If you could be any animal for a day, which animal would you pick? I would like to be a dolphin. How about you?

[justaprogressive]

30. A whale on a planet that didn't hunt them...

Suddenly you are a great bubble-creature soaring upward
through a golden yellow sea to the roaring music of breakers in
strange syncopated harmony, and you break the surface and leap high
in the sweet warm air, dipping and turning with your great flippers,
hanging and laughing in glad to-be-alive greeting, gliding in on your
belly to a surfboarding landing on your own private swell.

You watch huge leaping brown creatures cavorting in a golden sea,
seal-like whales with noble brows and mighty eight-fingered hands on
the ends of their flipper-like arms.

"Statistically speaking by the rules of the game our species should not
have evolved into the galactic stage happy hotshots we are as we sing
this song-dive-dance into the sea of space. Airbreathing water creatures
evolve big brain big body complexity think noble thoughts but usually
don't develop external-world-manipulation-technology... natural kings of
the sea living pure mind and flesh but doing no galactic deeds remaining
eternally stable primary stage civilization in ignorant bliss."

You come bubbling up for air from the golden depths near low rocky cliffs;
you shoot up, into the intoxicating world of the gassy atmosphere hyper-
ventilating in rapture, grab the cliff edge with the hands of your flipperarms,
and vault up onto a grassy plain where your mates are
already waiting.

"Our species kept its hands when we returned to the sea for the land remained
our opiumdenboudoir-playground have you ever tried copulating swimming
around with no hands forget it."

From "Songs From The Stars" by Norman Spinrad

If you do or ever had an imagination, : it's recommended reading.