While sentimental anthropomorphism can be a risk for animal advocates, anthropomorphism based on empathy and careful observation is a valid approach to understanding and appreciating other species.
Listen to Thinking Like a Chicken Podcast, February 10, 2023. Transcript below.
"Sister Species" -
Twyla
Francois Art
Today I want to say a few words about Anthropomorphism: meaning the
attribution of human characteristics to other animal species,
originally to a “God.”
In 2004, a professor of agriculture at Dordt College in Sioux
Center, Iowa, gave a talk in which he argued that the animal rights
movement consists mainly of urbanites with “anthropomorphized
visions of animals.” Animal rights people, he said, know animals
mainly as pets, and having been taught that humans “really are like
animals,” these people have a sentimentalized view of animals.
It is true that animal rights people may be tempted to try to turn
our companion animals into duplicates of ourselves, surrounded as so
many of us are by machines and material comforts in an entirely
humanized, technologized world into which our animal companions –
typically our dogs, cats and pet birds – must fit.
And yes, some animal advocates may be tempted to portray all animals
on the planet as existing in a kind of Disneyland framework of
utopian harmony outside of any natural ecological order. It is
possible for even the most dedicated animal rights advocate to slide
unwittingly from sensitivity to sentimentality toward the members of
other species, to the point where the identities, needs and desires
of other creatures become artificially fused, or confused, with the
advocate’s own, idealized self, resulting in a false
anthropomorphism of over-zealous “humanization” of both domesticated
and free-living animals.
That said, the majority of activists I have worked with for more
than thirty years are passionate about wanting nonhuman animals to
be able to live according to their natures and be respected for who
they are. The desire to share our lives personally with certain
animals, and to protect all animals from human abuse as much as
possible, is quite different from the desire to separate our species
from the rest of the animal kingdom, except as a controlling,
subjugating, traumatizing force of Tyrannical Dread and Destruction.
Animal exploiters brandish the term “anthropomorphism” to silence
criticism of their mistreatment of animals. Ever since Darwin’s
theory of evolution erupted in the nineteenth century (The Origin of
Species appeared in 1859), “anthropomorphism” has been used to
suppress objections to our abusive and inhumane treatment of animals
and to enforce a doctrine of an unbridgeable gap between humans and
other animals – except when convenient, as in the use of nonhuman
animals as experimental “models” for human diseases, or dressing
them in costumes and making them do tricks for our amusement.
The term “anthropomorphism,” which originally meant attributing
human characteristics to a deity – a God or a Goddess, now refers
almost entirely to the attribution of consciousness, emotions, and
other mental states, once commonly regarded as exclusively or
predominantly human, to nonhuman animals.
While sentimental anthropomorphism can be a risk for animal
advocates, anthropomorphism based on empathy and careful observation
is a valid approach to understanding and appreciating other species.
After all, we can only see the world “through their eyes” by looking
through our own. The imposition of humanized traits and behaviors on
other animals for purely selfish purposes, forcing them to behave in
ways that are unnatural to the animals themselves, and that make no
sense to them, is not the same as drawing inferences about the
emotions, interests and desires of animals rooted in our common
evolutionary heritage.
We are linked to other animals through evolution, and communication
between many species is commonplace. Reasonable inferences may be
drawn regarding such things as an animal’s body language, facial
expressions, and vocal inflections in situations that produce
comparable responses in ourselves.
Chickens, for example, have a voice of unmistakable woe or
enthusiasm in situations in which these expressions make sense.
Their body language is similarly interpretable. Behavioral
resemblances do not require an exact match. One may consider these
resemblances in terms of the common wellspring from which all
experience flows, or in the form of a musical analogy, in which the
theme of sentience and its innumerable manifestations hark back to
the matrix of all sentient forms. Anthropomorphism conceived in
these terms makes sense. One may legitimately formulate ideas about
other animals – their desires, needs, deprivations, fears, and
happiness – that the rhetoric of exploitation seeks to discredit.
One may, and I believe that we must, proffer a counter rhetoric of
animal liberation.
The treatment of chickens bred for human consumption exemplifies
false anthropomorphism as its worst. It entails the industrialized
severance of chickens from all human sympathy and connectedness with
the natural world, while simultaneously imposing on them a set of
humanized constructions designed to reflect only what we want to
extract from them, or insert into them, or force them to do or
appear to be at the expense of who they are and what they need and
desire, in order to experience themselves as Chickens as opposed to
desolated remnants of their once-upon-a-time vibrant, autonomous
selves.
I hope you’ve found today’s topic interesting and useful. Thank you
very much for listening, and please join me for the next podcast
episode of
Thinking Like a Chicken – News & Views. And have a
wonderful day!