What if intelligence is not best measured by abstraction, language, or complexity of thought—but by presence, responsiveness, and right relationship with life? This reflection explores the difference between intelligence and intellect, and how confusing the two has shaped human ideas of superiority, spirituality, and evolution. What emerges is a more honest, humbler view of intelligence as something shared—expressed differently, but no less fully—across species.

We often compare humans and animals through narrow frameworks—intelligence, emotional capacity, self-awareness, or spiritual development—using hierarchies and models created by the human mind. While such systems can be illuminating, they can also distance us from a more direct, lived experience of truth.

Assumptions can quietly block our ability to perceive realities and receive communications from animals. In this article, I explore how beliefs can inhibit our ability to truly hear animals.

This month, I came across a powerful article in The Guardian that gave me a breath of genuine hope. Journalist Megan Mayhew Bergman described what she calls the “last frontier of empathy”: seeing ourselves not as superior to animals but as animals too—kin among kin.

When I began my professional career as an animal communicator in the 1970s, I made a conscious decision: I would not refer to animals as pets or to people as their owners.

Amy Richardson wrote this article for the July 1993 issue after attending an animal communication course I taught. It is a wonderful example of how much we can learn from our wise animal friends when we listen to them.

Almost nothing can get me on my soapbox as the assertion that animals are lower and less-evolved than humans, or that humans are the ultimate, divine species on Earth.

A magazine article talked about how dragonflies "hunt the insects humans hate—mosquitoes and gnats, deerflies and wasps—and their 95 percent success rate makes them nature’s most lethal predators….They can fly backward and sideways, dip up and down with ease, hover in place, and reach speeds up to 30 miles per hour. With their compound eyes, odonates process 200 images per second—over three times more than humans do—which produces a slow-motion effect that allows them to hyperfocus on prey.”

I decided to find out more from the dragonfly masters themselves.

A two-year-old orca, which locals named “Little Brave Hunter” translated from the Ehattesaht First Nation language, became stranded in a lagoon along the northwest reaches of Vancouver Island when traveling with her mother.

Dawn Baumann Brunke was editor of Alaska Wellness magazine and interviewed me for her book, Animal Voices, https://www.animalvoices.net/ published in 2002. Here’s an excerpt from our interview for the chapter “When All the World is Wise.”