Animals are Not People

Animals are Not People

Time and again men and women unable to foster human relationships create them with animals whose only ability to resist is to kill them in return.

I love animals and always have. I expect someone watching me play with my lab/hound mix would ascribe all sorts of human characteristics to the relationship, and undoubtedly while playing or petting or observing, I can’t help but see “Morgan” in human terms.

But I won’t buy a cemetery plot for him. I won’t subscribe to PetMeds while monitoring his blood sugar and I’m even adverse to putting gooey tick repellent on him. He isn’t human. He’s a pet.

Throughout my career in Africa I’ve encountered numerous researchers who cross the rational limit of thinking of animals as humans. The most flagrant examples are those ascribed to elephants: how they return to where close relatives have died, how they sacrifice their own well-being for another individual.

Balderdash. These are human behaviors that while I concede we can never scientifically measure in an animal with the clarity that I suppose, I trust my intuition on this one. I even question whether pain as we humans understand it is anywhere similar to what animals experience.

Critics will contend I’m setting up situations that allow for animal cruelty, but that, too, is balderdash. I have a hard time understanding why people swat flies with such vengeance or unload aerosols into gardens or are amused at young boys firing beebee guns at the nearest squirrel. I have serious questions about the morality of hunting animals for sport.

But to think of an animal as a child, or parent, or human friend, is to diminish the radiance of our own place in the biology of the world. It’s a terrible shortcut for trying to understand the complexities of life and does significantly more injustice to that life form than accepting it for what it is.

And it’s so absolutely clear to me whether it’s an old man, doting spinstress, recluse or young career-minded couple that has traded procreation for a more balanced 401K – all of whom embrace their dog with the ridiculousness of human attractions — are doing so entirely, utterly and selfishly to assuage their own inadequacies, and at the horrible expense of the meaning of that dog, the beauty of its form in the biomass in which we also participate.

There are so many negatives to anthropormorphizing animals, but one overriding one is that whatever faux emotion is created in the human master, it probably decreases that person’s empathy to humans in need. It likely distracts the master from the misery of his servants.

And, then, ultimately the price is paid, in an inevitable and ultimate way.

Last month a famous relationship between a hippo and a man came to an end when the hippo killed the man.

The jolly guy, a stellar citizen and former military officer, was a farmer who adopted an estranged baby hippo. (As I once adopted an estranged baby baboon.) He raised it with tender loving care. (As I raised mine.) But when baby turned adult, when the full sense of the creature came to the fore, he couldn’t give way. He claimed again and again, to over a quarter million viewers on YouTube, that everything was just fine.

“Humphrey’s like a son to me,” Marius Els told his local South African newspaper. “He’s just like a human.”

Marius Els, 41, had no son, no viable human relationship with a child. Why doesn’t matter, but nor should he have tried to create that relationship as a shortcut with an animal. The hippo bit him multiple times, then pulled him into the river and drowned him on November 14.

2 thoughts on “Animals are Not People

  1. Boy, do I ever agree with everything you said, Jim. I don’t understand people who let their dogs (really big ones) sleep in their bed with them or who call their pets their “babies” and are offended when you disagree with them. Totally nuts! I once heard a member of PET say that if his house caught fire he would rescue his dog rather than his mother?! A couple of months ago we were at a couple’s house when a tiny mouse ran through the kitchen. The females all screamed and climbed up on chairs. I grabbed a magazine and killed it. End of problem. I love animals, as you know. But vermin is vermin and needs to be eliminated. Period. I have many fond memories of growing up around farm animals.

  2. I agree and disagree. Much of my life revolves around animals, both pets and wild animals that I raise and rehabilitate. I treat them all with the respect that they deserve. Unlike people I’ve known, animals don’t lie. They are 100% honest and they are much easier to understand than people. I’m much more comfortable in the presence of animals than around humans. However, I’m not so enthralled that I do not recognize that an animal is NOT a person. They don’t think or act with human rationality. A wild animal is just that – wild – and the larger that animal the more dangerous it can be. Animals can be extremely devoted to their owner/keeper but anyone who fantasizes that an animal, especially a wild animal, will love them with the same emotional consideration as a human is setting themselves up for disappointment, if not serious harm.

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