I confess, the replies that quickly accumulated made the video seem like a "chick flick", definitely a three-hanky video, so being a guy, I was a little reluctant to take a look, for fear of having to reach for the kleenex box myself. You know how us guys just hate that!

But I watched it, and yeah, I misted up a bit. Oh the shame! But it was beautiful. It never ceases to amaze me, the bonds that humans can form with animals.

Relationships like that shed a lot of light on what it really means to be human. We tend to focus on our mutant brains as the secret of our success, but like fish oblivious to the ocean, we don't give nearly enough credit to the power of our sociability. Watching the video of Christian is a demonstration that the human "social field" is so powerful that we can draw members of other species into our orbit and make them members of our extended tribe.

Then I think of the genre of photos of "animal friends", the lamb lying down with the lion, dogs and cats cuddling, etc. And it seems to me that all of the examples of that that I've seen are animals living within the human sphere of influence. Our sociability is infectious across species lines.

I'd add to our various self-descriptive labels, such as "tool-using ape", an important one: "The ape that makes friends". Homo sapiens gregarious, that's us.

Thanks, Lindy.