DOLPHIN EMBASSY
Speaking Animals
RECOGNITION OF DIFFERENT INTELLIGENCE
BOOK - PLATFORM - FILM - DECLARATION - MISSION
Do animals know how to love? Experience joy? Do they feel sadness? Grief?
Do they recognise themselves in their reflections?
Do they have expectations? Memory? Awareness of death?
Do they value beauty?
Do animals know what gratitude is?
Are they able to forgive? Remember? Tell jokes? Give gifts? Create something new?
Overcome instinct? Go out of their minds? Sacrifice themselves? Make a choice?
Understand us? And save us?
The Speaking Animals project will show that the answer to all of these questions is affirmative.
A new look at animals, based on cutting-edge scientific discoveries and empirical data, proving that animals possess consciousness, intelligence, feelings, social structure, culture, language, as well as abilities significantly superior to those of humans, and are capable of becoming highly valuable evolutionary guides for mankind.
Professor Jason Badridze
Ethologist, the first in the world to live for more than two years inside a pack of wolves
The project is based on the work of scientists with impeccable international reputations who, instead of careers as armchair theorists, chose direct experience of observation and interaction, including extended periods living "inside" free communities of animals in their natural habitat - the legendary Jane Goodall, Jason Badridze, Giacomo Rizzolatti and their followers.
As well as people whose fate is inextricably intertwined with animals, who learned to consider people the meaning and centre of their personal lives, such as Alain Delon, Paul McCartney and Jean Houston.
The project presents the results of research, descriptions of non-invasive experiments, direct experience of interspecies communication, as well as personal “first hand” recollections of people.
We call this overturning of the Cartesian picture of the world (René Descartes once concluded that animals do not feel pain or joy; if we think the same today, we are stuck in the 17th century) a "children's revolution." Children know that animals understand and feel, speak and dream. Then children go to school...
Are the Speaking Animals actually us, or these animals? Trained mammals originally destined for freedom - us or them?
The project will feature the world’s best photographers who capture images of the eyes of animals looking at us. Through the eyes of whales, elephants, monkeys, wolves, horses, dogs, birds, the world peers into us.
The Speaking Animals project is about the impossibility of hiding from this gaze.
It is said that in order for man to really value something, he needs to kill it. This has almost happened in the case of many animals.
We do not want this project to become a requiem, although during the lifetime of every adult alive today the majority of the free animals on the planet have been exterminated. “Speaking Animals” is a diplomatic mission: the book (scheduled for release in spring 2022) will become a message personally handed to the "powers that be," on whom decisions depend at the national and global level. In their offices, homes, planes, at conferences or on vacation, we will get through to them, if only because they were all once children too. Quite recently, when there were many more animals.
This is not contact with an alien intelligence. This is contact with another form of Earth intelligence concurrently existing on the planet. As well as the search for the universal criteria for intelligence.
Contact that destroys the brutality within us.
Making us human.
Project initiators: Alexander and Nicole Gratovsky, anthropologists, founders of the Dolphin Embassy, leaders of international expeditionary and research projects in the field of consciousness, authors of books and documentaries about humans and whales.
Dolphin Embassy's expedition 2021
