"Kinship With All Life" and Animal Rights

Hi all,
Sorry for missing last week's post! I don't know what has gotten into me lately.
On the bright side, it looks like I've had a lot of visitors since I last checked in here.
Today I would like to cover something highly interesting that could potentially change the way we look at animal rights. It's a book called Kinship With All Life, by J. Allen Boone.
I first heard about Kinship With All Life (let us call it KWAL) in a nice little book called Random Acts of Kindness by Animals. The latter book gave an anecdote from KWAL, discussing potential communication with animals.
Intrigued, I got the book and read it. The book is about communication with all animals, including dogs (especially the movie-star dog Braveheart), snakes, ponies, flies, and even ants! The author claims, in a nutshell, that respect for all life and a desire to communicate with animals can help you create "mental bridges" with other creatures. These mental bridges foster two-way communication, through thoughts alone. It could be described as telepathy or ESP.
This might sound far-fetched to many of you, but think about it: people frequently claim that their dogs and other pets can "read their minds". Their dogs know when the owner is thinking about taking them for a walk, and horses are able to sense which way the rider wants to go without the rider giving them any physical cues whatsoever. Animals are able to make group decisions silently and without body language. If this is true, why wouldn't humans have the ability to do this, too? Perhaps we have merely lost our capacity to do this over time, as our connection with nature has dwindled and our lives have become more busy and completely un-spiritual than ever.
If you are still unconvinced (and I don't blame you if you are), I suggest that you read the book and decide for yourself. You can find a list of J. Allen Boone's works here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship_with_All_Life, and you can buy Kinship With All Life on Amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.com/Kinship-All-Life-Allen-Boone/dp/0060609125. If you live in Ottawa or surrounding areas, you can request to borrow my copy of the book by e-mailing me at rabbit-cat[at]vegemail[dot]com; I highly recommend you do!

If we accept that J. Allen Boone may indeed be correct in his theories, what implications does this have for animal rights? If we truly can communicate with animals through our minds, we will finally be able to make good, joint decisions based on both of our wants and needs. We will be able to work together like never before, not wanting to imprison and kill each other, but instead being able to create true alliances to get mutual benefits. If I wanted to travel to some town without driving a car, for instance, I could find a pony and agree-- with the pony, not just an owner, because by then the whole idea of ownership of animals would be abolished-- that if she takes me to the town, I'll do something in return for her (pay her in apples, for example). The pony wouldn't have to agree, and that's the beauty of it-- animals would have the power of choice. Right now, the animal rights movement is confined to what we think animals want; we make the assumption that animals don't want to work for us without pay, and while we're probably right, wouldn't it be nice if animals truly had the choice to make all of their own decisions?
*Happy sigh*
But in our current world, this is not a reality. People haven't learned how to communicate mentally with animals yet, so I suppose our first job is to try out this mental communication for ourselves to see if it does work. Proper instructions can be found inside the book.
Oh, and if you're wondering whether this has worked for me... well, not fully. For instance, I haven't created the "two-way" bridges that Mr. Boone talks about. I can't tell what they are trying to tell me; at least I don't think I can. However, I have noticed that I can get messages across to animals often enough. For many, that alone is a truly magical experience.

Read the book and try it out for yourselves!