Rebuilding Rob

What are your favorite animals?

I love animals, so I apologize in advance if this post runs a little long. I’m not a rampaging animal-rights activist or anything; but I am fully aware that they are feelings, consciousness, and are just as self-aware as any human.

Before I get into my favorite animals, I’m going to mention my two honorable mentions, dogs and cats. Domesticated dogs and cats are my favorite animals, but I’m not dedicating this list to them because I’m sure most people will talk about one or both of them.

Honorable mention: Dogs and Cats

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about how I admire the seemingly blindly loyalty dogs develop toward their owner. I’ve had a dog in my home for the majority of my life. I feel like they’re a big part of my identity. After a lot of soul-searching and evaluating my status and where I am in my life, I’ve recently deduced that “I need a dog”; a sentiment to which my closest friends agree.

In many way, I think that domesticated cats may even be more interesting than dogs. Growing up, my parents never had cats in our house. I didn’t really become a “cat person“ until college. For as much as I may complain about X1 and X2 , one of their enduring legacies to me – beyond having kids together obviously – was turning me into a cat person.

As physically smaller animals, you can be as physical with them as you can with dogs, but they have a way of making their presence felt more than dogs do at times. And anyone who tells you that cats don’t have the same emotions as dogs do; or they don’t miss humans the way the dogs do as simply never owned a cat.

Bears

Bears are one of those wild animals that we started learning about from a very young age. But in the last few years, as an adult I’ve really kind of rediscovered them. Bears are of my favorite animals to go see in a zoo. They sleep. They eat. They look for shelter. They take care of their young and every once in a while, you get to see them play around. Bears are so much more like humans than we realize. But I would not want to encounter one in the wild.

Apes

Continuing the trend, apes are another animal that have resparked my curiosity and fascination as an adult. Whether or not you believe that humans evolved from primates, the similarities between us and them are almost impossible to ignore. Sometimes, when I’m at the zoo, I will just sit there and stare at apes, even if they’re not doing anything. you can see something in their eyes, you can tell that there’s a lot more going on in their mind than we realize. Maybe I’ve just watched Planet of the Apes one too many times, but it makes you wonder…

Rays

I think I was a teenager before I ever really heard of, let alone noticed rays. Thanks to Finding Nemo, kids drawing up in the last 20 years are more knowledgeable about them than I probably am. Don’t get me wrong, dolphins, whales, and sharks are all fascinating; but Rays always look like through the water rather than swimming in it. I had once heard somewhere that Rays were an evolutionary offshoot of sharks. If that’s true, then Mother Nature really is some kind of mad scientist.

Whereas bears and apes fascinate me because they remind me so much of humans, the opposite is true with rays. That they look unlike anything else or earth is what draws me to them. This, of course, says nothing about the fact that they live in the ocean – this incredibly large, unexplored mass of the Earth, that we humans still know very little about.

When I started today’s prompt, I thought that I was just gonna name a couple of animals and why I think they’re cool. I did that; but as I got deeper into my writing I realized how much looking at other animals gets me thinking about humanity in general.

What are some of your favorite animals and why? Do you agree or disagree with anything on my list?

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The article “My Favorite Animals” originally appeared on Rebuilding Rob.