Loving animals

Being interested in what psychiatrist Kresno Mulyadi stated, that house pets will have the child build empathy toward animals can nurture emotional intelligence. He also stated that by having pets at home children will learn the meaning of friendship, how to take care of the animals' well-being and how to deal with the feeling of loss (The Jakarta Post, Jan. 21, 2001).

Now that the government is striving at curricula improvements for the sake of better output to become better citizens, I would like to suggest that taking care of animals be some element of the local content. This is particularly so when you consider the following: loving animals remains number seven in the multiple intelligence areas to be instilled in children said Gardner (Rose and Nicholl 1997:38), after linguistic, logical, visual, musical, bodily kinesthetic, and interpersonal intelligence. Loving animals belongs to what Gardner terms "naturalist intelligence that is the ability to recognize flora and fauna".

Teaching how to love animals will, in my opinion, be a good step toward creating loving people. If education is directed to make humans more human, I am sure such bad social phenomena, like bickering, insulting, undermining, fighting, vandalizing, raping, robbing and killing can be finally reduced, eliminated or eradicated. Besides, loving pets is equal to preserving nature, thereby providing us with more varied types of nature. Take note of what William O'brien says: "The greatest unexplored territory in the world is the space between our ears" (1997:40).

ODO FADLOELI

Bandung