Draft 2016.6.10
Handout 3
Animal Studies and the Question of Anthropomorphism
by Paul Waldau
The issues raised in this handout provide background relevant to any
course in Animal Studies. The special abilities that humans have (i) to
inquire about other living beings, then (ii) to notice them, and ultimately (iii)
to take such beings seriously if humans so choose are by no means fixed—in
fact, these organic abilities are ours to work with and grow as we use them
in combination with what our era and/or our society knows or purports to
know about ourselves, other animals, and the Earth as our shared
community.
These special abilities have important implications, some of which are
inherently ethical in nature.1 For this reason, these special abilities provide a
heartbeat that gives life to discussions that have intense ethical overtones
even when the discussants are not consciously aware that their comments
have these dimensions. In other words, sometimes ethical dimensions arrive
in a conversation even when those dimensions are not consciously invited or
courted.
Thus, as we study other animals in this course, stay aware that our
discussions will often be perceived by some or all members of the class to
have ethics-intensive features. We will notice this all the better if we also
stay aware that, like our abilities to notice other animals and then take them
seriously, the human activity we call explicitly name “ethics” or “morality”
is clearly not a fixed subject closed to innovation—instead, the subject
matter of this activity is ours to shape, construct and even design anew.
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FN: In this course, we will treat the words “ethics” and “morality” as
synonyms—originally, “ethics” comes from the Greek word ethikos which
in early times meant “customs”; similarly, the word “morality” draws on the
Latin word moralia, which also was originally rooted in the idea of custom.
While some educators, scholars and “authorities” distinguish the two words,
most do not—for that reason, these two words are now in many circles used
interchangeably to name the foundational fact that each normal human
possesses a set of human skills and abilities that create rich possibilities for
responding to, even caring about, other living beings (no matter whether
these living beings are human or members of some other species).
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The principal textbook in this course (Animal Studies—An Introduction)
presents many different materials that suggest individual humans’ attention
has long been, now is, and in the future will continue to be invited by other
living beings. Sometimes these invitations are examined under the name
“ethics” or “morality,” but as we will see that there are many ways to
approach nonhuman animals and the ways they intrigue, baffle, compel—
hence “invite”—the attention of individuals and entire cultures and religious
traditions.
Thinking as Carefully as We Can
Powerful though our abilities are to notice other animals and even to care
about them if we choose, these abilitites are of course limited and finite in
ways that we will also explore. One task we undertake in this class is to
explore (1) how humans have used our suite of abilities to think about
“others” has in the past been carried across the species line, as well as to
consider (2) how these abilities are now in astonishing ways being carried
across the species line or denied by individuals and our many modern
corporate enterprises. A complementary inquiry to these first two is guess in
a responsible way (3) how members of our species might in the future
choose to deploy these abilities for some or all living beings.
In this class (and throughout any human enterprise dealing with nonhuman
animals), we face the obvious risk of projecting ourselves onto that which
we are encountering. This risk is known as anthropomorphism. We know,
for example, that many people project their own abilities on to our most
familiar nonhuman companions, such as sometimes happens when people
talk about what their dogs, cats or horses might be “thinking,” “feeling,”
and “planning” in response to their owner’s actions.
Science can help us with some of this—for example, we know that while
dogs see colors, the colors that dogs can see are not as diverse as those
colors which our human eyes see. We can show this graphically with a
chart of the different range of colors that dogs, on the one hand, and
humans, on the other hand, can discern with their respective eyes. Or we
might simply use words to explain the difference, as in the following:
 Instead of seeing, as do most humans, a rainbow’s violet, blue, bluegreen, green, yellow, orange and red colors, dogs see the rainbow’s
many colors as dark blue, light blue, gray, light yellow, darker yellow
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(sort of brown), and very dark gray. In other words, dogs see the
colors of the world as basically yellow, blue and gray. They see the
colors green, yellow and orange as yellowish, and they see violet and
blue as blue. Blue-green is seen as a gray. [This passage is based on
the information available in Andras Peter’s 2013 “Dog Vision”, which
can be accessed at https://dog-vision.com.]
The upshot of this particular example is that we can discern some
anthropomorphism in some cases (for example, we might suspect
anthropomorphism when someone goes on and on about their dog’s favorite
color being green) since there is publicly confirmable evidence (from
scientific information of the kind described above) that the human making
this claim is not thinking this out as carefully as possible. Why? Because
dogs do not see green as green, but as yellowish.
So we know some in our human community commit, despite our big brains,
obvious mistakes due to an unjustified anthropomorphism—and surely we
could easily identify more complex mistakes advanced by those who use
misleading anthropomorphisms.
But here’s the rub—some people have used the existence of such
anthropomorphism-driven mistakes to limit altogether how humans should
talk about other animals. So some people think it erroneous to attribute any
human traits to other animals. But there are critics of such claims. The
eminent research Frans de Waal has pointed out that an insistent refusal to
attribute to nonhumans traits found in humans can involve the error of
anthropodenial.2 Such critics point out several things—first, it is inevitable
and altogether natural that humans use our familiarity with our own abilities
and experiences to explore and hypothesize about the world around us.
Further, our common mammalian heritage with, for example, primates,
dogs, cats, horses and other mammals justifies the suspicion that there may
be some overlaps in what we, on the one hand, and certain other mammals,
on the other, can see, feel, think, etc. Similarly, our co-evolution with dogs
provides a reasonable basis for wondering if there are other overlaps
between these co-evolved partners.
2
Frans de Waal 1997. “Are we in anthropo-denial?”, Discover 18.7 (July 1997), 50-53.
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What the existence of some anthropomorphism-driven mistakes tells us is
that whenever we talk about the realities of other beings, we must always
humbly approach this topic because such questions are deceptively complex
due to our limited abilities to explore perfectly. Obviously, though,
sometimes we are discerning and careful enough to notice our limits in
such inquiries, and then to work within them.
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