ANIMA - by Catalyst ✍️

I was reading an insight by EALO titled "EDEN". It's about her dog, who she still doesn't want to believe the dog committed suicide, cause how can a dog that has lived in a space for few months or more sef...I don't know the amount of years sha. How can a Dog that has lived in a space for more than few months not know it's way around a house to fall in a pool? If it's not suicide I don't know what that is. Cause the pain she obviously went through, the grief when there's no one there to console her can make even a human do the same. Reading that insight is what brought about this, and I'm so curious that I started thinking... Does animals also see life the way we do?Do they also have the believe of an afterlife after death?Has it ever crossed their mind they have a creator?Do they overthink as we do?Do they have life ambition like us?Do they even have crush?Is there even anything like morals or culture for them?... These are questions that crossed my mind as I was reading, and reading "Eden" got me think about animals, we only see them act only on instincts, they eat when they are hungry, sleep when they are tired, run when they feel endangered, mate when the feeling comes. I'm just thinking, what if there is more to their life than what meets the eye? Or what if there are lots of thinking that goes on behind their eyes that we can't comprehend? What does a dog even think when it sit alone, breathing heavily with its tongue out? Is it just resting or is it reminiscing about a past or future? I remember a dog lost its owner, a grandma in the neighborhood then, it refused to eat for days. Is that just attachments or is it a dog grieving the loss of a loved one? Let's even talk about Love.Do they fall in love or we are the one describing what they feel as such? Does a dog miss another dog because it feels their absence like we human do? Or does a cat looks at another cat and think "I like this one, the curves, the smile, I feel safe with him or with her bla bla". Gosh this is making me crazy! 😩🤲 And morals?I've seen movies where animals are trained to their best behavior, they only eat until the owner says "eat", they know when they've done something wrong and hides when their owner walks in. Is that just in movies or is that how they are in reality?Do they feel guilty, or they learned that we humans don't like certain things? Do they even have their own unwritten rules about what is acceptable? Do they even have names for themselves apart from the one we call them? I'm a Linguist, and I've been taught animals don't have a language, they only respond to stimuli unlike we humans that our language is dynamic, we have words for everything. But animals I know only produce a sound, it's either they bark, meow or bleats. They already have a problem expressing themselves with words and I think that's why they do it most with actions. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/Screenshot_20260922-050826_1.png"/> We already know that animals communicate, cooperate, teach their young, mourn the dead, remember individuals. I think Dog still has a longer memory of someone. I remember I saw a dog when I was seven when I went to Grandma, I went back there and it still recognize me. Don't ask me how I know it does, but I sha know.But where exactly does their instincts stop and their thoughts begin? We have spent so much time trying to understand what makes human different from animals, and I think it's high time we start studying what similarity is there between us. They may not sit around wondering about life like we do, maybe they do. They may not stare at the ceiling at 3am like I just did, questioning the next move,they may not have dreams of becoming greater, or plans for five years from now. But, how do we know? We can't enter their minds, we can only watch them, interpret their actions and give meaning to what we see. So, when I read about EALO's Eden and the possibility that a dog could have somehow ended in that pool, I found myself thinking beyond thinking whether a dog could intentionally take it's own life. I started thinking how little we know about the creatures God surround us with. The questions I ask here isn't whether animals act like us but that we've been so unconcerned to assume that they don't think like us or they don't think deeply at all. I won't lie, reading EDEN changed my view about animals. At this rate, I might turn a vegetarian.🥺 And also the Title is not a mistake. ANIMA means soul or living things in Latin.

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