In recent years, the very new idea that animals are superior to people has been growing and deepening. Many people tell me they love animals more than people – this is much in vogue these days – and they believe that animals possess an innate kindness and generosity of spirit that is lacking in many human beings. I have come to believe that the worship of animals in America is growing more rapidly than the worship of any God. I posted this question on my Facebook Page today – are animals superior to people? – and was mesmerized by the intelligence, passion and depth of responses. Many people – about a third – said they did love animals more than people, and many thought that animals are superior to humans. I have to be honest, it seems to me to be a politically correct idea more than a well thought out one.

Others repeated one of the mantras of contemporary animal love – “I love all animals.” I wonder if anyone would say they love all people, or if such a thing were even remotely possible.I, for one, do not love all animals, I do not love rats and fishers the way I love dogs, I do not love them at all.

If you study the history of the human/companion animal bond, as I have, it seems that the worship of animals has grown in direct proportion to the growing disenchantment with humans. At the dawn of the enlightenment, the great philosophers worshipped the human soul, striving to create a better world.

There is a very understandable feeling that humans are ruining and ravaging the world, and anyone who loves our country must be heartsick at the degrading spectacle unfolding daily in Washington.  The news offers us an unrelentingly grim and dispiriting view of the world, and our political leaders seem to have degenerated into  middle-school bullies, taunters and dividers, speaking to the angry, the ignorant and the isolated. Small wonder the idea that animals are somehow more pure and worthy than people has wrong.

This idea – that all animals can be loved equally, and that they are somehow superior to people – has never been an idea I could accept or believe. For me, it is an idea that doesn’t serve animals or people. I have lived with a lot of animals for nearly two decades and I have not found that animals are more generous and kind than humans. I think of Simon driving Rocky into a fencepost, of Frieda pouncing on baby rabbits and tearing them to pieces, of chickens pecking out the eyes of their dying brothers and sisters, of the barn cats torturing and dismembering anything small enough to catch, of ewes trampling lambs in their rush to grain, hawks shrieking down on rabbits and chickens, of donkeys kicking each other in the head in their rush to eat fallen apples. The real world of animals is not generous or kind, it is brutal, ruthless and cruel. We build no-kill shelters, but no animal lives in a no-kill world.

This does not mean animals are inherently cruel, neither are they good. Animals do not possess conscience, they are not moral, they do not make moral decisions. They life by the instincts and needs, they are neither good nor bad, they simple react to life as it presents itself to them. Their faith is acceptance, not morality or kindness. There is no such thing as a good dog or a bad dog, as much as we love the terms, they simply do what they need to do to survive, as all animals do. This does not make them in any way superior to us, it just makes them different and in many ways, less destructive.

The emotionalizing of pets has caused so many of us to lose perspective and idealize animals as somehow free of the many flaws and shortcomings of humans. The more ignoble and flawed we see humans, the more noble and perfect are animals.  When someone tells me they love all animals, I shake my head in wonder. Most of us can’t even know more than a fraction of all the animals, how could we love them all indiscriminately? Why would we?

There is no way I can see clear to he idea that animals are superior to humans, as much as I love them. And as much as I love people, I am acutely aware, as so many animal lovers are, of their murderous and greedy deprivations on one another and on Mother Earth. Of wars, shootings, arguments and conflicts. I love the human soul, the human conscience, the human desire to be happy or sad, to create, to philosophize and strive and yearn to be better. We used to worship that in people, not in animals, and I think the growing tendency to worship and romanticize animals is especially sad, not only because it distorts the true nature of animals, but because it grows mostly out of growing dissatisfaction and disappointment in our own species.

For me, the choice is not to replace my love of humans with an unconditional love of animals, I do not wish to give up on my own kind. For me, the answer is to keep on trying to be a better human being, not matter what my fellow humans are doing. And to love animals for what they are, not for what we are not.