Humans. Polite Laughter, Please.
It occurred to me this morning how oddly vulnerable we humans must look to all the other animals. For all intents and purposes we are like turtles with clothes instead of shells. We are not equipped with fur, or scales, or leathery hide to protect us.
More to the point, we humans don’t seem to have the sense we were born with.
Unlike dogs, we wander off from our pack and then reappear with no discernible food in our mouths to share with other pack members. We mostly eat things other humans have decided not to eat. And we throw away food which is perfectly edible and often pleasantly smelly.
Unlike cats, we never lick our backs clean. Our reflexes are too slow to make us good mousers. And we seem to have no sense of fun. Even those humans who eat other animals don’t usually play with their prey first. Plus, as a species we seem to have an unusual fondness for dogs, which is a weakness from a cat’s perspective, to say the least.
Birds don’t even pay attention to us. What’s the point? Humans are too foolish to bother with. We drop perfectly good seeds on the ground and walk away without eating them. Unlike seagulls, we can’t dive into a bay and come up with fish in our mouths. When we are lost, we can’t flap our arms and soar into the sky to check out an alternate route in the vast quilt of land below.
We are slow, uncoordinated and bad at noticing the world around us. Despite our ability to communicate with each other, we don’t always work reliably as a pack. A mouse has a better sense of self preservation. We ignore weather to our peril and are often caught outside our dens when it is raining or snowing.
Still, we have some useful attributes.
Humans do have senses of humor, like dogs. We give cats something to laugh at. We give donkeys, birds and porpoises someone to pity. And like bees, we can tell stories.
Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.
