Animal Kingdom
When I play with a cat, am I spending time with the cat - or is the cat spending time with me?
That question already occupied Plutarch (approx. 46-120), one of the antiquity's first philosophers that accentuated animal ethics and demanded to respect animals.
In the "old heathendom" (that's what most of us call it today), before the institution of monotheistic ideologies like Christianity, Judaism or the Islam - all of them enforced on people by war, murder, terror, torture and other interpersonal bestialities - men understood nature's aspects on all levels, spiritually and secularly. For them, nature was holy because it was essential for their survival... and the homo erectus considered himself a part of nature. Not its "master", owner, exploiter... and eventually destroyer
From the beginning, the absolutistic dogmas of these ideological chimeras ennoble men to the "peak of evolution" and ridicule us with premium attributes like "homo sapiens" (for those of you that got around having to study Vulgar Latin: the wise man). All of a sudden animals and plants were not holy anymore, were no longer worthy of protection, were subordinated and held to our free disposal, and were all along unscrupulously exploited, misused, tormented and devastated.
While these stupid, abnormal and totalitarian ideologies survived to this day by power-crazed, degenerated, powdered old men imposing terror, intimidation and brainwashing on compliant masses of simpleminded and uncomprehending serviles, they for centuries kept on vilifying, haunting, mutilating, torturing, raping and burning women - the far more precious part of the human species that the heathens - deservedly - still worshipped and esteemed. Up to this day, these creeds degrade women to second-class human beings, to silent subordinates at men's disposal. This may not exactly be the primary subject of this Web site; it nevertheless cannot be commemorated often enough.
Men as measure of all things - animals, a subordinated species.
Even those characters that we value as philosophers, poets, scholars to this day - for example Descartes (1596-1650), a "keen thinker about humanism in the Renaissance era", who classified animals as "sort of automats" - regarded men the measure of all things, and associated honorableness, respect and morality with him and his deeds.
Deservedly?
Is it in fact worth to be called wise that, up to this day, men's sheer boundless stupidity, sickening complacency and baseless arrogance bars them from understanding that and how, for example, animals - and also plants - feel, what they think, how they (re)act, and whether and why they adulate or threaten us, ask or demand us to do (or not to do) something?
The Darwinism
May darwinism ("survival of the fittest") in the animal kingdom still endure, it simply does not apply to the self-proclaimed peak of evolution. The more "civilized" a society, the more "anti-darwinistic" it is. The almost unbelievable degree of widespread human stupidity proves that the principles of natural selection are not that relevant for mankind as they are for animals' preservation, whose stupid specimen quickly lose the struggle for survival and become extinct. So, consider each animal you meet a winner; an exemplar of a species that was evolutionary-biologically strong enough to survive the devastating presence of men up to this day. You're actually facing a "winner", which is far more than animals could say about us.