We don’t need to understand animals

1158: 

When I come across people who are different from me, I either alienate them because I fear them or I make an effort to get close to them. It’s the same when I’m meeting animals.

With people, they may remain a mystery for some time but their differences, if not threatening, become points of interest. Maybe, at first, I don’t understand them, but do I need to? The more differences others have, the more they ‘bring me out of my shell’. The more I can learn from them, about how they operate and how they see the world, the more interesting they seem to be.

         

I think that learning by observing differences, instead of wanting similarities, builds relationship. There’s no hint of expectation.  And that applies not just between fellow humans, but with animals too.

Who hasn’t wanted to be close to a creature? You might not understand them but aren’t they always fascinating? Who hasn’t learnt from them and wanted to understand them better?

But surely the question is, why should one even want to understand them? Surely we want to be close to them, as you do with cats and dogs.  Perhaps they with us too? Even with strangers? Everybody knows the feeling you get, whether you’re one year old or a hundred – the way they are so easily intimate with us. We want to get close to them. But there’s no need for us to understand them any more than they need to understand us. 

The human connection with animals isn’t just being near an animal, but getting them to like us and trust us. We want to be friends, indeed it could be said that for many people, some of their best friends are animals.

But more importantly, it’s the empathy most of us humans feel, a protective feeling towards them. Animals, especially when in danger, bring out the guardian in us.

So when you see any animal distressed it’s heartbreaking, especially when it’s caged, penned, tied up or enclosed. It brings me out in a claustrophobic rash. It might bring us out in an ‘empathy flush’. It might get you hot under the collar. All I can say is that captive animals make me feel empathetically-ill. But it doesn’t have that effect on many others (otherwise they’d be vegan, of course!). But these ‘others’, even if not particularly ‘animal-y people’, even if they eat them, they don’t necessarily want to make an enemy of animals. But somehow, they have to repress their guardian nature because they can’t conceive of life without animal content. And there doesn’t seem to be any direct danger from using them, since we know that animals are less powerful than us and can’t defend themselves.

That contradicts natural instinct that makes any of us want to look out for them. Humans are natural protectors. Almost no one is capable of hurting an animal, any more than they’d be able to harm a child. As protectors, we humans do it well. We like being involved. We’re not that much different in that respect to animals. They like being with one another (and maybe also with the humans they’re close to). As it is with dogs. With thousands of years of being-close-to-humans, they’re good at it. In fact dogs are renowned for being protective of their youngsters, loyal to ‘their humans’, and with humans in general, they’re often loyal and irrepressibly friendly.

Perhaps we know less about the other animals, since we’re seldom living with animals unless they’re cats or dogs. But all animals, amongst themselves are protective of their young and act for their wellbeing. They, like us, have an altruistic trait. Maybe it’s a bit different in animals, but in humans, altruism is one of our main talents. It often springs out of us, instinctively.

But there’s another element in humans that animals don’t experience; we ‘do’ altruism. They don’t ‘do’ it, neither intellectually nor by design, whereas we do. Altruism in humans is (but not always) a reflection - “oh, wouldn’t it be great if I were altruistic, not just for my kids and family, but altruistic out of a love of fun and being constructive”.

And that, I think, is how Animal Rights advocates feel; they want to bring that altruistic side out in themselves. They want to step beyond self interest in order to attend the urgent needs of those animals who are part of a vast enslaved population. We try to empathise with both animals and the humans who are still eating them. We certainly don’t need to understand either humans or animals in order to advocate for animals, but in our attempt to wake up our fellow humans and in our work to protect the rights of animals, we can have fun doing that, as well as perform a constructive function.