Communication with our pet

Many of us share our lives with an animal companion, be it a dog, cat, bird, rabbit or any other species. With them we not only share space but also time in which we participate, depending on the occasion, in a more involved way than in others. The reasons why we seek the company of an animal are varied, but the common point in general is the emotional need to feel accompanied and loved. Unfortunately, our society suffers from the virus of loneliness. Human relationships are more and more in disuse as communication is established in most occasions in a virtual way. At these levels of existence, reality has become so pragmatic that we have lost the mammalian-emotional sense of the human being itself. The hug, the kiss, the caress,in short, physical contact together with eye contact has been replaced by social distance, which has been reinforced in recent years. Almost everything is processed through a virtual way in the network. This indeed has many advantages but it also has some disadvantages such as the lack of warmth when it comes to human-to-human communication. Somehow we overlap this lack among many others by including a specimen of the domesticated animal species in our lives from which we sometimes expect too much without living up to it in reciprocity. We ask too much and think we give too much for the simple fact that we feed them and take them out for a walk only when it is strictly necessary. We should start to ask ourselves what our pets really give us and what we give them in reciprocity. It has to be balanced so that the relationship flows in perfect harmony.

Indeed, we humans are not the only species on the planet with thinking, emotional and sensitive capacity. To understand this, we have to broaden our vision of reality so that it ceases to be simply ours and becomes that of the other we want to understand. Many times we make the big mistake of wanting our vision to be the only one, as well as prevailing over any other, which makes us lose the perspective of the different realities that surround us. If we generalize the term animal species: in it we group all the different species that live on this planet. From there we make a subsection where we gather a few animal species that we call “domesticated”. We should reflect on this term: who domesticates whom, what does it really mean, and is it legitimate to understand that domestication is produced by the submission of one race over another? We should rethink this concept in order to transform it into a new one that embraces not the supremacy of a race that considers itself more powerful and more thoughtful over another, but rather the two-way provision of companionship, cooperation and understanding. In short, mutual love.