There is a minor controversy raging out there in the science grove. Learned men and women, painfully shy of being accused of the dread sin of anthropomorphism, are beginning to consider the idea that animals have personalities.

Anthropomorphism refers to our natural and sloppy way of attributing human motivation, characteristics, and behavior to animals, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.

I suppose it harks back to an earlier kind of human spirituality, which in itself implies that the spirit is not constrained soley to those bipeds with souls. or to the enduring popularity of the jokes which feature dogs who can talk.

As a Pentagon PowerPoint Ranger, I was often assigned the role of The Talking Dog. The assertions on the view-graphs were purely secondary to the marvel that I could speak at all.

The scientific community has been backpedaling from the concept since the turn of the century. Darwin was naive enough to think that observation of animals might give him insight into how humans behaved, and most of the scientific community of his day agreed with him.

But that common wisdom faded over the years, and died altogether with the arrival of people like B.F. Skinner, whose world view so molded the two subsequent generations. He figured that if people were hard to figure out, then animals were impossible.

That view, in turn, was a convenient one for a global society which had turned the consumption of animals into an industrial process. Were one to consider the carnage too closely, or imagine for a moment that a steer might not only feel pain at the abattoir, or fear, then the whole enterprise becomes suspect and very possibly morally repugnant.

That is part of the whole debate on abortion, which is a wholly human debate, and long ago I realized there was nothing rational I could contribute to the debate. I hold my contradictory feelings to myself, and will continue to do so. Moderation has no role in the discourse and I will not try to interject any here, particularly not on the anniversary of the Roe V. Wade decision 35 years ago today.

Which brings me back to the animals. I will grant to a certain anthropomorphic feel to storms, and particularly about machines. I have known airplanes and cars that had distinct personalities, some of them malicious, and verging on the downright evil.

The behavioral science  communities aversion to ascribing personalities to animals is understandable, if absurd. Anyone who has “owned” such an intimate companion as a dog or a cat knows that they have personalities, and life histories and responses that have nothing to do with conditioning.

Of course, the whole notion of ownership is problematic, and wholly human.

The horse community is another that knows animals are fully developed beings in their own right, not human, but thoroughly and fully developed as horses, bred to be with us, touching us, serving us.

But there is far more. Our animals know us better than we could ever imagine. Recently, science has come to the realization that dogs can read us like a book. The disquieting thing is that we are not a particularly good read.

A few years ago, the Atlantic Monthly published a fascinating article that claimed that everything we could see with our senses about dogs was wrong. Every response was simply an evolutionary survival mechanism, nothing more than chemicals bubbling behind those liquid brown eyes. Pigeons with fur, was the author’s conclusion.

But that could not have been more wrong.

Scientists have recently discovered that the dogs have capabilities that make our human dissembling transparent. According to the literature, dogs can tell from the distinct odors in human breath whether the humans have lung cancer, or not.

Some of them have been trained to do it professionally, since it is far more inexpensive than an MRI machine. Their conclusions are invariably correct, even if their learned opinion can only be rendered by sitting, or not sitting. Their binary conclusion is infallable.

But think for a moment about the  rest of our veneer of civilization they see through, without reproach. They know when and who has been sleeping with who. They can sense desire, and anger, and remorse with a unerring accuracy. I assume they process that information and integrate it in some fashion. Sometimes they run and hide, and with the realization of what they know, I don’t blame them.

Anyone who has owned a dog that was abused knows that, or the painful reaction to a coming thunderstorm.

We are fortunate that we are mainly numb to the great turmoil that rages around us, in the higher spectrum of hearing, and the intrusive sense of smell. We would go mad, I think.

Perhaps it is one of our survival mechanisms to be so insensitive.

In a way, B.F. Skinner was right. We don’t understand our dogs, but it is not because we inappropriately attribute human characteristics to them.

The dogs are way beyond that. It is just a good thing they can’t talk.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window