans have only two or three of them per
square centimeter, so they can perceive very little changes in temperature. Animals like
the snail cannot perceive the movement of things. For it, the grass pushed by the wind is seen like not moving at
all. The reason is that snails do not
perceive a movement as a series of movements when the succession of images
goes too fast. And this stage occurs
much faster for the snail than for humans. On the
contrary, many animals perceive things that are without motion or change for
humans, like the growing of plants. People can distinguish sounds that range from 15 to 15, 000 hertz (vibrations per second) while dolphins, for instance, can distinguish sounds between 400 and 200,000 hertz. The dolphin’s language is too fast for humans to hear and too high pitched. Nevertheless, it seems
that humans and animals share one thing in common: they both are conscious of their environment and are sensitive
to it. Forest monkeys have been
reported as shy and nomad. However, monkeys that get used to city life become
aggressive bold and always sleep at the same place. It seems that city life for monkeys as for humans transform
them, so that they can never come back to a calmer and simpler life. They seem to react the same way to stress,
in other words to emotions than humans. |