“The Anthropocene, often called “the age of humanity,” really is “the rage of inhumanity,” and some people feel very comfortable killing other animals while at the same time claiming to love them.”
The article in Psychology Today landed in my in-box alongside a ringing endorsement from a Facebook friend, so who was I to argue? The article, as it turned out, about anthropomorphism and our habit of applying human traits to animals, was incomprehensible — turgid and badly written — but it had some interesting points to make nonetheless.
I’ll spare you the academic details — the writing is the kind of academic navel-gazing that should never, ever see light-of-day in a public forum, if the idea is to win converts over to a new, if not entirely novel idea.
Never mind what we think of animals. Dr. Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado (Boulder) has dedicated much of his career to trying to figure out what animals think of us. His writing on Twitter, in flagging a Washington Post article about how conservation is turning a natural laboratory into a time capsule (“We’re trying to keep the Galapagos Islands pristine. That might destroy them”), is clearer and more succinct than his writing for Psychology Today (“Geese-Human Relationships Offer Lessons for Coexistence: A consideration of geese-human relationships has wide-ranging importance”), but that’s the nature of the beast. He’s on firmer ground — or easier to understand, anyway — when discussing “compassionate conservation,” not to be confused with compassionate conservatism, which many would argue doesn’t exist.
A clue to the nature of his life’s work is evident in the fact that, together with Jane Goodall — no introduction needed — he co-founded the self-explanatory group Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He’s a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, and a former Guggenheim fellow.
He knows his stuff, in other words, insofar as it’s possible to ever know what an animal is thinking.
Seeing a part of ourselves in the animals we see and surround ourselves with, is only natural, Bekoff insists.
Most of us agree, after all, that people and animals — or mammals anyway — share
many traits, including emotions. We’re not imposing our way of thinking onto animals, in other words, but rather identifying what we share in common.
The scientific community used to dismiss the notion of imprinting our own thoughts, feelings and emotions on animals as sentimental and unprofessional; much of Goodall’s early observations of chimpanzee behaviour in the wild was dismissed out-of-hand, because she lacked an advanced degree in zoology at the time.
The scientific community is coming round to a new point of view, though, Bekoff insists: Seeing our own desires, values and emotions reflected in animals is not such a wild idea after all. In the eyes of science writer Brandon Keim, who Bekoff cites at length in Psychology Today, it’s becoming “both common and common-sense.”
And rightly so, Bekoff says.
The conservation debate comes down to a simple question: Do you hold with the statement that, “Humans should manage fish and wildlife populations so that humans benefit,” or do you lean more toward the idea that, “All living things are part of one big family.”
Or to put it more simply, do you view the world in terms of domination (as in, humans’ right to rule the planet) or co-existence? The guiding principle of compassionate conservation, Bekoff says, is, ‘First, do no harm.’
It’s all about empathy.
“The best guard against the inappropriate use of anthropomorphism is knowledge or the detailed study of the minds and emotions of animals,” Bekoff writes in Psychology Today. “And, in fact, all sorts of scientific research, ranging from observational studies to neuroimaging projects, strongly support the fact that we’re not alone in the emotional arena.”
Animals and people share emotions, in other words.
And that gives us added reason, as if more were needed, to conserve and protect what remains.
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