“Enter the Animal: Cross-species Perspectives on Grief and Spirituality” by Dr. Teya Brooks Pribac (vegan), Part 2 of 2

As we continue our dialogue with Dr. Pribac, she notes that animal-citizens possess complex emotional, cognitive, social, cultural, and even creative capacities and needs, comparable to those of humans. “Culture is not uniquely human and, as a matter of fact, nothing is uniquely human.” “Researchers have studied bighorn sheep, for example, and their seasonal migrations, and they have worked out that they are culturally informed. This continuity is quite important for other animals. And what we are doing out in the world, destroying everything essentially, it just disrupts everything, disrupts their lives, and so on.”

Dr. Brooks Pribac shares some compelling anecdotes supporting the existence of spirituality in animals. “And the sheep would notice it as they grazed, but they weren’t fussed by it, and they just noticed it, and then they just kept on grazing. That’s when you experience that merging that we talk about in spiritual matters, and that oneness, with this phenomenon and with everything around it. But ultimately, if we can feel something, whether it’s, during prayer, or touching plant leaves, or whatever, it is because we have an animal body and an animal brain.”

“Enter the Animal” was honored with a Nautilus Award and shortlisted for the American Academy of Religion book awards in 2022. “We’ve destroyed the homes of free-living animals, and we’ve locked everyone else up in cages and barren paddocks. We treat them like objects. And we either continue to do nothing and support the current system along with this torture and the environmental destruction, or we choose to live and eat differently, and we help build a new and better, more just system.”