"...if we assumed that these whales were ours to do with as we pleased..."

This post started out much angrier than (I hope) it ended. Story of my life...

The Radio Lab episode "Animal Minds" starts with a story about a whale tangled and drowning in the lines of about twenty crab traps and the bunch of humans with boats who, for no reason other than that they are awesome, worked to cut it free. They succeeded. Upon attaining freedom, the whale did not swim away. It hung around, gently nudging and staring at each of the divers in turn. Understandably, the divers took this behavior as whale for "thank you." From here, the episode turns to an animal psychologist who claims that it is "demeaning" to assign human emotions to other animals. Why, he asks, should we suppose that we live in a world in which every living being is somehow like us? Why shouldn't every species have its own way of relating (the implication being that maybe there is no whale "thank you")?

This is a fair point, much fairer than I thought when I first wrote those words. Not all animals are humans (though all humans are animals, a point which the Radio Lab hosts accentuate returning from the break before their last segment). Anthropomorphizing non-humans glosses over the reasons that this is true and prevents everyone involved from learning something from encounters with other species. There, I said it. What I take issue with is the way the point is raised. Instead of starting from the assumption that non-human animals are unlike us and trying to find the ways that we are similar, why can't we start from the assumption that they are like us (or, even better, that we are like them) and try to find the ways that we/they are different. To turn the psychologist's words petulantly around: "why shouldn't we suppose that we live in a world in which we are somehow like every living being?"

Case in point: The first piece of evidence the psychologist raises is a study done by another psychologist on dogs. The second psychologist (whose name stuck out for being a woman named Alexander Horowitz; she works at Barnard College) gathered a group of dog owners. Somehow, she contrived to have time alone with the dogs, after which she told every owner that their dog had misbehaved. This was only true in half of the cases. The owners (all of them) scolded the dogs. The dogs (even the dogs who had done nothing wrong) assumed the "guilty dog" posture (ears and head down; tail between legs). "Aha!" said the psychologist, "that posture does not denote guilt; it denotes submission. The dogs are just acknowledging our authority." Can we really separate this notion from guilt? Sure, there is a feeling I associate with the knowledge that I have done something wrong, but after 29 years of living in a society composed of religious, academic, and political authorities, I associate the same feeling with the knowledge that I have done something that an authority figure tells me is wrong.

I've always found the natural/artificial distinction some what troublesome. New York City is artificial. A beaver dam or an anthill is not. If this is really True, then there should probably be a word for "built by a beaver" or "built by ants" the way that artificial means "built by humans." "Artificial ingredients" also bother me. Unless they're holding out on us (or themselves; seriously, guys, there's a Nobel Prize -- or five -- in this), food scientists aren't in the business of producing particles from the aether, so everything must come from the Earth at some level. I know this is a lot of semantics and glosses over some very important distinctions about how margarine will probably kill you faster than butter, but there are consequences to how we draw those distinctions. After 2,000 years living from the assumption that we are different and therefore removed from all of the creatures around us, we have wiped out the Dodo, worse-than-decimated (which means to kill a "measly" 10%) several species of whale (and tigers, and gorillas, and...) and made an industry of felling the trees and polluting the oceans that regulate the composition of the air we breathe. We assumed the answer ("we are wholly different from all other animals") and the entire planet paid the price. Maybe we ought to consider assuming a different answer. The impact of assuming we are like other animals and being wrong is a world with fewer cheeseburgers, SUVs, and multi-national corporations. The impact of assuming we are not like other animals and being wrong is a world with less arable land.

People who think I'm being sentimental should read this. The elephants, it seems, are tired of putting up with our crap. If you'd rather not be depressed, you could also listen to this episode of Speaking of Faith.