“The old man loved his tiger, evidently she did not return the same affection”, Studio Aperto (Italian newscast), 3rd july 2013. I would start from this sentence to try to briefly illustrate how our usual vocabulary is inappropriate to talk about the animal world. The abomination of the statement of the journalist is patent – even if we are talking about one of the worst Italian newscast, the news has been covered globally. The man loved the tiger, but she did not. It sounds as if we were back in first grade, when the teacher told us that you cannot sum apples with oranges. Where is the flaw in that reasoning? The problem is always the same: the tendency to anthropomorphize animals. We cannot, we must not make human what the Nature made different from us. All that belongs to the sphere of ethics, morals, or of the notions of good and evil, kindness, tenderness, humility, generosity, in short to the great sphere of feelings is a human invention. It is the result of thousands of years of evolution of the human thought – unfortunately the only thing that humans are able to improve. Philosophy, jurisprudence and society have changed over the millennia also thanks to the teleological Christian model, based on a Manichean vision of good and bad. In mystical terms, we might speak – as a great contemporary novelist has already done- about good for everything that that pushes us towards a supreme perfection commonly called God; and about bad for everything that makes us walk away. God, black and white, Ying and Yang and even Heaven and Hell: these ideas belong to human beings and not to animals. This is just a small foreword to go straight to the point. When we speak of the tiger’s cruelty tearing his loving master, of the cat taking care of the puppies of an another animal, or of the lioness who dies after killing a gazelle giving birth, because the bitterness was too heavy, we are employing human notions that have nothing to do with an animal logic. I will not deny the presence of feelings in the animal world: I am only saying that the vocabulary used and the ethical principles that are the grounds of this vocabulary are inadequate. There is love among animals, there is affection, understanding, racism, homosexuality, evilness, goodness, perhaps there is even the spirituality, the concept of life and death, the genetic idea to spread the species, but all of this is far from us. We know that young dolphins not yet “married men” amuse themselves raping in gang; we know that sometimes they kill a creature of an another specie without any nutritional aim. We know that penguins are necrophilia and we have seen them have sex with carcass. Newspapers have shown these behaviors and medias have drawn conclusions: even dolphins and penguins are bad. First of all, they are bad, but in what sense? Take the example of the necrophiliac penguin. From the beginning of our existence, men were not pleased about their earth life, so they tried to project their bright future in the afterlife. The afterworld was born and at the same time we developed the respect of the dead that perpetuated their life in a mystic Nirvana. May that be the point of view of penguins? And of the young dolphin rapist? Courts around the world still find it hard to place the fault in the rape and rape as a guilt, they are victims of centuries of machismo during which men could abuse the women treating them like a knick knack. Imagine, if in a society so different from ours, as the dolphin is, they would give the same value to the body of the female. These issues ought be the subject of the attention of journalists, specialized sites and science communicators.
Recently, thanks to a friend that shared a video on Facebook, I found a boy who lived in total harmony with lions, panthers, cheetahs and tigers : this has touched me. I have seen a dog into the water saving a little cat in agony. I have seen the ferryfrog succumb to the poison of the scorpion. I have seen a lot of videos. I have read so many testimonies: in my heart, I will keep getting emotion, but then, I will meditate about the pertinence of humans feelings in animals.
We were so lavish in antiquity and we are still in coining new slang to overcome the deficiency of languages. Originally, the Latin modeled his scientific language on the Greek scientific terminology. Today, all disciplines from forensics to the literature have their specialized dictionaries. We push to let this happen also for the sphere of animal emotions, because they would be the first to benefit. It is too dangerous to make an animal a human. The risk is a misrepresentation of the animal world: this makes it harder to identify the real needs of animals, to completely understand them without any misunderstanding.
Andrea Vovola
Eco12 