Assaulting the Animals: The Problem with Perceptions

By Chad Marvin

The aimless amble humans have taken in drifting further and further from the other millions of species we were placed on earth with has done nothing but fabricate a reality where we will be able to watch our simulated perception of the world play out in front of us. I wish I could say or just know that there was a time when humans and animals lived and communicated amongst each other to the point where there was no such thing as humans or animals; a time where we had not yet began to create systems that would detach us from our partners of the planet. Unfortunately the fact is that the world we live in today is so detached from the animals we once lived among and has been for so long that is hard to really say for certain that we ever did live in harmony with animals. Perhaps it was a couple angry cavemen that had a bad encounter with a tyrannosaurus-rex, but somewhere along the line, we as humans drew a line and creates a divide that has never since been filled. Today we can listen to this divide expand to the sounds of “the cow goes moo” and “the horse goes nay”. We live in giant boxes and our lives revolve around even bigger boxes where we can “buy” the very fruit that grow off of trees, and yet not us but the other millions of species are the oddities of the earth, according to us that is of course. Every day we lose more and more of an understanding of the other lives in the world, a trend which many people have picked up on throughout time.

Julia Corbett, author of Communicating Nature points out much of the issue behind the rift between humans and animals just in the name of her chapter, “Communicating the Meaning of Animals. As if the key to understanding animals is not through returning to our original setting in nature and living among them but is instead through understanding what we have connoted them to be. However in “Communicating the Meaning of Animals”, Corbett does point out some of the wrongdoings we have committed related to how we view animals, she says “We use animals as devices, metaphors, and symbols for a great deal of our expression and ideas.” This sentence might seem quite objective, and it is in terms of how it was written, however in Corbett’s objectivity, she hits upon a key issue, the “we.” “We use animals” to fit what we need them to, and we take them at face value. We see a jaguar, it is fast; we see an Olympic sprinter “that sprinter is as quick as a jaguar.” But what about the jaguar’s other traits, its mysteriousness, its position socially among other animals, what it may do for sheer enjoyment? Corbett continues her discussion of animals in pointing out that we have even moved past thinking about animals and their traits and instead we think of them relative to ourselves “Gradually, some predators were remade in a human image, an image that any predator could be tamed and made accessible to humans.” As we humans have grown and made our impact felt across all parts of the world, Corbett is suggesting here that so to have we made our mentality one where humans are not only felt around the world but are essentially the world. Even predators, even the most fearsome creatures to us are just a memory of that one time we saw them roar at the zoo, they are not their own entity, just a minute fraction of ours. Corbett expresses that we have essentially burned our own image of animals into our head even when we may not want to think of them in a certain way “Even when we seek out authentic experience and understanding, we cannot entirely remove the deer from its pop culture communication or the wolf from our historical hatred of it.” This is where our own simulation plays in our head, we see a deer and it is an innocent creature and the wolf, a devious and vicious beast. Who is to say however that this deer is not a wild, charging buck and that this wolf isn’t just calmly walking a trail meaning no harm to anyone? It is a tragedy indeed that we are “Communicating the Meaning of Animals” however in looking at this information we can gain a better understanding as to how we can stop “Communicating the(ir) Meaning” in our everyday lives and just try “Communicating” with the animals.

In Linda Hogan’s Deify the Wolf, she speaks about many of the mindsets which have set our minds far from a view that is justified or fair in its perception of animals, namely wolves. She was on a trip to see timber wolves of Minnesota and on her journey and was discussing her experience, she found that a lot of people there were there to see the wolf because it was some rare, dangerous, almost fictitious animal “A California woman thinks seeing the wolves would be “like in the movies.” There was also a trapper, who had someone take a photo of him with one of the dead wolves they were studying in a way that made it look like he had caught the tough animal. From both of these examples, Hogan gives us examples of how humans are placing their idea of wolves onto the wolves by implying that they are these creatures are only this rough tough things and there is no greater importance beyond that. Hogan herself points out that this is wrong, she asserts that we need to let wolves be whatever they are and think of them in the way that they truly act “Something wild must hold such sway over the imagination that we can’t tear ourselves away from any part of wilderness without in some way touching it.” What Hogan is getting to in her piece is the idea that we need to detach ourselves from our human impulses and let the wolf be a wolf. She talks a lot about the wolf and how in a lot of ways it is similar to us and this scares us for as humans we like to dominate and area and be able to walk around without feeling threatened. This is why we have hurt them for so long and the same can be said for other animals.

We eliminate what scares us or is different to us instead of embracing it, we as humans have even seen this happen among our own people and that obviously not acceptable. We need to recognize these faults and see that what we are doing in killing the wolves and other animals and ignoring them is no different then taking lives in wars or genocides. They are innocent live only seeking to live and be free. We have placed a picture of a smiling bunny eating a carrot in front of the rabbit dying from pesticides. It is this trend and idea that must be eliminated from the earth, not the animals.