Practicing Kindness With Animals

“Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”
~ Jack Canfield

Many experiments have been made with animals around the notion of consciousness, especially thanks to MRIs done in England with dogs. These showed brain activity in animals and showed that animals do have emotions, thoughts, and sensations. The law has now recognized that a domestic animal is no longer considered a piece of furniture, but is a sensitive being capable of perceiving and feeling pain. All the same, our society does not yet recognize animals as conscious beings.

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You have only to hear about some of the experiments practiced on animals to be absolutely opposed to this practice. For example, the following experiment involved using electricity on monkeys and the effect it had on their eating habits — a kind of convoluted science if you ask me, but here goes:

One monkey gets an electrical charge. During this experiment the group of monkeys stopped eating so that the single monkey would not receive electric charges. These tests prove, beyond a doubt, that the monkeys were aware of the following:

• Of other monkeys suffering pain,
• That this electric charge caused another monkey to suffer pain,
• That their suffering was linked to food,
• That these monkeys were also aware that the situation was not a normal one, but since it was question of survival at that moment and because they were exposed directly to pain and suffering through their feelings of empathy, they could not act otherwise,
• They were aware that the experiment was taking place in a laboratory in which they were confined by the people running the experiment (the scientists),
• They were not going to judge or analyze the situation, but were well aware of what was happening. So even though they were very frightened by the experiment and the scientists present, they did not judge them. They only submitted to them!

As a result of this experiment we see no only that these monkeys possessed awareness, but they also were able to feel empathy and compassion. Interestingly, these qualities of consciousness-empathy and compassion were not evident when humans underwent the same experiment. Unlike the monkeys, humans tended to increase the electric charge on the person undergoing the experiment rather than decrease it!

One day, when mankind reaches an advanced state of evolution, we will no longer question the consciousness of other beings and we will certainly not make them undergo experiments to prove their awareness since it will be evident that they are sentient beings. In order to evolve to this state, we need to refashion ourselves by practicing mindfulness, compassion, and energy cultivation techniques in order to transform our reality and our perceptions of other conscious life forms.