Am I going too deep on this question????

Obviously animal morality isnt the same as human morality but as maintained by darwin it is ridiculous to propose that a being capable of feeling empathy, sympathy and love, as higher animals demonstrably can, does not have some sense of morality.
Also, to compare animal morality with human morality is fruitless as the term “rapist” means very little to a dog…

“I will feel their presence watching over me like totemic deities….

“How can I descent to such antrhopomorphoism? Easily – but is it, in this case entirely false? Perhaps not. I am not attributing human attributes to my snake and bird acquaintances. I recognize that when they serve purposes of mine they do so for beautifully selfish reasons of their own. Which is exactly the way it should be. I suggest, however, that it’s a foolish, simple minded rationalism which denies any form of emotion to all animals but man and his dog. This is is no more justified than Moslems are in denying souls to women. It seem to me possible, even probable, that many of the nonhuman undomesticaed animals experience emotions unkknown to us. What do coyotes mean they yodel at the moon? What are the dolphins trying so patiently to tell us?”

Then he quotes Walt Whitman:

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins…”

(The quote continues: “they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.”

What I am trying to say is that morality isn’t real. You’re not born with it, it’s not an existing thing. It is a concept that we have come to create for ourselves. The conditioned responses we have, the same as ants teaching ants, is something we simply call morality, when really its nothin more than learned social responses. The supposed “Laws of Morality” simply dont exist.

Thank you for restatin my argument in clearer terms. There really isn’t any real difference between the learned responses of different species other than cognitive capacity. I apologize if I didn’t make that clear. My main point, though, is that the contemporary concept of morality simply does not exist. It’s fabricated through human culture, just like the religions AND rules of law different moral codes adhere to. Morality, like language, is an arbitrary system.

That doesn’t mean our definitions of right and wrong and good ones, just that they exist. One can just as easily teach a domesticated animal to bite, or not bite strangers. To sleep on, or not sleep on, a given piece of furniture. To beg, or not beg for food.

You cannot however, teach them not to lick their genitals. That doesn’t mean they don’t know it’s considered wrong – it just means there are some things in life more important than conforming to what’s been defined as morality for you, and genital licking is apparently one of them.

Which may also explain why Sara Palin’s daughter is pregnant.