Humans have historically been much concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts. We speak; we reason; we imagine; we anticipate; we worship, we laugh. They do not. The historical insistence on an unbridgeable gap between humans and other animals suggests that it serves some need or function. Why do we humans so frequently define ourselves by distinction from animals? Why should the distinction between man and beast matter?
Attempts to make this distinction fall largely into two categories. First, many cite human failings as unique, chief among which is fighting among ourselves. In these cases, the writer is usually trying to inspire his readers with moral resolutions. In the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, admonishes: “Lions do not fight with one another; serpents do not attack serpents, nor do the wild monsters of the deep rage against their like. But most of the calamities of man are caused by his fellow men.” When, in 1532, Ludovico Ariosto in Orlando Furioso says, “Man is the only animal who injures his mate,” this, too, is meant as an admonition. James Froude in his Oceana of 1886 claimed, “Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one for whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.” And even William James, in this century, wrote that “Man . . . is simply the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on his own species.” In these examples, animals are not so much being observed as men are being exhorted to cease killing (usually) other men. They are intended to shame men into recognizing that they behave worse than animals.
The other—by far larger—category of man-beast contrasts cites human advantages: our intelligence, our culture, our sense of humor, our knowledge of death. In the nineteenth century William Hazlitt maintained, “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.” And in our century, the philosopher William Ernest Hocking claimed, “Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.” Uniqueness is claimed for the human sense of humor, the ability to understand virtue, the ability to make and use tools. Again the authors seem more interested in making a didactic point for humans than in observing or understanding animals.
Human-animal comparisons have historically served as a rich source of moral instruction for humanistic philosophers, particularly during periods when the natural world was sentimentalized and viewed as a model. The most poetic was Buffon, the great nineteenth century French naturalist, who began his essay “On the Nature of Animals” by saying that animals cannot think or remember, but have feelings “to an even greater degree than humans do.” Buffon believed there to be an advantage to an animal’s purely feeling life. Humans, he wrote, lead lives of quiet desperation, and “most men die of sorrow.” In contrast, “Animals do not search for pleasures where none can be found; guided by their feelings alone, they never make a mistake in their choice; their desires are always proportional to their capacity to enjoy; they feel as much as they enjoy and enjoy only as much as they feel. Man, on the other hand, wanting to invent pleasures, does nothing but spoil nature; wanting to force feelings, he only abuses his being, and digs a hole in his heart which nothing is capable of later filling.” He ends by speaking of “the infinite distance that the Supreme Being has put between animals and [Man].”
Contemporary renditions of this contrast have been scarcely more grounded in animal reality and have not shed much more light on animals—or humans. Recently N. K. Humphrey wrote that “human beings have evolved to be the most highly social creatures the world has ever seen. Their social relationships have a depth, a complexity, and a biological importance to them, which no other animals’ relationships come near.” Considering how little is known about “other animals’ relationships,” this seems unwarranted.
How little we know, and how much we pretend to know, is illustrated by the fact that, until very recently, it was a canon of animal behavior that, of females, only the human experienced orgasm. As recently as 1979, anthropologist Donald Symons pronounced that the “female orgasm is a characteristic essentially restricted to our own species.” When the question was actually investigated in the stump-tailed macaque, using the same physiological criteria used for humans, it was found that the female macaques did appear to experience orgasm. Primatologist Frans de Waal observes the same of the female bonobo (pygmy chimpanzee), from behavioral evidence. Like many questions specifically involving the human female, the truth is that not many scientists had ever considered the question systematically, let alone done the necessary field observation studies to find an answer. Perhaps it pleased most male scientists to imagine that while animal females sought sex only during an estrus cycle, and hence had sex only for reproduction, human females, due to their unique orgasmic capacity, wanted sex all the time.
People have always exalted certain “higher” feelings that are claimed to single us out among animals. Only humans, it is said, feel noble emotions such as compassion, true love, altruism, pity, mercy, reverence, honor, and modesty. On the other hand, people have often attributed so-called negative or “low” emotions to animals: cruelty, pride, greed, rage, vanity, and hatred. At play here appears to be a seemingly unbearable injury to our sense of uniqueness, to our entitlement to the special nobility of our emotional life. Thus not only whether animals can feel, but what they feel, is used to strengthen the species barrier. What lies behind this “us/ them” mentality—the urge to define ourselves by proving we are not only different, but utterly different, including emotionally? Why should this distinction between man and beast be so important to humans?
A look at the distinctions humans draw among ourselves may provide a partial answer. Dominant human groups have long defined themselves as superior by distinguishing themselves from groups they are subordinating. Thus whites define blacks in part by differing melanin content of the skin; men are distinguished from women by primary and secondary sex characteristics. These empirical distinctions are then used to make it appear that it is the distinctions themselves, not their social consequences, that are responsible for the social dominance of one group over the other. Thus the distinction between man and beast has served to keep man on top. People define themselves as distinct from animals, or similar when convenient or entertaining, in order to keep themselves dominant over them. Human beings presumably benefit from treating animals the way they do—hurting them, jailing them, exploiting their labor, eating their bodies, gaping at them, and even owning them as signs of social status. Any human being who has a choice does not want to be treated like this.
A blatant example of many of these prejudices, with a suggestion of some of their social consequences, can be found in the article on “Animals” in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, written in 1908:
Civilization, or perhaps rather education, has brought with it a sense of the great gulf that exists between man and the lower animals. . . . In the lower stages of culture, whether they be found in races which are, as a whole, below the European level, or in the uncultured portion of civilized communities, the distinction between men and animals is not adequately, if at all, recognized. . . . The savage . . . attributes to the animal a vastly more complex set of thoughts and feelings, and a much greater range of knowledge and power, than it actually possesses. . . . It is therefore small wonder that his attitude towards the animal creation is one of reverence rather than superiority.
Only a lower man, one close to animals, would value them. Human rationalizations of this gap are analyzed in A View to a Death in the Morning, an elegant book on hunting by Matt Cartmill:
In policing the animal-human boundary, scientists have shown considerable ingenuity in redefining supposedly unique human traits to keep them from being claimed for other animals. Consider our supposedly big brains. Human beings are supposed to be smarter than other animals, and therefore we ought to have larger brains. But in fact, elephants, whales, and dolphins have bigger brains than ours; and small rodents and monkeys have relatively bigger brains (their brains make up a larger percentage of body weight than ours do). Scientists who study these things have accordingly labored to redefine brain size, dividing brain weight by basal metabolic rate or some other exponential function of body weight to furnish a standard by which these animals’ brains can thus be deemed smaller than ours. The unique bigness of the human brain thus turns out to be a matter of definition.
This is not the only example of the manipulation of science toward the goal of dominance. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould cogently described the conscious or unconscious manipulation of data on brain size to prove that the scientist’s racial group was inherently smarter than other groups. (A similar example of an attempt to force science into the service of racial discrimination may be found in Murray and Herrnstein’s recent The Belln Curve. This ugly piece of advocacy is depressing evidence that measurable intelligence is no guarantee of intelligent ideas.)
Animals’ presumed lack of feeling has provided a major excuse for treating them badly. This has been so extreme that animals were long regarded as unable to feel pain, physical or emotional. But when an animal is hurt in a way that would hurt a person, it generally reacts much as a person would. It cries out, it gets away, then examines or favors the affected part, and withdraws and rests. Veterinarians do not doubt that wounded animals feel pain, and use analgesics and anesthetics in their practice. The only criterion that an animal fails to meet for feeling physical pain as humans understand it is the ability to express it in words. Yet the fish on the hook is said not to be thrashing in pain (or fear) but in a reflex action. A lobster in boiling water or puppies whose tails are being docked are said to feel nothing. A recent German book on animal consciousness argues to the contrary: “The fact that we so immediately understand these signals is just a further sign that we share with other animals the grand construction of our pain apparatus.” When the subject is actually researched, the findings are in line with common sense: the apparent pain of the fish twisting on the hook is real.
It has always been comforting to the dominant group to assume that those in subservient positions do not suffer or feel pain as keenly, or at all, so they can be abused or exploited without guilt and with impunity. The history of prejudice is notable for assertions that lower classes and other races are relatively insensitive. Similarly, until the 1980s, it was routine for surgery on human infants to be performed with paralytic agents but without anesthesia, in the long-held belief that babies are incapable of feeling pain. It was believed, without evidence, that their nervous systems were immature. The notion that babies do not feel pain is directly counter to their screams and can only be classified as scientific myth. Yet it has been a tenet of human medicine, only recently acknowledged to be false in the wake of studies showing that infants who do not get pain medication take longer to recover from surgery.
A similar bigotry has extended to the presence of emotions in the poor, the foreign, those raised in impoverished or unenlightened cultures, and in children, who supposedly have not yet learned to feel in fully human ways. It is often asserted that when an infant smiles, for example, it is a physical response to gas in the intestines. The baby is said not to be smiling in response to other people, or out of happiness, but in response to digestive events. Despite the fact that adults do not smile as a result of discomfort in the stomach, this notion is widely repeated—though often not believed by the infant’s parents. Studies showing that infant smiles are not correlated with burps, regurgitation, and flatulence have made little impact on this idea. Many people are gratified to think of infants as having diminished or no feelings.
If it is so easy to deny the emotional lives of other people, how much easier it is to deny the emotional lives of animals.
The greatest obstacle in science to investigating the emotions of other animals has been an inordinate desire to avoid anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism means the ascription of human characteristics—thought, feeling, consciousness, and motivation—to the nonhuman. When people claim that the elements are conspiring to ruin their picnic or that a tree is their friend, they are anthropomorphizing. Few believe that the weather is plotting against them, but anthropomorphic ideas about animals are held more widely. Outside scientific circles, it is common to speak of the thoughts and feelings of pets and of wild and captive animals. Yet many scientists regard even the notion that animals feel pain as the grossest sort of anthropomorphic error.
Cats and dogs are prime targets of anthropomorphism, both wrongly and rightly. Ascribing unlikely thoughts and feelings to pets is common: “She understands every word you say.” “He sings his little heart out to show how grateful he is.” Some people deck reluctant pets in clothing, give them presents in which they have no interest, or assign their own opinions to the animals. Some dogs are even taught to attack people of races different from their owners’. Many dog lovers seem to enjoy believing that cats are selfish, unfeeling creatures who heartlessly use their deluded owners, compared with loving, loyal, and naive dogs. More often, however, people have quite realistic views about their pets’ abilities and attributes. The experience of living with an animal often provides a strong sense of its abilities and limitations—although even here, as for people living intimately with people, preconceptions can be more persuasive than lived evidence, and can create their own reality.
Consider three statements about a dog’s behavior: “Brandy’s upset because we forgot her birthday,” “Brandy feels left out and wants your attention,” and “Brandy is performing the submissive display of a low-ranking canid.” The first two statements can both be called anthropomorphic and the last is the jargon of ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior. The first statement is probably anthropomorphic error or projection; the speaker would feel bad if his or her birthday were forgotten and assumes the dog feels the same, but of course the idea that the dog knows what birthdays and birthday parties are is far-fetched. The third statement describes an “ethogram” of the dog’s actions and avoids any mention of thought or feeling. It is an incomplete description, one that deliberately describes events and avoids explaining them, restricting its own predictive ability. The second statement interprets the dog’s feelings. While it could be mistaken, it is only anthropomorphic if dogs cannot feel left out and cannot want attention—which most dog owners know to be untrue. In the end, it may be the most useful of the three statements.
Perhaps the richest source of anthropomorphic error occurs in human thinking about wild animals. Since people live with domestic animals, erroneous theories about their behavior are likely to be disproved in the course of events. But since most people’s contact with wild animals is so limited, theories about them may never run up against facts, and we remain free to imagine ravening wolves, saintly dolphins, or crows who follow parliamentary procedure.
Science considers anthropomorphism toward animals a grave mistake, even a sin. It is common in science to speak of “committing” anthropomorphism. The term originally was religious, referring to the assigning of human form or characteristics to God—the hierarchical error of acting as though the merely human could be divine—hence the connotation of sin. In the long article on anthropomorphism in the 1908 Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, the author (Frank B. Jevons) writes: “The tendency to personify objects—whether objects of sense or objects of thought—which is found in animals and children as well as in savages, is the origin of anthropomorphism.” Men, the idea goes, create gods in their own image. The best-known example of this tendency comes from the Greek author Xenophanes (fifth century B.C.). He notes that Ethiopians represent the gods as black, Thracians depict them as blue-eyed and red-haired, and “if oxen and horses . . . had hands and could paint,” their images of gods would depict oxen and horses. The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach concluded that God is nothing but our projection, on a celestial screen, of the essence of man. In science, the sin against hierarchy is to assign human characteristics to animals. Just as humans could not be like God, now animals cannot be like humans (note who has taken God’s place).
Young scientists are indoctrinated with the gravity of this error. As animal behaviorist David McFarland explains, “They often have to be specially trained to resist the temptation to interpret the behavior of other species in terms of their normal behavior-recognition mechanisms.” In his recent book The New Anthropomorphism, behaviorist John S. Kennedy laments, “The scientific study of animal behavior was inevitably marked from birth by its anthropomorphic parentage and to a significant extent it still is. It has had to struggle to free itself from this incubus and the struggle is not over. Anthropomorphism remains much more of a problem than most of today’s neobehaviorists believed. . . . If the study of animal behavior is to mature as a science, the process of liberation from the delusions of anthropomorphism must go on.” His hope is that “anthropomorphism will be brought under control, even if it cannot be cured completely. Although it is probably programmed into us genetically as well as being inoculated culturally that does not mean the disease is untreatable.”
The philosopher John Andrew Fisher has noted, “The use of the term ‘anthropomorphism’ by scientists and philosophers is often so casual as to almost suggest that it is a term of ideological abuse, rather like political or religious terms (‘communist’ or ‘counterrevolutionary’) that need no explication or defence when used in criticism.”
In a science dominated by men, women have been deemed especially prone to empathy, hence anthropomorphic error and contamination. Long considered inferior to men precisely on the ground that they feel too much, women were thought to overidentify with the animals they studied. This is one reason why male scientists for so long did not encourage female field biologists. They were too emotional; they allowed emotions to sway judgments and observations. Women, it was felt, were more likely than men to attribute emotional attitudes to animals by projecting their own feelings onto them, thereby polluting data. Thus did gender bias and species bias converge in a supposedly objective environment.
To accuse a scientist of anthropomorphism is to make a severe criticism of unreliability. It is regarded as a species-confusion, a forgetting of the line between subject and object. To assign thoughts or feelings to a creature known incapable of them would, indeed, be a problem. But to ascribe to an animal emotions such as joy or sorrow is only anthropomorphic error if one knows that animals cannot feel such emotions. Many scientists have made this decision, but not on the basis of evidence. The situation is not so much that emotion is denied but that it is regarded as too dangerous to be part of the scientific colloquy—such a minefield of subjectivity that no investigation of it should take place. As a result, any but the very most prominent scientists risk their reputations and credibility in venturing into this area. Thus many scientists may actually believe that animals have emotions, but be unwilling not only to say that they believe it, but unwilling to study it or encourage their students to investigate it. They may also attack other scientists who try to use the language of the emotions. Non-scientists who seek to retain scientific credibility must tread carefully. An administrator at one internationally known animal training institute remarked, “We don’t take a position on whether animals have emotions, but I’m sure if you talked to any one of us we’d say, ‘Sure they have emotions.’ But as an organization we would not want to be depicted as saying they have emotions.”
From the belief that anthropomorphism is a desperate error, a sin or a disease, flow further research taboos, including rules that dictate use of language. A monkey cannot be angry; it exhibits aggression. A crane does not feel affection; it displays courtship or parental behavior. A cheetah is not frightened by a lion; it shows flight behavior. In keeping with this, de Waal’s use of the word reconciliation in reference to chimpanzees who come together after a fight has been criticized: Wouldn’t it be more objective to say “first postconflict contact”? In the struggle to be objective, this kind of language employs distance and the refusal to identify with another creature’s pain.
Against this scientific orthodoxy, the biologist Julian Huxley has argued that to imagine oneself into the life of another animal is both scientifically justifiable and productive of knowledge. Huxley introduced one of the most extraordinary accounts of a deep and emotional tie between a human being and a free-living lioness, Joy Adamson’s Living Free, as follows:
When people like Mrs. Adamson (or Darwin for that matter) interpret an animal’s gestures or postures with the aid of psychological terms—anger or curiosity, affection or jealousy—the strict Behaviourist accuses them of anthropomorphism, of seeing a human mind at work within the animal’s skin. This is not necessarily so. The true ethologist must be evolution minded. After all, he is a mammal. To give the fullest possible interpretation of behaviour he must have recourse to a language that will apply to his fellow-mammals as well as to his fellow-man. And such a language must employ subjective as well as objective terminology—-fear as well as impulse to flee, curiosity as well as exploratory urge, maternal solicitude in all its modulations in welcome addition to goodness knows what complication of behaviourist terminology.
Huxley’s argument ran counter to mainstream scientific thinking when he wrote that in 1961, and it remains so today. A contemporary example is provided by Alex, the African grey parrot, who was being trained or tested by experimenters who varied the requests they made of him to avoid cueing and to prevent Alex from becoming bored. When reviewers of a paper that researcher Irene Pepperberg submitted to a scientific journal vetoed her use of the term boredom, she remarked:
I had a referee go ballistic on me. And yet, you’ve watched the bird, he looks at you, he says “I’m gonna go away.” And he walks! The referee said that was an anthropomorphic term that had no business being in a scientific journal. . . . I can talk in as many stimulus-response type terms as you want. It turns out, though, that a lot of his behaviors are very difficult to describe in ways that are not anthropomorphic.
What is wrong with exploring the idea, based on many such observations in a research setting, that parrots and humans may have a shared capacity for boredom?
In the study of animal behavior it has long been taboo for scientists to name the animals. To separate individuals, they might be called Adult Male 36, or Juvenile Green. Most field workers over the generations have resisted this precept, naming the animals they spent their days watching, at least for their own use, Spot-Nose and Splotch-Tail, Flo and Figan, or Cleo, Freddy, and Mia. In their published work, some reverted to more remote forms of identification; others continued to use names. Sy Montgomery reports that, in 1981, anthropologist Colin Turnbull declined to provide a supporting statement for Dian Fossey’s book of observations on mountain gorillas because she assigned names to the gorillas. It is even more common not to name animals in laboratories, perhaps for the same reason that farmers often avoid naming animals they expect to slaughter: proper names have a humanizing effect, and it is harder to kill a friend.
Rebutting the view that naming animals only causes one to assign them human traits, elephant researcher Cynthia Moss notes that the opposite happens to her: people remind her of elephants. “When I am introduced to a person named Amy or Amelia or Alison, across my mind’s eye flashes the head and ears of that elephant.” The no-name norm has gradually changed, particularly among primatologists, perhaps because of the outstanding work of researchers who named—and admitted that they named—the subjects they studied. Bekoff and Jamieson, a field biologist and a philosopher, have argued that it is not only permissible but advisable to name animals under study, since empathy increases understanding. Yet as recently as 1987, researchers studying elephants in Namibia (then South-West Africa) were instructed by park authorities to assign the animals numbers because names were too sentimental. Granted that a number is more dehumanized than a name, does that make it more scientific? Assigning names to them—referring to a chimpanzee as Flo or Figan—can be called anthropomorphic, but so is assigning numbers. Chimpanzees are no more likely to think of themselves as F2 or JF3 than as Flo or Figan.
We do not know if animals name themselves or each other. We do know that animals recognize other animals as individuals and distinguish between them. Names are the way humans label such distinctions. Bottle-nosed dolphins may identify and imitate one another’s signature whistles, something very close to a name. A similar phenomenon has been observed in captive birds. When their mate was removed, caged ravens and Shama thrushes “frequently uttered sounds or song elements which were otherwise principally or exclusively produced by the partner. On hearing these sounds, the bird so ‘named’ returned at once, whenever this was possible.” The ability to call a mate by name could be even more useful to wild birds. Some animals clearly respond emotionally to being given a name. Mike Tomkies in Last Wild Years writes that “only the ignorant pour scorn on this habit of mine of giving names to the creatures that, over the years, have shared my home. And also others that have not. So long as it is not a harsh sound, it matters little what the name is, but there can be no doubt whatever that an animal or bird will respond differently, become more trusting, once it is given a name.”
If naming the animals one studies promotes empathy toward them, this may help rather than occlude insight into their natures. The essential fact glossed over in the attack on anthropomorphism is that humans are animals. Our relation to animals is not a literary exercise in creating charming metaphors. As the philosopher Mary Midgley puts it: “The fact that some people are silly about animals cannot stop the topic being a serious one. Animals are not just one of the things with which people amuse themselves, like chewing-gum and water-skis, they are the group to which people belong. We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.” To act as if humans are a completely different order of beings from other animals ignores the fundamental reality.
Even fierce opponents of anthropomorphism concede that it often works in trying to predict animal behavior. By considering what an animal feels or thinks, we may improve our ability to project how it will act. Such guesses have a high success rate. While successful prediction does not prove that the animal actually felt or thought what was imagined, it is a standard test of scientific theories. John S. Kennedy, the animal behaviorist who views anthropomorphism as a disease, concedes nevertheless that it is a useful way to predict behavior. Kennedy argues that anthropomorphism works because animals have evolved to act as if they thought and felt: “it is natural selection and not the animal that ensures that what it does mostly ‘makes sense,’ as we are wont to say.”
Even though Kennedy disavows the “assumptions that they have feelings and intentions,” he acknowledges that empathy can be useful for generating questions and making predictions. Thus one might predict that a cheetah, fearful for her cubs, may run close to a lion to lure it away. Under Kennedy’s formulation, if the cheetah does so, it does not mean she fears for the lives of her cubs. It only means that she has evolved to act as if she fears for their lives. To speculate that leaving more offspring is the ultimate cause of her behavior is permitted. Not permitted is to speculate that fear for their lives is its proximate cause, far less about how she may feel seeing the lion grabbing them. Why is it so impossible to know what animals feel, no matter how much or what kind of evidence there is? How is knowing about their feelings different, in truth, from the assumptions made routinely about the feelings of other people?
Short of being another person, there is no way to know with certainty what another person feels, although few people, even philosophers, carry their solipsism (the belief that the self can know nothing but the self) this far. In learning others’ feelings, people are not always led by words alone, but watch behavior—gestures, the face, the eyes—patterns and consistency over time. Conclusions are based on this, and ground everyday life decisions. We love certain people, hate others, trust some, fear others, and act on this basis. Belief in the emotions of others is indispensable to life in human society. N. K. Humphrey writes, “For all I know no man other than myself has ever experienced a feeling corresponding to my feeling of hunger; the fact remains that the concept of hunger, derived from my own experience, helps me to understand other men’s eating behavior.” On human claims not to know animals’ pain, Midgley has said of the extreme solipsistic position: “If a torturer excused her activities by claiming ignorance of pain on the grounds that nobody knows anything about the subjective sensation of others, she would not convince any human audience. An audience of scientists need not aim at providing an exception to this rule.” She locates the basis of human assumptions of natural superiority underlying the position of the solipsist when she quotes an astonishing passage from Ethics, by the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza:
It is plain that the law against the slaughtering of animals is founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason. The rational quest of what is useful to us further teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with our fellow-men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is different from our own; we have the same rights in respect to them as they have in respect to us. Nay, as everyone’s right is defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights over beasts than beasts have over men. Still I do not deny that beasts feel; what I deny is that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours, and their emotions are naturally different from human emotions.
Spinoza refrains from discussing how he knows that animal emotions are different from human ones, or from explaining how this justifies the human exploitation, plunder, and murder of them. He simply says we have more power than they do. Might makes right. Jose Ortega y Gasset’s defense of hunting comes to the same conclusion, insisting that the victim is always asking for it:
[Hunting] is a relationship that certain animals impose on man, to the point where not trying to hunt them demands the intervention of our deliberate will. . . . Before any particular hunter pursues them they feel themselves to be possible prey, and they model their whole existence in terms of this condition. Thus they automatically convert any normal man who comes upon them into a hunter. The only adequate response to a being that lives obsessed with avoiding capture is to try to catch it. [Ortega y Gasset’s italics]
Such delusional anthropomorphism, based in turn on a human model that itself is delusional, reveals deep and hidden assumptions and interests. Ortega y Gasset’s buried premise—that hunted beings seek their own demise—closely resembles rationales about rape. A common excuse of rapists is that women ask for rape, thus seeking and causing their own violation, most especially when actively trying to avoid it. A similar exoneration of hunters is sought here by justifying the capture of animals by calling animal flight from capture an “obsession”—meaning they most desire what they most strenuously flee.
Simpler forms of anthropomorphism can also interfere with observation and distort understanding. Carolus Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who developed the classification system of living things, wrote of the frog: “These foul and loathsome animals are . . . abhorrent because of their cold bodies, pale color, cartilaginous skeletons, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation and terrible venom.” The words are all emotive, referring to emotions Linnaeus felt when he saw a frog. They are pure projection. Calculating is not a scientific term to describe a frog’s eye. This passage is art—it describes little in the physical world, but powerfully conveys the scientist’s subjective state.
Another problem with anthropomorphism has been that human views of gender—often as wrong as human views of animals—have been attributed to animals. People sometimes expect a male animal to lead the herd or be dominant or more aggressive even in species where the reality is different. A recent nature program on television featured a family of cheetahs in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. The male cub was called Tabu and the female Tamu—Swahili for Trouble and Sweetness. One expects different things from a Sweetness than a Trouble. Surely the sentence “Trouble is prowling around my tent” is more threatening than “Sweetness is prowling around my tent.” Sociobiology has tended to encourage prejudices men have about women by insisting that they are “natural,” by which is meant they can be found among members of the animal kingdom. As already noted, one can prove almost anything by careful choice of species. It does not seem accidental that human society has for so long been compared to baboon society, despite the facts that baboons are far more sexually dimorphic than humans and that baboons do not form mated pairs. The idea seems to be to impose greater gender inequality on human females by enforcing a supposedly natural template.
A serious problem with careless human-animal comparisons is the inadequacy of our present knowledge of animals’ lives, especially of crucial matters like the role of culture in animal learning in the wild. Elephants, for example, learn from their elders which humans to fear based on the history of the herd with humans. Mike Tomkies describes watching an eaglet in the wild being taught to fly so as to hunt and kill by repeated demonstrations on the part of its parent, who was clearly showing the youngster what to do rather than engaging itself in search of prey. Evidently the eaglet is not born knowing this. It is transmitted by learning, that is, by culture. It is natural, but it is also learned; that it has to be learned does not make it unnatural. To use the word natural to describe how the eaglet kills simply means that an animal was observed doing it. The distinction between innate and natural, on the one hand, and cultural and learned, on the other, loses much of its force in light of more recent observations on what animals teach each other.
The real problem underlying many of the criticisms of anthropomorphism is actually anthropocentrism. Placing humans at the center of all interpretation, observation, and concern, and dominant men at the center of that, has led to some of the worst errors in science, whether in astronomy, psychology, or animal behavior. Anthropocentrism treats animals as inferior forms of people and denies what they really are. It reflects a passionate wish to differentiate ourselves from animals, to make animals other, presumably in order to maintain humans at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy and the food chain. The notion that animals are wholly other from humans, despite our common ancestry, is more irrational than the notion that they are like us.
But even if they were not like us at all, that is no reason to avoid studying them for their own sakes. The point has been made by J. E. R. Staddon that “psychology as a basic science should be about intelligent and adaptive behavior, wherever it is to be found, so that animals can be studied in their own right, for what they can teach us about the nature and evolution of intelligence, and not as surrogate people or tools for the solution of human problems.” The knowledge obtained from such study, whether or not it contributes to the solution of human problems, is still knowledge.
Idealizing animals is another kind of anthropocentrism, although not nearly as frequent as their denigration and demonization. The belief that animals have all the virtues to which humans aspire and none of our faults is anthropocentric, because at its core is an obsession with the repulsive and wicked ways of humans, which animals are used to highlight. In this sentimental formulation the natural world is a place without war, murder, rape, and addiction, and animals never lie, cheat, or steal. This view is embarrassed by reality. Deception has been observed in animals from elephants to arctic foxes. Ants take slaves. Chimpanzees may attack other bands of chimpanzees, unprovoked and with deadly intent. Groups of dwarf mongooses battle other groups for territory. The case of the chimpanzee murderers Pom and Passion, who killed and ate the infants of other chimpanzees in their group, has been well documented by Jane Goodall’s research team. Orangutans have been seen to rape other orangutans. Male lions, when they join a pride, often kill young cubs who were fathered by other lions. Young hyenas, foxes, and owls have been seen to kill and eat their siblings.
All is not as humans wish it to be among our evolutionary cousins. One has to sympathize with Jane Goodall’s reaction to some chimpanzees’ treatment of one old animal, his legs wholly paralyzed by polio, who was lonely, shunned, and sometimes attacked by those who were still healthy. In the hope of inducing companions who were grooming each other to groom him as well, he dragged himself up into a tree:
With a loud grunt of pleasure he reached a hand towards them in greeting—but even before he made contact they both swung quickly away and, without a backward glance, started grooming on the far side of the tree. For a full two minutes, old Gregor sat motionless, staring after them. And then he laboriously lowered himself to the ground. As I watched him sitting there alone, my vision blurred, and when I looked up at the groomers in the tree I came nearer to hating a chimpanzee than I have ever done before or since.
It is hard to romanticize anything this ugly.
It has been a long time since anyone called the lion the king of beasts (except in a Walt Disney film), but dolphins have recently been romanticized as smarter, kinder, nobler, more pacific, and better at living in groups than people. This ignores the well-documented fact that dolphins can be quite aggressive. Recently it has been discovered that some dolphins occasionally rape. At the same time, animal cruelty does not approximate the human standard. It is unlikely that dolphin rape rivals the human figures. One respected random sample study in 1977 found that almost half of all the women in one U.S. city had been victims of rape or attempted rape at least once in their lives. Child abuse may occur rarely in the wild, but nothing compares with over one in every three girls being sexually abused as children, as shown in a major American study conducted in 1983 by the same researcher.
If humans can misunderstand animals by assuming they are more like us than they are, can animals also wrongly project their feelings onto us? Do animals commit what might be called zoomorphism, ascribing their attributes to humans? A cat who brings a human offerings of dead rodents, lizards, and birds day after day, no matter how often these objects are greeted with loathing, commits zoomorphism. This is the equivalent of offering candy to a cat, as children sometimes do. In The Hidden Life of Dogs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes: “When a dog with a bone menaces a human observer, the dog actually assumes that the person wants the slimy, dirt-laden object, and is applying dog values, or cy-nomorphizing.” Were a dog to give a history of the human race, some valuable attributes may be denied us, just as our history of any animal civilization would doubtless miss many of its signal achievements.