The Forbidden Question
Feb 23, 2017 · 1 min read
“Science usually steers firmly from questions about the inner lives of animals. Surely they have inner lives of some sort. But like a child who is admonished that what they really want to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mind — if there is such — is unknowable. Permissible questions are “it” questions: about where it lives, what it eats, what it does when danger threatens, how it breeds. But always forbidden is the one question that might open the door: Who?”
–Carl Safina, Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel
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