Humans and animals. Humans or animals. Humans vs. animals. Are these legitimate separations?
Humans are animals; so, from where does this fictional distinction come? I honestly cannot say when or where humans began to use 'animals' exclusively to describe non-human animals. I can say that I think that the choice to continue to separate them in this way is harmful, in addition to being false and dishonest, to humans and non-human animals. I also wonder about the relation between this separation and the separation of 'race.' 'Race' is not a thing that actually exists; instead, 'race' refers to phenotypic characteristics like the darkness of one's skin. Also, as I understand it, humans also may have unnecessarily changed our species name; the move to referring to homo sapiens was not biologically justified. It seems like these problems all have the related problem of creating arbitrary distinctions.
I usually (it is difficult to break a habit) refer to non-human animals as non-human animals, and I usually refer to people of different 'races' by referring to the comparative darkness or lightness of their skin tone.
Sorry this is sort of jumbled up in an awful mess of thoughts. Do you folks have any thoughts about these things?
Hey, I responded to your post, the link is here:
ReplyDeletehttp://equityhumanfauna.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-response-to-mr-gaudet.html
I like your question a lot and think it is a good idea to think about how "humans" are animals when we talk about animal hunting, or animals in zoos
I responded to your post here: http://valueultimate.blogspot.com/2013/04/useful-distinctions.html
ReplyDeleteIt seems we need a new vocabulary to voice the very thin distinction between humans and nonhuman animals.