But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

Can you believe that it is time for Theme Thursday already?

Today we are not talking chocolate, toddlers, mess or ignominy. No, today we're dealing with ANIMAL.

Now I could have posted a picture of a possum, numbat, wombat, wallaby or any other furry killing machine that roams our fair isle, but I figure that I'd use a far more deadly creature as an example of an animal.

Some people - I know them as fools - have chosen to embrace that highfalutin idea that human beans are for some ungodly reason superior to animals. Of course, what these imbeciles seem to forget is that were are simple animals ourselves!

Anyone with a baby, toddler, teenage boy or Queenslander in their household could tell you this.

Look at Henry [above]. One chocolate frog in the back of the car on a sunny day and all of a sudden it's Elagabalus meets Bacchus for a quick shandy in the Serengeti and we're down on all fours carrying on like a cat in heat.

Fair dinkum, anyone who chooses to elevate anything as crude, vulgar and imperfect as a human as anything more than a chimpanzee with ideas above its station has obviously never been to Schoolies Week on the Gold Coast!

I postulated previously (1996 previously) that Descartes needed a kicking. My main beef with the preening philosophical pioneer has nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with hubris. He falls into the trap of thinking that we [humans] are better than animals, rather than - slightly (and that's just some of us) - more complex creatures.

For Descartes, animals are purely physical entities. For him, they have no mental nor spiritual substance. Thus, with the kind of arrogance you can only find in the absurd human, he concluded that animals can’t reason, think, feel pain or suffer. My beef with Descartes then is that this bloke reckons that animals are just machines with no consciousness.

You want to kill 'em for fun?

No problem!

Live vivisection?

Good luck with it! [By the way, that screaming is just a reflex response, it doesn't really feel pain.]

So in this sense, Descartes needs a kicking.

Milan Kundera put it best in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In it, he mediates on Nietzsche and his final break with sanity. Picture it:

"Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears.

That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had re­moved himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications:

Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.

And that is the Nietzsche I love, just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting his head in her lap. I see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which mankind, “the master and proprietor of nature,” marches onward.”

So what I want to know is, who's the animal again?