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Foreword How we are educated by children, by animals! —Martin Buber, I and Thou Animals indeed! If anyone thinks that the lives and habitat of the animals are not existentially central to the meaning of human life,I urge them to reconsider. At times, the presence of animals is electrifying, as in my witnessing the snarled upper lip of a ferocious leopard who was displeased by my gaze. More telling is an event undergone forty years ago, and yet as sensorially present as if it were happening now. The place is Yellowstone Park and I have ¤ve young children in the car.Several grizzly bears meander down the hillside,including a mother bear and her cub. My children want to exit the car, say hello, and toss them some forbidden food. I say, no! It is very dangerous for you and it is not good for the bears. As only children can do, they grouse. Ahead of us is a car with a more pliant and foolish set of parents. They allow their children to leave the car and, incredibly, toss Hershey chocolates at the bears. Mistake! The cub picks up a Hershey bar and instantaneously, Mama Bear belts the cub and sends it ®ying toward Yosemite. While doing this, the mother bear lets out a roar that stripped the paint from our car and sent frozen,paralyzing chills down the spines of each of the seven of us, ne’er to be forgotten to this very day. My parental response was simple. I told the children, now more than willing to listen, that they had come close to the inner world of the animal kingdom. Awe is appropriate, but pedagogically the better word is respect. As John Dewey is fond of saying, nature has its own affairings and for us as human naturals to ignore, trample, or exploit those ontological rhythms is to court disaster. More often and less dramatically, our animals are around and about, providing a subtle yet pervasive sensibility as to the irreducible and ineluctable fact that we, too, are animals. Now just what sort of animals are we? Historically, the millennia-long effort to separate human animals from animals ueberhaupt is by rendering humans as “higher animals.” Such an appellation runs the risk attendant upon any use of hierarchy as a nomenclature entailing content. The assumption here is that the higher one reaches on the ladder, ostensibly the more quality is obtained. Surely, and deleteriously, this contention does not hold if one surveys the personal histories of many popes, political and military leaders, chief executive of¤cers, and, lamentably, parents. I cite but two obstacles to the acceptance of hierarchy as a positive source for evaluation of worth. First, what ladder? The long-held belief that higher is better rests on the cultural residue of a discredited geocentric cosmology. High and low, up and down are but temporal constructs, having no ultimate purchase in in¤nite space. Second, the claim to be “higher” often blocks us from the wider recesses of experience, namely, from those affective sensibilities available only horizontally. Human animals are not “higher” than other creatures. They are, however, different, in some ways profoundly and markedly so, as witness the arts, mathematics, and a capacity for a publicly articulated history. In other ways, the difference is malodorous, as instanced in the persistent practice of violence for reasons other than survival and the pervasive intent to deny mortality. The destructive trait of self-deception is characteristic of human animals and is not found among the other creatures. On this matter, Albert Camus has it right. “Man [woman] is the only creature who refuses to be what he [she] is.” That refusal has given us the Sistine Chapel, the technology of dazzling artifact, and the Holocaust. A complex, rich, and perilous message to be sure. Contrariwise , the messages of the other creatures are simpler, more direct, and always authentic. I am an inveterate listener to “stories” and I am, after my own fashion, a storyteller. Now in my eighth decade of stories heard and told, I offer that those told by us about animals seem to be singularly free of human self-centeredness and of trickery or dissembling. Telling stories about animals brings out the best in us, for I believe that we take the animal at face value, horizontally and not from a position of superiority. Here, I tell but two stories, one a slight vignette and the other a pedagogically enriching trauma. When...

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