"This octave of faulty/ decorum hides the extraordinary lizard till night-fall," Moore
The question put to me on a daily basis by my 10 year old child generally revolves around the query, “what is your favourite animal?” A variation, if not a departure from the general theme, is “if you were an animal, what would you be?” And most recently, “which animal do you feel most sorry for?” I have learned over time that there are more, and less, appropriate answers to these questions. For instance, it is considered absolutely unacceptable to wish to be a housefly, unless one is willing to face a mob of irate 8-10 year olds and their little webs of reasoning and feelings. Nor is it adequate to name paramecium or amoebas as one’s favourite animal. There seems to be a distinct bias toward multi-celled organisms with fur and large, doleful eyes. Last weekend I was faced with two indignant children accusing me of cold-heartedness when I said I do not feel sorry for any animal. “But what about the polar bears?” protested my daughter, “or the dolphins? or the cats that get run over by cars?” I suppose I should have humoured her and said pandas or gorillas, but the question of empathy and intelligence with has been on my mind a great deal lately. I could not offer her a simple, thoughtless answer. The idea that we have the ability to know an animal, know enough of its consciousness to conceive how it might feel in any given situation is questionable. This is not to mean that I condone cruelty to animals, but rather I deliberate on our capacity to do what empathy seems to demand, that of stepping into another’s shoes, so to speak, for an animal. Other than the salient fact that animals don’t wear shoes, there is the issue of “knowing” a reality or world that exists in a different time and space than ours. To disengage from the reality in which one lives and enter into some more “natural” world where living is simpler is not only a fool’s errand, it fails recognize the complexity, the diversity, and fullness of animal life. It hovers on a type of anthropocentrism, or the very least, a sort of “petishism” in which we look at animals as reflections of our ideal selves. It seems to me to deny the level of calculation and deliberation necessary to sustain life for any entity. We cannot live or think like lions, because we do not live with the same relation to space and time as they do. We may observe them, interact with them, admire them, but their relation with the world is radically different. They do not move through the world in same way we do. To claim to “think” like an animal, or even authentically empathize with one, is to neglect not only the complexity of their world, but to practice a sort of self-deception. Our thoughts, and the way in which we direct, moderate or express emotion are dependent on language and culture. The way in which we interact with the world, has evolved as a response to the world in which we live in, and as social beings, we have developed a high levels of emotional complexity and means of communication. These allow us to infer, to create choices, alternatives to merely acting on the drive for self-preservation. This is not to claim animals do not have the intelligence to make choices, but rather we are not as occupied with the things at hand, such as the hunt for sustenance or the hunter’s rifle. We examine, reflect and conjecture.
The digressions of Alison Salt 