OR CENTURIES, JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY HAD ASSUMED THAT BATS WERE mice with wings. When Linnaeus refined the Aristotelian classification of animals in the eighteenth century, he challenged this “common sense,” in the name of an eternal order decreed by God. After carefully examining their anatomy, Charles Linnaeus proclaimed that bats were actually primates, like monkeys and human beings. Decades later, he reconsidered and placed bats in their own category, the chiroptera, where they have stayed ever since. A bit less than a century later, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution provided taxonomists with a new paradigm—that of biological inheritance.
But to define an animal strictly in terms of evolution is too narrow, technical, reductionist, or restrictive for many purposes. Scientists generally regard animals as belonging to different “species” when they do not habitually mate with one another. Although dogs, wolves, jackals, and coyotes are capable of mating together, they generally do not do so in the wild, so each of these is considered a distinct type. This biological definition loses much of its meaning under conditions of domestication, whether on a farm or in a zoo, where animals do not necessarily choose the partners with which they breed. A horse and an ass can mate, and they are often induced to do so in order to produce a mule, which retains useful qualities of each.
The definition becomes almost entirely meaningless when dealing with animals produced by genetic engineering, for which one cannot really speak of “species” at all. Scientists have produced a cross between a sheep and a goat, known as a “geep.” They have placed human genetic material in pigs, in order to produce organs that will not be rejected when transplanted into human beings. They also have produced laboratory rats with transparent skin, so that their organs can easily be observed during experiments. Some of these creatures are like the monsters of folklore, and it may be that in the future we will see crosses between human beings and apes or dogs.
With gene splicing, it is now possible to cross not only the divisions of species, but even those between plants and animals. Scientists have inserted genes from flounders into the genetic code of tomatoes in order to increase their resistance to frost, and they have introduced genes from chickens into tomatoes to make the plants more resistant to disease. By inserting genes from a jellyfish into tobacco, they have produced plants that glow in the dark. Genetic theory views all living things, from ferns to human beings, less as either individuals or representatives of species than as repositories of hereditary information, to be endlessly recycled in new combinations.
One alternative method of classification is to lump creatures together by habitat. The old mariners who considered the whale a fish (rather than a mammal) really had a point. Just as we, for the most part, classify most of the people who live in France as “French,” regardless of race, height, complexion, age, temperament, and so on, we can classify animals that live in the woods as “creatures of the forest.” Shared environment arguably creates a more intimate sort of kinship than genetic inheritance, since it involves interaction and common experience. Human beings usually feel greater affinity with dogs and cats, which often share our homes, than we do with the great apes, our closest biological relatives. People have been learning from pets for millennia, and these animals have been learning from us. That is why dogs are vastly better able to interpret human body language than apes. Dogs understand the pointing of a human finger without being taught, while apes are almost always unable to comprehend this gesture.
But suppose we work to preserve either a species in the wild or a breed in domesticity. What exactly are we trying to perpetuate? A collection of physical characteristics? A bit of genetic code? Part of a habitat? If we define each sort of animal as a tradition, our definition includes all of these and more. It also includes stories from myth, legend, and literature. Such tales, with the love and fear they may engender, are part of an intimate relationship with human beings that has been built up for many centuries.
Animals entering a steam ark.
(Illustration by J. J. Grandville from Un Autre Monde, 1847)
To regard each sort of animal as a tradition also encourages respect. Why should we care about species extinction? Appeals to transcendent reasons do not easily satisfy people in our secular society. Appeals to pragmatic reasons, such as preserving the ecosystem, are easily subject to challenge. Tradition robustly links animals not only to their natural environments but also to cultural values and practices over millennia—indeed, to our identity as human beings. It reveals how environmental interdependence is spiritual as well as physical. Without other creatures, “humanity,” as we know it, would perish, even if our genetic inheritance continued to be passed on.
My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “tradition” as “an inherited pattern of thought and action.” It comes from “trade,” which originally meant “track.” To study a tradition is to track a creature, as though one were a naturalist, back through time. In the chapters that follow, I must at times ask the reader to make a special effort of imagination, and to forget for a while, as much as is reasonably possible, what he thinks he “knows” about the animals in question. Try to imagine each as it might have been experienced in unfamiliar cultures and environments. Finally, consider every animal as a sort of primal experience that reflects, creates, challenges, and, to a degree, transcends the limits of culture. These are animals of the spirit, living in the geography of the mind.
Ponder what it is like to be a bat and navigate by echolocation, i.e., by sonar. I imagine that must resemble entering a sort of spirit world, where things have definite locations but lack solidity. What is it like to be a dog, with a sense of smell 500 times as strong as a human being’s? Perhaps the scents must be rather like intense intuitions, precise and yet not quite tangible. What is it like to be a shark, and hunt prey by their electromagnetic fields? Maybe the experience is akin to living in a musical world, where everything is better expressed in notes than in words. All of these possibilities have their counterparts in human culture.
No person is ever completely “human,” and no animal entirely lacks humanity. We discover qualities in animals that we wish to lay claim to, and others which we attempt to disavow. Human beings construct our identity—collective, tribal, and individual—largely by reference to animals. Other creatures not only make us “human,” as Paul Shepherd has observed, but also divide us into groups, making us females, males, Japanese, Americans, Mexicans, Christians, Buddhists, artists, intellectuals, mechanics, warriors, saints, criminals, and so on. This process is attested by the ubiquity of animal imagery in most of the symbols and stories that define our heritage as human beings. We have merged with animals through magic, metaphor, or fantasy, growing their fangs and putting on their feathers, to become deities, sages, tricksters, devils, clowns, companions, lovers, and far more.