“We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
I was born a vegetarian and have continued to be a vegetarian, not because of pressure due to family and tradition, but because I was exposed to nature as a child, and eventually I started questioning what it would be like to see the world from an animal's perspective, does it feel and think like we do?
A lot of people, to this day, think that anything non-human is just roaming the world and doing its duty of existing just on blind, unfeeling instinct.
Although there has been tons of evidence to the contrary, in 1909, a German biologist named Jakob von Uexküll introduced a concept called Umwelt, whose core idea simply says that every animal, regardless of species and each individual within that species, has its own sensory bubble through which it sees and experiences the world. What one animal experiences is completely different from what another experiences.
An electric fish sees and maps the world around it using electrical distortions. While the idea of a bat being blind is a myth, it does use echolocation to identify objects in its path at night. This applies to humans as well — what one human thinks and experiences in his or her environment is very different from what another human thinks and experiences.
Our understanding of Sentience — the ability to feel and experience the world — might be too narrow. If we stop judging nature by human standards and look at the world through the individual animal’s unique sensory bubble, we realise that there is intelligence everywhere beyond what we could have imagined.
Cultures, Fads, and Rituals Across Species
Not only does the animal kingdom have immense intelligence, but it also has cultures and strategies. Humpback Whales do not just sing; their song evolves; every pod has a unique song. Every year, all the males in a region sing a complex song, and if another whale swims by with a trendier tune, the locals tend to adopt that as the new hit single, passing it across the ocean just like a song goes viral on the internet.
Orcas do something similar; in 1987, it was observed that when a female orca started wearing a dead salmon on her head like a hat, it sparked a “fashion” fad that spread to other pods, though temporarily.
Elephants grieve the loss of their calves. They caress and stroke the body of a calf to acknowledge its passing; they sometimes bury the calf with soil, leaves and foliage. They have also been seen returning to the grave years later and lingering around the grave as if they are paying their respects to the dead.
While mother Orcas carry their dead calves on their snout or head for vast distances, sometimes for weeks, preventing it from falling to the floor of the ocean, if the calf slips off, the mother will dive and bring the body back up. Some pods have been observed swimming closely in synchronised circles around a grieving mother, which some scientists consider akin to a ritual or wake. Sometimes other members carry the body so that the mother can rest, and they also share their food with her. Deep awareness extends further into the ocean: Dolphins have been observed using sea sponges as protective gloves, and octopuses actively seek relief when in pain.
A bridge between instinct and cultural intelligence can be seen in primates, too. Chimpanzees in Gombe, for example, do not just rely on basic evolutionary instincts; they pass down cultural traditions and lessons they learned in their lives through observation and practice, like using twigs to dig out termites. They even strategise complex social dynamics, including planning coordinated attacks and participating in territorial warfare against rival groups. The most notable being the famous brutal four-year war observed and documented by Primatologist Jane Goodall, which took place between the Kasakela and Kahama Chimpanzee communities.
Evolution is a blind, chaotic lottery that just hands out whatever tools can help a species survive. It's called Convergent Evolution, where multiple species in completely different environments and places develop similar tools independent of each other.
The Ratchet Effect & Ancient Underground Societies
Humans did not invent complex societies out of thin air. We started farming about 12,000 years ago when the Ice Age finally stabilised. There is a concept called the Ratchet Effect, which is the ability to keep improving upon the previous ways without losing the original knowledge.
It was later discovered that ants have been farming and cultivating fungi to feed themselves and the whole colony for about 50 million years, and sometimes that practice of agriculture in the ant communities, according to our moral standards, is brutal and terrifying. They practice a form of factory farming in which they bite off aphids’ wings and secrete chemicals to stop the aphids from growing wings back, so that they cannot escape. Ants also leave behind pheromones that are used to influence and manage aphid colonies. Since aphids naturally reproduce through parthenogenesis for much of their life cycle, ants take advantage of that reproductive strategy to maintain a constant supply of honeydew producers, and if the protein production is still low, the aphids are just killed and eaten by the ants.
All of this makes me wonder, are humans that different? Our history is filled with incidents like this, some of which went on for centuries. Are these tiny creatures just acting on instinct, or is there an actual mind somewhere in there which we haven’t noticed yet? If ants can practice forms of agriculture and slavery, does that mean that, in some deep-rooted way, it's instinctual for humans too? We may just have been dressing up the same instincts with fancy tools and architecture, and on a much larger scale.
The Wood Wide Web & The Living Cosmos
This supposedly living awareness extends to plants as well. It was recently discovered that when a plant is being cut or is thirsty, it emits ultrasonic sounds. They release chemical warnings into the air to alert other plants that they are being attacked by bugs, and they share nutrients with other plants via the underground root system with the help of a massive fungal network known as the “Mycelium Network” or the “Wood Wide Web”. Nature is alive and communicating in ways we cannot hear, see or even understand.
For thousands of years, ancient thinkers understood this. Sages in India viewed the cosmos as one interconnected web, teaching that humans, animals and nature were not separate. Greek philosophers like the Stoics believed the universe was a single living organism. Shintoism of Japan embraced Animism: the belief that spirits or Kami animate everything from trees to rivers to mountains.
In the past few hundred years, as science started to evolve, it was deliberately separated from philosophy and spirituality. Fueled by new religious hierarchies, the need for industrialisation and capitalism, European thinkers like René Descartes deliberately separated the human mind from physical matter. By labelling nature as an unfeeling machine, it became much easier to exploit the Earth for resources without feeling guilt.
Only today, through Quantum Mechanics — which has shown that observation and measurement can fundamentally affect quantum systems — along with discoveries such as the Mycelium Network and advances in animal cognition, have modern scientists begun to finally loop back to ideas that many ancient philosophers had long explored. Statements like the 2012 “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” formally confirmed that mammals, birds and octopuses possess the necessary hardware to experience the world. Then, in 2024, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness took it further, stating that there is a real possibility that even invertebrates like insects have conscious experiences.
Navigating Ethics & Sva-Dharma
Learning that everything is living and breathing and connected on varying levels can be ethically challenging. As a vegetarian who wants to avoid harm, learning that even plants react in very similar ways to humans and animals makes me question my lifestyle options. Ancient traditions like Jainism, even today, practice radical empathy, avoiding certain root vegetables to protect the plant and the soil networks. People in this culture only eat parts of the tree, like fruits and vegetables, which do not harm the overall organism permanently.
I know that life survives by consuming other life; that's just how the natural world works. But navigating this reality does not require a flawless formula based on understanding the intent of nature, because nature clearly intends predators to hunt just as much as it intends seeds to be eaten. It's said that eating only plant-based foods causes infinitely less harm than the massive industrial destruction of both plant and animal life required to produce meat.
I guess there is a certain amount of solace that can be taken from that. Understanding concepts like Sva-dharma from the Bhagavad Gita, which means following your own authentic path, has helped me personally choose a vegetarian diet based on evidence available to me, which causes the least harm. But there is no right answer in this debate because there are people around the world who do not have access to proper agriculture, which means they have to depend on meat to maintain their health in those extreme climates.
Rebuilding Wonder in the Local Garden
I do not want to provide possible concrete solutions here; I just hope that children learn to appreciate and understand nature as it deserves to be. Teaching children via flat screens, textbooks and by looking at caged animals can be helpful in certain ways, but adding a simple nature walk to your local garden to the school curriculum can be much more beneficial; it can teach them how nature actually works.
Children can be taught the concept of Empathy, Umwelt and Sentience with live examples; they immediately learn that nature has multiple dimensions of secret realities. How a colourful flower that we assume is a regular flower has an ultraviolet colour that only bees can see. How the lone ant climbing the tree plays a big part in the ecosystem of that garden and its society and community is very similar to how a human society works, but on a smaller scale, running on a script that is millions of years older than the whole of human history. You see only a small root sticking out of the ground, but there is a massive underground fungal system called the “Wood Wide Web”, which, upon learning about it, can immediately replace arrogance and ignorance with awe and humility.
This simple walk in the local garden can shift perspectives and rebuild the ancient understanding that was held by people around the world for thousands of years: that the universe is a living, breathing, interconnected web. By encouraging compassion and curiosity, the disenchantment of nature can be reversed. So take your child to the local garden, look closer at a tree, a flower and look under rocks to discover hidden worlds all around you.