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October 24, 2009

Dear Colleague:  

     Let’s say that I have a house and my two most precious possessions in it are my young daughter and my cat. A fire broke out. I had to choose between saving my daughter and my cat. I saved the cat. My daughter perished. You can imagine the outrage! And yet, conceivably, a cat lover or two might say that I did the right thing. Here is another scenario. I have a house and my two most precious possessions in it are my cat and my pet rock. A fire broke out. I saved my pet rock, abandoning my cat to the flames. More and possibly even greater outrage! Don’t I realize that the rock is a piece of mineral without feelings? But that’s not how I see my rock. To me, it is a friend–a friend of undeviating constancy, a round object that warms my hand in winter and cools my cheek in summer.

     My point is that we humans are poetic animals–that we naturally assign human personality, motivation, and feeling to beings that don’t have them. The evidence lies in our language, which is chock-full of metaphors. When I say to my scientific geographical colleagues that they are poets, they are none too pleased, but they can’t escape the label, for don’t they say the mouth of the river, an arm of the sea, the spine of a ridge? Moreover, when their leg bangs against the leg of their desk, don’t they glower at it as though its obstructiveness was intentional?

     We love our kin–we love people who look like us, who have dark hair and brown eyes as we do. As for people with blond hair and blue eyes, well, they can be tolerated but not loved, for they are not one of us. What if people look even more radically different? What if they are hairy, what if their jaws recede and their arms dangle almost to their knees? Well, we won’t want to be close to them. In fact, we would be repelled by their ugliness–their grotesque appearance. Yet what I have just said is not true–or rather, not quite true–for there are creatures who fit the description I have given, but far from being repelled by them, we embrace them as cousins thrice-removed. Who do I have in mind? I have in mind the mountain gorillas. It is a peculiarity of our species that we can favor other species more than our own–love our animal pet more than we do a human child. Remember that in eighteenth-century Britain, a nobleman’s horses were housed in handsome stables; by contrast, the men who served them lived in dark, smoky cottages. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded long before the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In nineteenth-century Britain, stray cats and dogs were being taken care of when children seven or eight years old slaved in factories, suffered choking smoke and grime as chimney sweeps, and were sent to prison for stealing an apple.  

     How come? Well, we humans are compelled to love creatures unlike us because we were and are totally dependent on them. Domestication is a long-drawn and often cruel procedure. Nevertheless, in its early stages, we humans had to treat the animals we wished to domesticate with tender, loving care. That loving attentiveness has not totally disappeared even when techniques of domestication have matured to the extent that personal attention and care was no longer necessary. Another factor is our need to see our virtues vividly. Animals, serving as metaphors, answer that need. Thus the dog stands undeviatingly for loyalty, the cat for independence, the horse for elegance, the tiger for power, the lion for nobility, and the panda for cuteness. But that still leaves out the mountain gorilla. What does it stand for? The vulnerability of hulk? Innocence behind threatening appearance?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu