Nothing but our vanity, our insane imagination. Every human on some level thinks they’re God, and no animal does. That’s why humans are so violent, so aggressive, so judgmental, so miserable, and animals are so innocent, so pure. And that’s what makes us think we are different from them, more highly evolved in some fundamental way, which makes it okay to treat animals as lower beings. Like putting a chimp in a zoo. Come to the zoo and take a good, long look at the chimp. It is you sitting in a cage, nothing more, nothing less. Smarter than a 3 year old human baby. How deluded and narcissistic one must be to commit such an act of barbarism, purely for entertainment? We are more highly evolved alright, but along with our beautiful intellect we have evolved something else - our ego. And it’s not pretty.

We are not at all different from animals, we are the same. Maybe a bit smarter but that’s all. We just love to pretend we are something more, categorically, we imagine it and then wallow in our imagination, constantly trying to prove our superiority to ourselves and to other people. This leads to continuous violence, both physical and psychological which we can all witness in the world.

Every enlightened being knows that, because enlightenment is nothing but a dramatically painful fall from vanity.