The Judaeo-Christian version of the beginning of the world is not the only creation story. All origin tales account for the arrival, close in time, of humans and animals on the earth. Sometimes they exist already although in separate spheres. The Iroquois believed that there was a Water World, where the animals lived, and a Sky World inhabited by people. A woman fell from the Sky World and was saved by the birds. They made her some land to live on and she gave birth to a daughter who populated the Water World with human beings. In the Chippewa beginnings, a single cave-dwelling woman lived in a world of animals. She was impregnated by a dog and became the mother of the Chippewa people. A Chinese myth has the world created from a hen’s egg. And sometimes, as in Egypt, human and animal existed within the same creatures. It’s clear to all peoples of the earth that human and animal are dependent on, as well as battle with, each other. They always have a vital relationship, because creation myths explain the world that is already known. For all societies, until quite recent history, we inhabit a world where animals and humans coexist, where animals are magical, powerful and cunning, where animals can help humans, where, even if animals are hunted, they are party to the necessity. Animals, whatever their origin, are the friends and companions of humans on earth.
Even in Genesis, God hoped to find a friend for Adam among the animals. But here the companionship was undermined by the gift of dominion. The animals came first, in the first creation story of Genesis, before the man-and-woman. Though not before the light and darkness on the first day, the firmament dividing the above from below on the second day, the dry land and the seas, and on the earth the grass, the herb-yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is within itself on the third day (it was a busy day), the sun and the moon and the stars on the fourth day. Only then was everything in place for sentient life. On the fifth day:
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
The sixth day was a rush to get everything done before the sabbath day of rest. The
living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind.
And when all of them were in place
… God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
In this first version of the beginning, man was man-and-woman, a duality called them. He blessed them and told them to replenish the earth and subdue it. He gave them
… dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
But he didn’t tell the man-and-woman they could eat the animals. He introduced the herbs bearing seeds and the fruit of the trees yielding seeds and told the man-and-woman
… to you it shall be for meat.
And to the animals he gave
… every green herb for meat.
And then he saw everything and it was very good.
A vegetarian world, then; no hunting by humans, no predation by animals. But unequivocally the man-and-woman had dominion over the beasts.
The second chapter of Genesis has a different version of creation. First the Lord God created the earth and the heavens, and the plants and the herbs, everything in the earth waiting to grow because it hadn’t rained yet. The Lord God made it rain and then from the wet earth he moulded man – just a him all on his own. He made a garden eastward in Eden with trees and a river and minerals. He told the man to tend the garden and that he was to eat the fruit of the trees, all except for one. Then the Lord God decided the man needed help:
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
In this version, friendship is required and animals might have been the answer, but it turned out that animals were not able to provide it. So Eve was made out of Adam’s rib. She was a help meet, a human being like and of Adam, not an animal being who was separately made.
In both versions the early writers are keen to distinguish the human from the animal. The second story is not so absolutist about the original distinction. God thought that animals might be satisfactory companions, they and Adam were all moulded from the same wet earth; but he was not like them, it turned out, and needed another of his own kind – although Eve was made differently from either Adam or the animals. In the second story, there is no mention of dominion. Adam is made a gardener, a cultivator of trees and herbs. There is no indication of how he is supposed to relate to the animals, except that he does that most human of things: gives them names. Adam has language, which gives him a naming edge over animals. Nevertheless, aside from naming, it sounds as if the humans and animals led separate but equal existences in the garden. Eve talks and listens to a serpent. Only when she takes its advice, and chooses to believe its word (so the animals had language, too) over the Lord God, and then blames it for the whole disobedient mess, does a distinction come. The Lord God told the serpent:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Yet even though the man and woman are exiled from the garden, and the ground is cursed so that from then on making a living from it will only happen by the sweat of Adam’s face, there is still no mention of animals as food.
In chapter two of Genesis, Cain and Abel are already adult, and we learn that Abel is a keeper of sheep, while his brother is a tiller of the soil. Domestication and farming have arrived, as has a ritual life where the brothers make sacrifices of their products to the Lord. The Lord is pleased with Abel’s burned fatty lamb offering, but isn’t impressed at all with Cain’s vegetable produce:
And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.
Only now, and without explanation, man controls animals and meat has become so desirable that the Lord himself prefers it to salad. Meat causes the first human killing, though it seems that killing animals has been happening for some time.
After that, animals are entirely in the control of man, so that when God plans to wipe out all life from the earth, he instructs Noah to bring in reproductive pairs of animals in order to repopulate the planet. In our Western ancient justification of the world, man herds the animals, man kills the animals and man saves the animals.
Adam may have named the animals, but we have no idea what he called them or on what basis he called them what he did. This is aggravating because nomenclature is very important to human beings. Luckily, we have Linnaeus, the man who gave us taxonomy, the Adam of the Enlightenment. There are many ways to name animals: you can see them as individuals, as we see our cats, dogs and goldfish, and call them Gerald, Isabel and Archimedes. This was how I imagined the naming of the animals when I was small. When we name animals like this, it’s because we recognise them and can easily tell one from another – so Gerald the tabby who lives in your house is perfectly distinguished from Isabel the tabby and Archimedes the tabby who both also live in your house because, well, you know them, like you know your kids. But you still need a name for the group of animals that are dogs, and another for the group that are cats – at the very least so that their bowls don’t get muddled up.
Unless you don’t. Suppose that in some societies people do not classify types with names, but simply know them. How then would they refer to them to other people when the animals aren’t present? ‘Fancy a haunch of deer?’ ‘That monkey is really annoying me in the mornings with its howling, I’m off to deal with it.’ The howler monkey is distinguishable from another kind of monkey by its howling, but if you don’t need to refer to monkeys in the abstract (‘Monkeys are a very interesting and particular group of animals and I want to write a book about them.’) you could call everything Isabel and use individual descriptions according to need – howling creature/Isabel in the tree, slithering creature/Isabel bit me on my leg. As for lunch, you can work the other way round: meat is meat, whether it comes from a deer or a mammoth. Meat, rather than roots and fruit for lunch today. It could be all rather contingent and unproblematical. Choice is for supermarkets, not the forest or steppe. No need to bother with verbal categories. But even if you don’t have to distinguish between animals on the grounds that you take what you can get, still, they look different, one from the other, and you take that into account when you draw them on the wall of the cave. You might even have feelings about them beyond their food value: their size, availability, tameness, usefulness, speed, beauty. Those feelings, along with the quality of their taste, become how you know them and mark them off from other living creatures, whether you name them or not.
In wealthy groups with plenty of resources, meat needs categorisation. After all, it can be good-tasting, so-so-tasting, or bad-luck-to-it-feed-it-to-the-dogs-tasting meat. Choosing which genus of meat to have for lunch would be a luxury no subsistence-hunting community could afford. But once everything has got more complicated and you are writing and sending what you write to strangers, inviting them to supper to show off, you need to clarify. When you achieve a surplus rather than living hand-to-mouth, and you can exchange things, you do find one kind of meat more desirable, for taste or status, than another. Choice requires names for things. And if my lunch (a hard-to-get and delicious kind of meat, or more likely a hard-to-get and therefore delicious kind of meat) can indicate that I am of a higher status than you, then we had better distinguish it from what the peasants eat if they’re lucky. It’s very hard to do without names for types of things that come in many and varied forms, as everything on this planet happens to. We humans may have language, but evolutionary multiplicity comes first, and requires that we use the logos to make categories. Gerald and Isabel don’t know that they are ‘cats’, since they don’t have our language. They know something, though. They seem to know that they are like each other in a way that they are not like birds or dogs, however they might conceive of ‘birds’ and ‘dogs’. Human language does much the same thing: it tries to pin down the differences. You may not have to have a name for your dog, but even if you try and avoid it and call it ‘dog’, it still acquires a capital D and the specifics of your particular whippet.
We learned to classify, to separate and universalise. Some groups of people in the past classified their animals by the way they moved. They fly, crawl, walk on all fours, swing through the branches. Not all that helpful, really, in a post-domestic society, but there are no end of systems to be discovered once human beings start. Unless you’re a believer, the classificatory nature of the early books of the Bible looks like proof positive that they were written by us. Only a human being could conceive of a God so obsessed with separation and hierarchy. Linnaeus performed intellectually as God did with his world-making. Separation and hierarchy. Organisation. Kingdoms are divided into phyla, phyla into classes, classes into orders, families, genera and species, and species into subspecies. He used structural similarities to make his scheme. From Wikipedia, we learn that
Mammals (formally Mammalia) are a class of vertebrate animals whose females are characterised by the possession of mammary glands while both males and females are characterised by sweat glands, hair, three middle ear bones used in hearing, and a neocortex region in the brain.
Except for the five species of monotremes (which lay eggs), all mammal species give birth to live young. Most mammals also possess specialised teeth, and the largest group of mammals, the placentals, use a placenta during gestation. The mammalian brain regulates endothermic and circulatory systems, including a four-chambered heart.
There are approximately 5,400 species of mammals, distributed in about 1,200 genera, 153 families and 29 orders (though this varies by classification scheme) … Mammals are divided into two subclasses, the prototheria, which includes the egg-laying monotremes, and the theria, which includes the live-bearing marsupials and placentals. Most mammals, including the six largest orders, belong to the placental group. The three largest orders, in descending order, are Rodentia (mice, rats and other small, gnawing mammals), Chiroptera (bats), and Soricomorpha (shrews, moles and solenodons). The next three largest orders include the Carnivora (dogs, cats, weasels, bears, seals and their relatives), the Cetartiodactyla (including the even-toed hoofed mammals and the whales) and the Primates to which the human species belongs. The relative size of these latter three orders differs according to the classification scheme and definitions used by various authors.
In order to create these categories someone must go to wherever the animals are and collect samples, but after that, you can stay indoors, first in the anatomy theatre, and then in the study with plenty of candles and quills, and you think out the reality into abstraction. Once that is done, and done in a universally agreed language, everyone can discuss and refer to all the creatures on the planet without either the animals or the people having to be anywhere nearby. This is a tremendous step forward for learning, and it’s the point at which the mythic beasts on those old maps of uncharted waters are known to be impossible figments of the imagination. We can tell the truth from fiction without having to have the creatures to hand. And look, we’ve even made that separation of real and fantasy animals. These days, taxonomy has changed as we’ve learned more from biochemistry, but the scheme itself survives (although infinitely more complex) to allow us to tell one living thing from another with finer and finer distinction.
Above all, hierarchy ensures that some animals are more advanced than others. From the unicellular amoeba to the bipedal primate Homo sapiens, everything has a place in the scheme. Complexity is at the top, simplicity at the bottom, in the middle are what we easily recognise as ‘animals’. And it is us, Homo, us at the top, who have produced this laddered arrangement of life. Human animals have decided what ‘advanced’ and ‘primitive’ mean, what ‘complexity’ and ‘simplicity’ mean, and made that our way of judging where everything in the world is to be on the scale that goes from us downward. We even have the privilege of doubting our former certainties. In 1780, Brissot de Warville wondered
What import do the divisions of the species have … they are nothing but definitions, ‘chimerical divisions’ that have no existence in nature. All bodies belong to the same nature. Within this space, there has been established the capacity of some beings to dispose of others, a capacity that Brissot dubs ‘the right of property’.1
How can we do it any other way, since it is us doing it?
Scientific classification isn’t the only way to do it, and although it has been the most recent and most popular way these past three hundred years in the Western hemisphere, perhaps other ways are at least as interesting. Freud thought so, and so did Native Americans when they assigned particular animals to their tribe as their spiritual representatives. Totemism takes animals and classifies them in order to make useful ways of thinking about human groupings. For Lévi-Strauss it didn’t matter at all which animal was chosen; the totemic animal was arbitrary, the whole point was precisely to classify, not to make perceived animal qualities representative of the human group, but simply to make differences in the world, and in that, he said, the Indian tribes of North America were as scientific as we are. The older anthropological functionalists, like Firth and Fortes, had believed that the animals were specifically chosen to represent particular physical or psychological aspects that the tribe found desirable. The strength of the ox, the ferocity of a jaguar, the hunting skills of an eagle. By using the idea of the animal, it became their spiritual creature and would confer those desirable qualities on the tribe. Malinowski, even earlier, thought that the totemic animals were simply those which were designated good to eat, or were useful – for clothing, or for arrow-making. And Freud, interested in a quite different story, made the totems the tool of the unconscious, enabling tribes to blame or justify guilt by externalising it as the will of their totemic spirits, and using them as emblems to ensure that tribes inter-married rather than contravening the innate law against incest.
All of which are examples of Lévi-Strauss’s description of our relation to animals: that they are ‘good to think with’. We can and do use animals to think about anything and everything. All the various ways we have contrived to cook them – roast, boil, fricassee, grill, stew, sauté, make soup of, put with herbs, spices, fruit, nuts, vegetables, mix with other kinds of meat, dry, sauced, liquidised – parallel the multitudinous ways we have contrived to think about them as props to increase our own understanding of ourselves and the world. The animals, very often, are incidental. Perhaps ‘animals’, that category of non-human life which we have lumped into a single noun, exist more in our thoughts than in reality. When we worry, as we increasingly do, about the possible extinction of the northern white rhino (those last thirty-five northern white rhinos living their actual lives in Central Africa at the time of writing), are we really concerned for the creatures themselves, as anxious as we might be about the possible extinction of our aunt or our neighbour’s mother, or is the northern white rhino – rarely seen by most people in the world – in fact a thought we have that, like Native American tribes, we use to describe the world? The idea of the white rhino wandering in the bush is what we want. We abhor its absence, though for all we know, right now, at this moment, there are none left. The loss of the last northern white rhino on the planet might make you cry – it’s almost making me cry now – but we can’t be crying about Noname, who died last of all in Central Africa and doubtless, until it was inevitable, resisted her death as all living creatures do up to a point. If someone told us the white rhinos were out of danger, we’d be relieved; if they go extinct, we’ll be distressed. But like the tree falling in the forest, who knows what extinct or not extinct means to us, or, far more mysteriously and perhaps importantly than that, what it could possibly mean to the white rhinos?
Human beings can do more than one thing at a time. We can do several apparently contradictory things at a time. We can think with and about animals, worry about the loss of a species, and also breed animals far from their original phenotype and genotype for our eating or aesthetic pleasure and benefit. We can worry about an invisible white rhino and the loss of diversity in ‘nature’, and we can farm virtually monocultured domesticated cattle and sheep, keep chickens, race horses, breed dogs that we have manipulated over many generations to produce the qualities of growth, taste, speed, looks and obedience that we best desire for profit, pleasure and usefulness. We can see a herd of cows or a flock of sheep as we drive along the motorway. They’re not mythic beasts, not even far away in ‘Africa’, but right here and now, manufactured creatures. This is another result of the original naming and dividing. We remake and redivide our categories, creating them just like God moulding Adam and Eve from the dust after the rain had made it malleable. Cattle divide now into the limited breeds we have created that best provide our varied requirements: milk, meat, clothing, strength, good reproductive qualities. There are, as a result, rare-breed farms that keep some of the older stock, antiques (though these were already selectively bred), some butchers who sell, and wealthier individuals who are prepared to pay a premium for their meat on the grounds of improved (meaning unimproved) taste. The rare breeds are only as rare and endangered as white rhinos because of the creation and marketing of the ubiquitous breeds; millions of animals which we think about, if we think about them at all, in terms of taste or commerce, that are, apart from those moments when we pass them on the motorway, most known from their parts on butchers’ counters or on plastic-covered trays in the supermarket chill cabinet.
The last white rhino falling in the forest, and the millions of Aberdeen Angus steers born to be meat, the puppy in the pet shop, the working sheepdog, the dream camel interpreted by your shrink, the horse you put money on in the Derby, the glass giraffe on your shelf, the bird singing right now in the tree outside, next door’s cat crapping in your garden, the book you’re reading published by Penguin, my lunch, the squishy bear your toddler is clutching, the Just So stories you read her at bedtime, the fish you pull from a river, the simile you last used to describe speed, or grace or cold-eyed calculation – all these and so much more are our animals. What animals are to themselves is a question mostly left to philosophers to fail to come to a conclusion about.