What We Fed To The Manticore By Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

Human Self-Conceit. The human race’s superiority complex has been in play for as long as humans can remember, but some works have started to highlight the issues in our misconstrued ideologies. In Talia Lakshmi Kolluri's What We Fed to the Manticore, the author uses anthropomorphism to illustrate the idea of human and animal codependency through a collection of short stories. Human-animal relationships have been studied for a long time now, yet some humans still find the idea of inter-species cooperation hard to grasp. Although humans may consider themselves hierarchically superior to other living species, Kolluri’s What We Fed to the Manticore emphasizes that humans and other organisms depend on each other more than they realize. This idea

Rebecca Hall describes that “Over 75 genera of fungi have been identified in the oral cavity alone, which can seed the respiratory or GI tract mycobiome” (Hall). This is crucial in understanding the relationship between humans and other organisms because it shows that humans also depend on these fungi as much as they depend upon humans. So, in turn, their relationship is mutualistic because fungi rely on humans’ diets and environments to survive, while humans depend on fungi to break down bacteria in the human gut in order to properly digest food. This fact is important because it points out the idea that these relationships display codependency rather than a relationship in which only fungi benefit from the human ecosystem. Therefore, even though fungi depend on humans, the human dependence upon fungi in order to maintain physical health signifies that humans are not superior to other life forms. Another example of human dependency on other organisms is the common connection between humans and the animals they choose to surround themselves with during their day-to-day lives. For example, human dependence on their pets and even service animals has an immense impact on their physical and mental