Does my pet have a soul?

I think a lot about my dog Valentina. Does she know how loved she is? Is she bored, anxious, unhappy? Does she have opinions about the different podcasts we listen to at home regularly? Does she have a good life?

If you are similarly preoccupied with your dog or cat’s interior life, or if you’ve ever been crushed with grief when a pet you love died, you’ll enjoy Casper ter Kuile's latest column for Vox. It starts with the question of whether animals have souls, and is a lovely exploration of the way our pets can help us connect with something much bigger than ourselves. “Our paradigm of anthropocentrism distinguishes us from the natural world and puts us on a pedestal of worthiness, forcing us to look at the whole of nature as somehow less real than we are,” he writes. But loving an animal complicates that — and it’s a complication we would all be wise to welcome if we’d like to create a more connected and loving world.

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—Rachel Wilkerson Miller, senior editor

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