Owls and other non-human animals know things, as Ben Kilham has said, while we believe things. We are the only animal capable of absorbing centuries of illogic; of perpetuating delusional thinking; and of acting out fervently and violently those things for which there is no evidence, or that evidence, with blinding incandescence, refutes. For millennia the main project of Western thought has been to labor to be who we are not, to loathe our natural selves, to designate and denigrate all “others,” and to disregard our world.
