‘To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here.’ –Dostoevsky
In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group or band. Creatures as unrelated as sea gulls and bonobos indulge in homosexuality and other nonreproductive sexual activities. There are even animal artists: male bowerbirds, who construct complex, obsessively decorated structures to attract females; dolphins who draw dolphin audiences to their elaborately blown sequences of bubbles. Whales have been known to enact what look, to human divers, very much like rituals of gratitude. (…)
Bit by bit, we humans have had to cede our time-honored position at the summit of the “great chain of being” and acknowledge that we share the planet — not very equitably or graciously of course — with intelligent, estimable creatures worthy of moral consideration. (…)
As Paul Trout makes clear in his fascinating Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination, the important distinction, from a human point of view, is not between animals and humans, but between animals that we eat and animals that eat us.
Trout’s book is the most ambitious survey to date of the relationship between humans and the wild carnivores that have preyed on them as long as Homo sapiens, or our hominid ancestors, have existed. (…)
It is the “other animals” who of course have paid the highest price for the human ascent to the top of the food chain. In no small part because of our own terrifying prehistory as prey, humans could not seem to stop killing, as if we had to keep reassuring ourselves, over and over, that we had indeed evolved from prey to predator. Many explanations have been offered for the massive extinctions of large animals (megafauna) that began about 12,000 years ago — viruses, meteor hits, climate changes — but the soundest hypothesis is summarized by the word “overkill.” Humans killed what they needed to eat and then killed much more, eliminating animal populations as they spread out over the globe on foot or by sea. In the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, megafaunal extinctions follow closely upon the arrival of humans.
related { I discovered my incredible strength at the age of 13, and, almost immediately afterwards, promised myself that, one of these days, I would fight a lion. If he chooses to withdraw, or surrender, and lets me tie him up, then I will not kill him and the fight will end. But if it comes down to either me or him, I will have to kill him. If this battle does not get the positive reaction I’m expecting, then I will be forced to leave the country and go somewhere where they can appreciate a man like me: the strongest man in the world. | Foreign Policy | Continue reading }
related { Top 10 Heroic Animals }
