I’ve written before about human chauvinism. An example we all engage in is anthropomorphising nature. Usually in giving animals human characteristics. Or explaining their behaviour in human terms. A perfect example from when I went camping (this reconstruction is exaggerated):
FRIEND: Hey, check this out, this is so cute! There’s a bug holding a baby bug on this blade of grass. [See photo at the top, it's very blurry but you can just make out a larger bug and a smaller one sitting on its back, towards the bottom of the abdomen.]
ME: Umm…I think it’s 2 bugs mating. Why would a bug be holding a baby, and keeping still for so long?
FRIEND: But there’s such a size difference! How can they be mating?
ME: In most insects the female is larger than the male, sometimes by heaps. Often in these cases, the male is almost superfluous. A breeding tool, a parasite. [Yes, my speech has hyperlinks]
FRIEND: But they’re just sitting there!
ME: Yes, the male is sitting on the female at the bottom of her body — where the genitals would be! Plus the female’s whiskers are moving back and forth rhythmically — why would she be doing that if she was holding a baby?
FRIEND: Wow, something so innocent has just been ruined thanks to you!
ME: You’re welcome, any time. [Of course I don't think this ruins anything at all.]
[Fin]
There are many other cases where we anthropomorphise nature. (If you can think of others, let me know in the comments!)
- “My dog knows he’s done something wrong; see how guilty he looks!” It hasn’t been proven that dogs don’t have a mechanism for thinking about guilt or even sin. But there’s no evidence for it. Seems far more likely the dog’s just reacting to the owner’s body language.
- “That poor zoo animal, it’s cage is so small! How cruel of them to keep it so.” Now, plenty of zoo enclosures are cruel and uncomfortable. However humans have a curiosity that most animals lack — many species would rather be fed and sheltered in a metal cage than hunt their own food in a “free” environment. The famous zookeeper Gerald Durrell said in one book that he had to make cages for many animals much larger than necessary just so the human visitors wouldn’t get distressed for the animal’s sense of “freedom”.
- “Look how maternal that bird is, feeding its cute helpless chicks!” Some species are very maternal, others aren’t. When the cliche of the open chick mouths happens, many species are actually deliberately withholding food from the weakest chick(s) thereby starving them. Every mother on earth has its own way of being maternal based on the species, whether it’s doting on offspring or infanticide.
Now I don’t want to be criticising “us chauvinist humans”. A lot of this comes from living in cities (and for most of us, not having the time to learn about nature). I do think there’s a much more interesting world out there. A world that’s almost alien. A world of parasitic males that attach themselves to a female 1000 times bigger (essentially a sperm capsule) — of females that decapitate the male during sex — of babies born by eating the mother alive from the inside — of lesbian albatrosses that mate for life and get pregnant by “other means” — of species that alternate between sexual and asexual reproduction — of frequent sex-changers — of beetles with spiky phalluses designed to rip the female reproductive organs — of males masquerading as females before an alpha male biding their time — of sterile female aunties who live solely for their nieces and nephews. We could have evolved into a boring world but didn’t. Thank goodness!
6 comments ↓
Man, you have to teach me how to speak with hyperlinks like that.
“many species would rather be fed and sheltered in a metal cage than hunt their own food”
this is a more telling piece of anthropomorphism than that you are trying to refute
i’m not sure how. do you mean because i said “would rather”?
George — I was basing this on a book I read but I couldn’t find the reference at the time. I have it now — it’s Stephen Budiansky’s Covenant of the Wild, p. 147-150 about his experiences in farming and a few other examples.
It took me up to about halfway through this post before I realised that it wasn’t what I thought it would be. I expected – from the title, the trancribed conversation, and most especially the photo – that it would be a treatise on the strangeness of the media’s requirement to ‘blur’ sensitive people’s faces (or interview them in darkened rooms) in the interests of privacy / confidentiality, and the arrogant manner in which we don’t extend this courtesy to animals we photograph / film.
I thought your photo had deliberately blurred out the faces of the bugs as an illustration of what you think all nature documentaries should do (as a mark of respect for the privacy of animals – in the absence of clear communication from any them that they consent to be photographed or filmed unblurred).
Hmmm, that’s next week’s topic.
Although there’s another good reason for the photo to have been blurred — it’s bug porn! And they definitely didn’t consent to being filmed whilst having sex.
Also I prefer the darkened room approach to nature documentaries, eg. a Great White shark sitting in the chair of a dark office — its voice digitally altered so nobody could exact their terrible vengeance.
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