Talk to the Animals

A YouTube channel I follow, Gutsick Gibbon, has done several videos on the subject of human exceptionalism. She is quite clear that we are not all that different from our assorted animal relatives, especially the other primates. (She’s a primatologist on her way to a PhD.) And the evidence is on her side, of course, despite what many people seem to think. Our differences are a matter of degree, not anything absolute. A lot of people resist this. And yet it is also true that we have possibly for as long as we’ve been human imbued the animal kingdom—and sometimes even plants and so forth—with human traits in our fiction.

Sometimes, they’re used as archetypes—the clever fox, the crafty raven, the noble lion. Interestingly, though the owl is seen as wise, there’s also a phrase that crops up in British writing that’s “as stupid as an owl.” Other times, though, the animals are characters with defined personality. While it’s true that Bugs Bunny fits into the trickster archetype sometimes ascribed to the hare, I don’t think there’s a similar archetype that involves the Tasmanian devil. And Disney uses two different dog characters—and it’s interesting that the one that doesn’t talk often appears more clever than the one that does.

Pixar, meanwhile, has showed us that it’s possible to anthropomorphize anything. Toys, okay; toys are anthropomorphized going in. And, sure, bugs we can do. Bugs are animals. But cars. A lamp. Our very emotions. The world around us can live and move and have personality. Fire and water can be people who love and marry. Pixar didn’t start this trend, but let’s be real. No one does it quite like they do, to the point that it’s a little disappointing when their movies are about just people.

Still, mostly, we’re talking, well, talking animals. Many of our current cultural icons are descended from the characters of Aesop and other fairy tales and legends. While there are human animated characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, it’s not surprising to us that the henchmen are weasels. Yes, there are the bullets and the cab, but the movie would have felt incomplete without a mouse, a rabbit, and a pair of ducks. There are dogs and pigs and elephants and hippos and things. That is the world humans create.

It starts very young; my children sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” as toddlers, before graduating to Charlotte’s Web. Humans make our world human so we can understand it better. The world is very large and can be very scary, and if you believe everything in it has an understandable motive, it’s easier to get through the day. And what’s more understandable than other humans? And if we think of ourselves as better than animals at the same time, well, what’s a little cognitive dissonance among friends?