2026-07-24 Animal friendship
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> It could be my imagination, but I feel like that hummingbird has
> made it a point to visit me every day since. – @eekim@sfba.social in
> Anthropomorphizing Anna’s Hummingbirds

When I grew up we were told not to anthropomorphise animals and I
thought it was the right thing to do. But it felt wrong. Much later I
read a treatise by Schopenhauer on the foundations of morals and he
argued that it all starts with compassion – and more specifically, I
remember a point made being the empathy with suffering animals. That
is much more in line with how I feel these days. I can watch the birds
and some are shy and some are greedy and some are cautious and some
are bossy and I think to myself that there is no denying that they
have an inner life, a personality. They know when we stop and look at
them. They know when they’ve been spotted and they don’t like it. So
they know of us as agents. And all of that without going into the
stories of animals catching human attention so that humans can save
their babies and the like. I’m totally in camp “animals have a soul”
so to say.

#Life