Animals Matter

I love my dog. I love to see monkeys leaping through the rainforest, dolphins swimming in the sea, and house sparrows feeding on a park bench, I am fascinated by urban coyotes and cheer the return of the mountain lion across the USA…I also I love a good steak, eggs and cured ham. There is no simple way to describe humans’ relationships with other animals, but one thing a fundamentally clear: animals matter.

Whether as food, labor, collaborators, friends, and even family, animals help us become human

Most of the humans on the planet rely on animals for food, income, and security. Many of us have animals as companions --some even as kin. Across the globe other animals play central roles in our minds, myths, bodies, and our daily lives. There are few, if any, human societies that do not rely on animals in one way or another; animals help us understand what it means to be human.

Humans are animals (primates, close kin to the apes to be exact), but we are a kind of animal that engages other animals more extensively -- both cruelly and compassionately --than any other creature on the planet. We are well informed about the marvels of other animals and how we often underestimate and mistreat/misrepresent them (see Marc Bekoff’s and Barbara King’s excellent blogs for example). But we all too often forget that for a large chunk of human history other animals helped us become who we are, and continue to do so. To truly understand human evolution, in the past, present, and future, we need to understand our relationships with other animals.

Recent books by Pat Shipman, Meg Olmert, and many others highlight our relationships with dogs and other animals as being important in the evolution of our physiologies and psychologies. Recent work demonstrates that these relationships are ongoing. For example, dogs can have substantial impacts on our hormone levels, can act as a bridge between autistic children and other humans, and play central roles in a range of therapy for humans who’ve undergone substantive psychological trauma.

Work by anthropologists like Rebecca Cassidy, Loretta Cormier, Eduardo Kohn, Matei Candea, Eben Kirksey, and Marcus Baynes-Rock (just to name a few) illustrates that across the globe diverse cultures are entangled with other animals as central parts of their lives. Whether it is peoples in the Amazon who include monkeys, dogs, peccaries and other animals in their families and kinship systems; humans and hyenas living side by side and sharing the streets of an ancient Ethiopian city; people’s intricate relationships with their horses; or the mix of species that characterizes most everyday life for humans around the world; animals permeate the human experience. Even recent innovative work in theology and social justice forces us to recognize that we cannot think about being human without including our being with other animals.

For the last two million years (and through today) evolutionary processes in humans have been intertwined with our relationships with other animals. Learning how to avoid, track, challenge and out-compete predators and how to understand, follow, process, and capture prey started early in our histories and shaped the way our minds and bodies work. Many of the earliest images created by humans are of other animals, or hybrid beings, a mix of humans and other animals. Once humans and other animals began to mutually shape one another in a very direct way (what we call domestication) certain species began to be part of our everyday personal environments…the very patterns of natural selection were impacted and shaped by these relationships. We began to have new types of nutrition, new behaviors, new diseases, and new ways of seeing ourselves and the other animals we brought into our homes, hearts, and stomachs.

This means that when we generate evolutionary explanations for why we behave the way we do, for why our bodies function as they do, we need to be cognizant of the possibility that other animals’ presence is shaping our selves. We must think about the bodies and behaviors of other animals as core parts of the ecologies in which we exist and, thus, include them as part of the suite of central influences in our own evolution. We did not make it in the world alone; we made it as part of a multispecies ecology.

We owe it to other animals to admit this, to recognize their role in our own success as a species and the debt of gratitude we owe them. This carries with it moral and ethical implications as we continue to expand our use, abuse, and caring for these evolutionary partners.

Animals matter in our past, present and future. How we relate to them and how they continue to help shape us depends on our choices and actions. Next time you hug your companion animal, eat a piece of meat, spray your lawn with chemicals or take a medication, think about the relationships involved and how we can look to our creative multispecies past to better develop a sustainable multispecies future.