ANIMATE

The way we treat animals is “a crime against nature and a moral injury inflicted on ourselves.”

Bond, the author of Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way (2020), writes, “For the vast majority of human history, Homo sapiens was an equal participant in the great game of survival. …Then at some point a few thousand years ago we began to see ourselves differently, and other animals, too. We convinced ourselves that our ability to reason…put us above the rest of nature.” Studies of cave art, he says, show early images that depict animals, human and otherwise, in interaction. About 8,000 years ago, however, images turned from showing reverence or respect for animals to drawings displaying human domination of animals. The “general assumption that humans are biologically, cognitively and morally distinct from other animals and, by implication, superior” has been used “to justify both our dominion over the natural world and our cruel treatment of animals.” The shift in attitude comes from philosophy and religion, Bond argues. Aristotle believed that humans alone possessed “a rational soul” that allowed humans to deliberate, deduce, evaluate, and speak, which set them apart from other animals. And Judeo-Christian theology casts humankind in the image of God; that belief gave humans, the author writes, “permission to use nature as a means to our ends.” But research makes it clear that animals can deliberate, deduce, evaluate, and speak. Elephants, orcas, and bottlenose dolphins have big brains, and octopuses have cognitive capacities that indicate a sense of self. Sheep can recognize the faces of other sheep and even those of humans. Crows can create tools from sticks and wire to help them hook food. And many animals—dogs, cats, cows, apes—demonstrate joy, fear, sadness, shame, grief, and many other emotions. “We have allowed ourselves to promote the myth of human uniqueness and ignore what animals are capable of,” Bond writes. “Fortunately, the weight of evidence is making it hard to maintain that conceit.”

A searing indictment of the human animal’s inhumane treatment of non-human animals.