Why we called this site “Simorgh”
Simorgh is a mythical bird, a mythical animal like we find so enormously many in probably every human culture/civilization. The common interpretation of mythical animals goes often into the direction of totemism, metaphorism, and symbolism, etc. If we take a new look at history, from an Animal Rights angle, we can come to different definitions of that what those animal myths probably contained in terms of ethical standpoints towards nonhuman animals.
Such a different look will take us into deeper layers of folk tales and oral traditions, and foremostly it will take us deeper into the morals thereof (these type of materials are definitely not the easiest to untangle, but there are ‘golden threads’ that help).
We picked the bird Simorgh as our basically random choice for taking a representative for all such mythical embodiments of nonhumans in (secular) historical folklore. You’ll find some background about the bird in some of our web contents. And to close this intro we must add that our view of that bird Simorgh does not have a lot in common with the common imagery of that bird – a figure torn from its myth, made comfortable for an anthropocentric perception of the nonhuman world.
Here is a starter about ‘animal portrayals’ in mythology.