The kinkajou | Photo: Rebecca Yale via Getty Images

There’s a scene from the first episode of The Green Planet, David Attenborough’s latest nature series, that I’ve been compulsively watching. He’s telling the viewer how the balsa tree gets the kinkajou, a fruit-eating relative of the raccoon, to pollinate its flowers. “As night falls, the tree prepares an enticing treat,” Attenborough narrates. “Each flower is filled with huge quantities of exceptionally rich nectar, supercharged with sugar. Irresistible. The kinkajous drink so greedily that they get pollen all over their faces.” We see footage of a kinkajou slurping up the sticky liquid with her unusually long tongue. This animal, also known as the honey bear, is having the goddamn time of her life, climbing the branches with expert agility, going from flower to flower, simply delighted by the widespread availability of this delicious balsa juice.

Every time I watch this, I can’t help but feel jealous of the honey bear in the balsa tree. I enjoy food, don’t get me wrong, but I will never enjoy eating something as much as a kinkajou enjoys balsa nectar.

It’s not only the kinkajou I’m jealous of: I watch a program about manta rays, see those flat, elegant fish calmly gliding through the ocean, their weird mouths wide open, taking in millions of plankton, and I wonder if I’ll ever be as relaxed as they are. On a different show, I see a sun bear in Borneo, effortlessly climbing up a tree to take honey from a beehive, excited for a little treat, and well, it seems like a fun adventure, something I’ll never be able to partake of thanks to the annoying reality that I am a human being.

Sun bear in a tree | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Which brings me to my proposal: everyone should get to be the animal of their choice for two weeks every year. (Maybe using one of those Avatar machines? I don’t know. I’ll let a science-genius work out the mechanics of the whole thing.)

It’s not that I hate being a human or anything. In fact, I actually like it! The human imagination is a wonderful thing, so rich and complex that it stretches far beyond the experience of being a human. The idea of being an animal is so seductive to me because of my imagination, because I’m always wanting to understand more and more about all the ways one can exist in our world.

Being a simple creature whose life is solely centered on eating, reproducing, staying alive, and chilling sounds kinda nice. Not having the burden of complex thought, not having to live a life centered around working and making money and buying shit and worrying about politics or whatever seems like a fucking dream.

Before you tell me about the major drawbacks to being a non-human animal, that they live lives red in tooth and claw, let me say, yes! I’m aware. That’s why my idea is nothing crazy, just two reasonable weeks annually, where you don’t have to be human. (Also, if you die as an animal, you don’t die in real life, your two-week vacation just gets cut short.)

I mean imagine it: you are a blue whale, floating through the ocean, in a state of total tranquility. If you’re hungry, all you need to do is open your mouth, and boom, you get all the krill you desire. Or maybe you’re a chameleon, hanging out on a leaf that looks just like you, shooting out your long weird tongue whenever a bug comes along. (Don’t worry, bugs are delicious to you because you’re a chameleon.) Perhaps you’re a kangaroo joey, warm and safe in your mother’s pouch, drinking milk whenever you get hungry, peeking your head out to see what’s going on in the world whenever you get bored.

An itty bitty chameleon | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

An unknown with my (genius) idea that concerns me is what happens to you when you go back to being a person. Maybe your weeks as an animal is horrible and traumatic, and reminds you why you love being a human. Maybe you enjoy it in the same way you enjoy going on vacation. Maybe you end up loving your weeks as an animal so much that it ruins your human life. If that ends up being the case with me, you’ll know because I will have given up all my worldly possessions and moved to South America to live amongst the kinkajous. The cool thing about my modest proposal is that you get to learn what another existence is like. It would allow you to rethink your own in ways you couldn’t possibly imagine.