Humans are just not that special
Letting go of the fear of ‘anthropomorphising’ animals and plants
During the funeral of Omanachettan, one lofty mourner received more attention than the corpse itself. Brahmadathan waded through the crowd of people and headed straight for the body of his constant companion of 25 years. He quietly, respectfully reached out to touch Omanachettan while streams of emotion ran down his face. After a few seconds, completely undaunted by the attention he was receiving, Brahmadathan left as quietly as he came.
Brahmadathan is an elephant, and the dead body belongs to his mahout.
It is evident that Brahmadathan understands death and is grieving for his dead companion. Many would say that I am anthropomorphising elephants by making this claim. I cannot know with certainty what an elephant is going through, so I should refrain from attributing ‘human characteristics’ to him.
Until recently, this was the dominant opinion within animal science.
Instead of making claims about the inner lives of animals, the science stuck simply to making observations about their behavior.
So to say, “An elephant walked up to a dead body” was okay but to say “An elephant grieved the death of his human friend” would be crossing a line.
This refrain is driven by the belief that we’ll always understand animals from a “distinctly human perspective” and end up drawing many wrong conclusions.
This belief seems to ride on the assumption that grief, empathy, intelligence, culture, complex decision-making, and layered social abilities are distinctly human features. But, it has become abundantly apparent that none of these things are unique to human beings.
To be fair, many researchers do believe that animals possess a certain degree of intelligence and empathy, but humans are still the gold standard. We are the most ‘intelligent’ species, and the intelligence of every other life-form is measured in relation to us. They all fall short of this arbitrary standard, of course, simply because they’re not human.
Rather than studying animals as uniquely evolved subjects, we measured the degree to which they are like us.
We have been similarly (if not more) stunted in our understanding of plants.
“You know, we got good at language and consciousness, art and tool-making, and we think that’s the height of evolution. That whole time, actually longer — they [plants] have been around longer than we have — they were working on biochemistry, and they are the masters of biochemistry,” says Michael Pollan.
It is due to our limitations (not theirs) that we’ve been unable to recognise the genius of plants.
In the last few years, researchers and authors have begun to move past this self-imposed handicap to make claims about what instinctively presents itself to us when we observe non-humans; to try to understand non-humans on their own terms as wholly subjective beings.
Of course, we cannot exit our human perspective, and we will draw wrong conclusions.
But, the possibility of wrong conclusions should not hinder us. Someone at the funeral took a video of Brahmadathan and it went viral because those who watched it were touched by how deeply they could relate to the elephant. We did not need Brahmadathan to speak to see a reflection of ourselves in his grief.
If we learn to prioritise this ability to connect when studying non-human life, we might gain a more valuable insight into the magnificent mystery of the natural world.
“The problem isn’t “imposing . . . a distinctly human understanding of the world.” The problem is imposing a distinctly human misunderstanding. Our deepest insight into the living world: all life is one. Their cells are our cells, their body is our body, their skeleton, our skeleton, their heart, lungs, blood, ours. If we impose that distinctly human understanding, we’ve taken one giant stride in seeing, truly, each species within the vast living venture.” — Carl Safina in Beyond Words.
