Why Humans Do What No Animal Would

There are things I’ve read that I wish I hadn’t.

But there are also things I’ve lived.

Things I’ve seen on the long journey back to myself.

Things I’ve held in silence for people I love.

Moments from courtrooms and hospital beds.

From childhood memories and ancestral wounds.

From the spaces between us, where love tried to bloom… and violence answered instead.

Soul-splitting things.

Things no animal would do.

Not because animals are perfect —

but because they cannot even imagine such acts.

Only we can.

We who write poetry and hold funerals.

We who cradle newborns and sing to the sky.

We who also build torture chambers.

Use rape as a weapon.

Erase entire peoples for power or purity.

The horror of being human isn’t that we are animals.

It’s that we are not only animals — and sometimes we behave as if we are less.

What Animals Don’t Do

Let’s be clear:

Animals can be fierce.

Territorial.

Even deadly.

But their violence is functional.

Bounded.

It ends when the threat ends.

When the hunger quiets.

When the young are safe.

No lion kills for pleasure.

No dolphin builds a caste system.

No ape enslaves.

No whale punishes others for praying differently.

Human violence often begins where animal violence ends.

What Then Is at the Root?

If it’s not instinct —

not biology —

then what drives the unspeakable?

Let me offer three doorways:

1. Abstraction Without Anchoring

We live in story.

We create meaning.

We build myths and then defend them with blood.

“They don’t belong.”

“They’re unclean.”

“They’re not like us.”

“They’re the enemy.”

Abstraction turns people into categories.

Categories into enemies.

Enemies into objects.

Objects into targets.

The mind detaches from the body.

The idea overpowers the breath, the tears, the pulse.

Violence becomes logical.

2. Scarcity and the Fear of Not Enough

We hoard.

We preempt.

We kill not because we must — but because we might need to.

Unlike animals, we can imagine future threats.

And that imagination, unchecked by presence or belonging, creates a culture of pre-emptive cruelty.

Scarcity becomes a mindset, not a condition.

And in trying to secure safety, we destroy what we most need:

each other.

3. Separation From Belonging

This is the deepest cut.

Animals live in ecosystems —

relationally, rhythmically.

A whale belongs to a pod.

A bee to a hive.

A wolf to a pack.

They are not alone.

Modern humans?

We move.

Compete.

Ghost.

We build fences around our homes, and sometimes around our hearts.

And in our isolation, we forget that we are each other.

Empathy dries up.

Fear sets in.

Violence begins to feel like control.

Horror doesn’t come from instinct.

It comes from disconnection.

The Violence of Being “Civilized”

Here’s a painful truth:

Some of the worst atrocities in history were committed not by the “uncivilized”…

…but by the most educated, refined, and respected.

Universities measured skulls to prove inferiority.

Clergy blessed conquest.

Engineers designed extermination camps.

Lawmakers passed sterilization policies for the “unfit.”

The more “elevated” the thinking, the more dangerous it becomes —

when it’s divorced from body, breath, and the heartbeat of another being.

The Danger of the “Animal Excuse”

When we say:

“It’s just human nature. We’re animals.”

…we outsource responsibility.

But the wolf would not torture.

The elephant would not enslave.

The crow would not burn books.

The octopus would not erase history.

We don’t act this way because we are animals.

We act this way when we forget that we are.

What Then Shall We Do?

We remember.

We return.

To instinct.

To breath.

To pack.

To the pulse of the land.

To the sense that I am because you are.

We end the myth of aloneness.

We stop weaponizing story.

We stop turning others — and ourselves — into objects.

And we root our longing — for safety, for love, for power — in right relationship.

I&I includes all life.

There is no “other.”

There is no “below.”

Mercy Is Not the Exception

It is not a moral invention.

It is ancient.

It is wild.

It is relational.

It lives in the spaces between —

in the choice to spare,

to soften,

to remember.

The horror we’re capable of is not proof of our animality.

It is a warning of what happens when we sever ourselves from it.