An animal myself

aeon.co

31 points·Caiero··7 comments

And now, the animal is tired

http://www.robinhobb.com/blog/posts/38429

That was a pleasant little read.

This is why Merlin turns Arthur into all those animals in T. H. White's Once and Future King. The meta-lesson is that animals know how to be their kind of animals... It is humans who are fated to need to learn how to be human.

Although it isn't so clean-cut with non-humans using instinct and humans needing learning. Many animals meed to learn how to hunt from their mothers, for example, and many birds don't know their songs instinctively but need to be taught too. And humans aren't entirely instinct-free even if we have an extremely long (even adjusted for our long lifespans) childhood where we need to learn things.

Indeed. The internet is full of stories about "the X that was raised among Ys and now thinks it is a Y". My favorite being the squirrel that thinks it is a cat, and even learned to purr like one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gr5P-36w1Q

> childhood where we need to learn things

or maybe, unlearn/ forget/ obfuscate those built-in things.. like feeling others close without witnessing them, or surviving wide temperature ranges and smells and whatnot.. as these do not match the expected top-layer of cultural suit of "schooling".. And you know, school comes more closer from "school" of fish, not from "learn"..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School

A good essay, and I have to read her new book. Yet, still an alternative way of seeing it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimicry

Mimicry is also closely related to warfare through camouflage and related means; cf.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39071418

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