Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence

5. PRETENDING THAT ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE: THE CHARACTER OF CASTE

PRETENDING THAT ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE: THE CHARACTER OF CASTE G. B. Harrison, a Shakespearean scholar, once said, "A good department of English should include a diversity of creatures, like a good zoo, which is incomplete without its lion, giraffe, hip popotamus, and giant sloth, not omitting the indigenous fauna such as the viper and the skunk, who usually are also unbidden species in the collection. Personality is far more important for a teacher than an assortment of degrees and diplomas." When we think of the teachers we have known, we immediately recognize their places in such a bestiary. Indeed, we can find such types everywhere in society. Classifying personality traits as types of animals is to us a familiar form of satire. Such parody is a modern expression of the blending of people and animals that has haunted the search for human identity since the first sheep, goats, and dogs came to live with man. Domestication added a new twist to the ancient puzzle that arose with consciousness itself—the relationship of man and animal. It remains a problem for educated modern minds, for we now live almost totally among domesticated, tamed, and captive animals. In effect, we complicated the significance of animals for ourselves by getting too close to them. We added to the difficulty by lying to ourselves about the mentality of primitive peoples, in whom the elegant poetics of animals is still viable. As long as we were blind to the intelligence of tribal people, we were unable to see how the keeping of animals had affected us, how domestication profoundly redirected human reason. The nineteenth-century view was that primitives, like children and other illiterates, were unable to make clear distinctions between humans and animals. Their intense interest in animals 148 5 Pretending AnimalsAre People 149 was seen as itself animal. We assumed that they imitated, worshiped , and made sacrifices to beasts in an emotional, instinctive, and unreflecting manner ruled by their passions and reflexes, with only the vaguest conception of the self or society. But our new image of pre-industrial people raises some questions that have not yet been faced. If savages are intellectual, rational, complex, and subtle in their logic, sensitive to the nuances among animals and men, confronting the question of relatedness with equal or better resources than ourselves, it follows that a mature philosophy is as likely to come from Australian aborigines or the Paleolithic cave art of France as from the classical Greeks. Cultural totemism, for example, makes sophisticated distinctions betweenhuman and animal realms, enhanced by a balance of respect for the human and the Other. Nature is seen as an endless drama signifying what needs to be known, and the scrutiny of the order of nature is a perennial exercise in logic. Totemic culture assumes the separateness of animals, not their participation in the household, in their confinement, herding, or treatment as fellows. Once that boundary of separateness is crossed the whole system of man/animal relationships is transformed. Instead of living independent but mysteriously compelling lives, the chosen species are fitted into the social web; they become companions or subhuman property, though they may still be admired and watched with keen interest. The domestic animal is wrapped in emotional bonds, social roles (the tokenship of wealth and status), and enmeshed in a legal framework. Now as a member of human society, the animal can no longer represent the outside or be the totemic emblem of clan membership. Human society has shifted its model for identity and social differentiation away from natural species and towardvocation and the productsof labor. Animal captives and slaves are both members and property, beings and objects. As incompetent humans, they rank low in the social system. Sometimes loved and protected, at other times abused, they are essentially wards with amusing, boring, or profitable aspects. The transfer from a wild fauna, a parallel reality, to one of symbiotic relationships with people, locked into the kindred rituals and economic values, profoundly alters the animals and their keepers. This shift reverberates throughout human thought. It is as though animal imagery, like a herd of Arctic caribou, had mi- 150 PRETENDING ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE grated to a different place in the human mind. The purpose of natural creation seems to change. Instead of being part of an infinitely subtle and complex net of ecological relations and behaviors, the nonhuman life is shorn of extraneous connections, becomes...