Dumb People vs Dumb Animals

I know I've missed the last couple weeks.  I'd like to say it's because I've been too busy, but to be honest I just haven't felt up for writing anything that I don't absolutely need to write.  However, I did a bit of philosophizing in the second-best place for doing so - the bathtub; the first is the toilet - and was thinking about the label 'stupid'.  Specifically, what does it mean in a human context, and does that differ from animal contexts?

I decided that it does, because of what society does for stupid people that it does not do for stupid animals.  Stupid people have the run of the place.  If, or rather when, they screw up, they have their social network, their union, their lawyer, and their government to back them out of it.  They can keep on being stupid.  Stupid people tend to underestimate risks, and they also tend to underestimate their personal impact on their social and physical environments.  A stupid person will do stupid things to make your life difficult that would, in a fairer world, mean at least the end of their viability in the community, if not the end of their life, but instead they get bailed out and may even get monetary compensation depending on the consequences of their own idiocy.

Stupid animals, on the other hand, are harder to nail down, but we can perhaps say there are two sorts: there are the kinds who underestimate risks, and those who overestimate them.  We all know animals who are afraid of anything strange, whether it be a guest in your house or a new piece of furniture.  We know dogs that bark at everything, and cats who are terrified of random inanimate objects.  Not too many animals go the other route; although we of course have sexually liberal critters, for the most part, animals who underestimate risks tend to die.  They certainly do in the wild, and given that the same social safety nets that work for humans do not work for the furrier of us, they often end up at least in a more difficult situation than they were before in domesticity.  Therefore, most stupid animals that we come into contact with are the skittish ones: the ones who overestimate risks, in contrast to their human counterparts.

Can we make a comparison, then?  Of course: someone who overestimates risks is much more reserved, and while they may be a detriment to their own lives, they are not, by definition, affecting the lives of others very much, as for them it's all about avoiding doing.  One who underestimates is the opposite: he will continue to do stupid things, as opposed to not do smart things, and these actions, in comparison to nonaction, are more potentially detrimental to the individuals and world around them.

A lot of armchair philosophers say that we should be more like our pets.  The realist in us says that we might not, since our pets might be kind of dumb, but if you're going to be an idiot, it's still probably best to at least be an idiotic nonhuman.  I would let a stupid animal near a person just about any day, but I would never allow a stupid person near my animals.

Just a little stupid brainstorming.  Hopefully I can be more regular with posting in the future, but if you're smart, you'll go by my track record and not my word.  Until next weekend - maybe!

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Cats & Dogs

One suggestion I got recently was to talk about the differences between cats and dogs as far as how they interact with each other, and how we as the humans in their lives interact with them.  Now, I think this individual wanted more me to discuss why cats rule and dogs drool, but I am going to take a different approach and examine the different ways in which each species is intelligent, and what those forms of intelligence mean to us.

I’ll start with dogs, then, because dogs are the species that we are most familiar with.  We, as humanity, have been befriending, working with, and selectively breeding dogs (from the grey wolf) for potentially as long as 30,000 years.  They are the first animal we domesticated, and the closest from day one.  Many scientists believe that humans actually nursed wolf cubs in the early years of domestication (from Grandin, T. 2005. Animals In Translation, an excellent book regarding comparative psychology and sociology).  It’s really little wonder, then, that today we feel much more at home with dog emotions, whether they have become more like us or we have become more like them.

The first and most obvious similarity is that we are both highly social animals, and rely very heavily on each other and social hierarchies.  Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not view their owners as “the alpha” – the pack mentality was bred out of them long ago, and we can see this today in the looseness and disorganization of feral dogs descended from domestic breeds.  They do, however, tend to put a great deal of stock in our happiness as individuals that they cherish, and retain a great deal of the social intelligence of their lupine ancestors.

Some of this intelligence is in their willingness to display how they are feeling in terms that we understand.  Dogs use facial expression well, including using their eyes.  Perhaps ironically, though, while they have little qualms about being embarrassed or making mistakes that impact them personally, they are more likely to inhibit themselves if they feel it necessary for the happiness or agreement of their enigmatic human companions.  I want to write a significantly creepier article on this later, but for now, this means simply that we as human beings must not fall into the hole created by the dog’s usual openness, and learn to read the more subdued cues they give, especially when they are uncomfortable.

I want to talk about cats more, because cats are far more mysterious – and they seem to like it this way, so I apologize to any cats whose veils I am preparing now to lift.  This desire to not show certain aspects of themselves, particularly anything that may make them appear weak, is pervasive across all breeds and species.  Perhaps the most famous and distressful example of this is that cats will seek complete solitude when they are dying.  Many cat owners, even those who have not lost a pet, are aware of this solace-seeking behaviour when kitty is ill; she will hide beneath or behind a piece of furniture and not come out for anything, even if she has had no prior experience with the veterinarian.  The etiology of this behaviour is pure instinct: a cat that is ill does not want to bare herself in the open as an easy target, and it is instinctive behaviour like this that often separates them from dogs.

Cats have been domesticated for a long time, but not nearly as long as dogs – only at most 9,500 years ago.  More importantly, we have never become partnered with cats – apart from, on occasion, using them as hunting partners, and even in combat, we have mostly just kept them around the grain bins and barns to keep away rodents.  We give them a place to stay and a nice source of bait for their food, and they keep that bait from being eaten by their food.  Only relatively recently, mostly since the late Bronze Age according to region, have we done much for keeping them as vanity pets and companions.  It’s therefore little wonder that they have much more for instinct, and we understand them far less than we do dogs.

However, one can learn cat.  While cats are still so well tied to their feral nature that they can even be expected to survive in the wild if abandoned, they do have some surprising social skills.  Although they are not nearly as tightly-knit as wolf packs, cats do form small social groups that are mainly for collective hunting and protection of queens and kittens.  Cats also have a huge range of communicative abilities, but there are two difficulties that we have in interpreting them.  Firstly, their base level is the way that dogs are when they are concerned with your reaction.  They keep their emotions tight to the belt in order to not appear weak, until they are needed.  In short, they are the opposite of dogs in their expressiveness.  Secondly, their ways of expressing themselves are much more foreign to humans: rather than using the direction of their gaze or ecstatic activity that are very easy for us to interpret, they use their ears, whiskers, tails, eyelids, and very minute tactile methods of communication that we simply are not very well-acquainted with.  Someday, perhaps, I will talk about these as well in more detail, but the simple fact is that unlike both dogs and humans, they put a great deal more stock in hearing, smell, and tactile information (ie whiskers) than they do sight, which leads to differing forms of communication.

Due to both the historical nature of our relationship, then, and our varying methods of communication that neither side has a great deal of ease in understanding, we tend to assume that cats are less amiable or even less intelligent than are dogs, which is not true and is merely a gross oversimplification of the differences in their respective psychologies.  The last number of posts I have made, I have left the reader with an overarching message to chew on until next week, and I believe this is a fine time for that: each animal genus and even species has its own idiosyncrasies, intelligences, and methods of communication, and all are deserving of respect and striving towards understanding, even (especially) if we need to leave behind our human mindset.

Genes, Animals Mating, and You

Some conversations I’ve been having recently have had me considering how sex is different across species… but also how it is the same.  This isn’t a new train of thought for me, but it is a new topic for this blog, and I imagine the handful of readers who have found this page without my linking them directly to it or finding it through some other zoophilic page have probably been waiting for me to talk about animal sex.

The conversation in particular I’m thinking of had to do with vorephilia, specifically why it exists in the first place, and I as a well-read academic and aficionado of kinks, paraphilias and orientations of all kinds immediately jumped up to posit the theory (not my own, but someone else’s) that vorephilia – a paraphilia related to biting and swallowing – is vestigial of the biting that many mammals engage in while mating to give themselves a certain dominant role.

But then I thought: why do they do it?  Anyone who watches enough Animal Planet knows that the species who are known for it – cats, canines, bears, etc. – don’t always do it, and the female (or male receiver) tends to be submissive enough anyway without all the biting.  Indeed, a lot of the time it’s not even real biting, but just sort of a threat that he could bite her if he felt like it.  It appears to have little to do with physical necessity and far more to do with the psychological, so we’re back to square one.

From there, I can take a different direction and philosophize a little about how mating activities have evolved – sex across the ages, if you will.  Sexual selection in larger, more modern mammals, such as the ones mentioned above, tends to be quite complex, with the female exerting a great deal of power over precisely with whom she will mate with, and the male more or less needing to put up with this because the female, while being a bit smaller, still has many sharp devices at her disposal that she can use to make sure that even if he impregnates her against her will, he may well die of infection or of the difficulties any injury may cause him.  The only large mammals in which rape can be called by any stretch common are primates, in which the females lack this natural weaponry, or, in the case of humans, any injury incurred by the male will not pose too much of a threat to his life.

This changes when we get to smaller, simpler creatures, such as most rodents, for many of whom mating success for the males depends on how quickly he can mount and disable the female.  Mating, then, tends to be quite violent, and often does result in injury – presumably, the number of young in a litter is considered to be genetically “worth it”.  In order to prevent herself from being injured, though, it is better for the female to be submissive, since, unlike the male, she cannot be mortally injured at the time of copulation and still have healthy young, thus passing on her genes.

We do not see these power-oriented sexual activities in non-mammals: in birds and reptiles, although the mating rituals can be extraordinarily complex, the action of mating itself is quite straight-forward.  In most fish, no real sexual interaction takes place at all; only in cephalopods do we see similar interactions to our rodent cousins, and in none do we see the symbolic gestures displayed by larger mammals.

It is from rodents that most other mammals have evolved from.  Is it possible, then, that this fixation on dominance in sex that manifests in such interests as vorephilia, sexual sadism and sexual masochism, and practices like bondage and necking, still remain in our genes from millions of years ago when we were merely rodents?  Were these paraphilias, which we now sometimes consider to be maladaptive and perverse, once part of an instinct necessary to pass on one’s genetic material?  This gives us an interesting perspective on these enigmatic paraphilias, which are sometimes, in the case of ones like vorephilia, to the point of being sheer fantasy.  Although this explanation obviously does not cover every paraphilia, if we consider how such interests and activities would have affected our non-human ancestors, we can get a better idea of precisely why they exist in the first place – and, in this, derive a greater tolerance for the associated individuals.

War Horse

Out from the world of holidays and back in to the world of real life and, of course, blogging.  I apologize for the copypaste filler, but that song always cracks me up, and I couldn't resist.  But you want to hear about my holidays!  Of course you do.  Well, beyond spending time with family, and wishing I wasn’t spending time with family, and spending altogether not enough time with love, I got around to watching a film.  The film was War Horse, and because of its heartfelt content and philosophical merit that is relevant to this blog, I am going to do a second film review.

Actually, it’s not really a review, but an analysis, so for those who haven’t seen the film, plan on seeing the film, and look forward to seeing the film without having me tell you everything that happens in the film, skip this post for your sake.  Don’t worry, there will be a new one next week.

For those who enjoyed the film just fine without imagining the extent to which its iconic relationship might go… don’t you worry either; I won’t make it creepy.  For me, the relationship between Joey the horse and Albert the boy and young man was only a small part of the film: the initial development and the goal, giving it a beautiful circularity.  I’m not much of a horse fan – they always made me nervous as a child and I never learned to ride beyond the basics – but nevertheless I found the one-to-one relationship portrayed in the beginning of the film between the titular character and his first owner to have gorgeosity in equality that isn’t often portrayed in film.  Albert leads the way, figuratively, but unlike any other horse master he waits for Joey to follow.  He doesn’t command, he suggests, and what’s more he provides an example, bringing himself completely to the level of the horse even to the point of wearing a yoke.  It’s interesting to note that this ultimate action of leveling saves Joey’s life later in the film.  In short, this relationship, the film’s place of growth and eventually its paradise, is also what I feel to be the ideal in the real world: equality in day-to-day life between humans and animals, and genuine caring between the two.

Far from being some New Age notion, though, or a PETA-esque proclamation that animals are no different from humans, the film goes on to show that it is possible to have this love and equality, or at least to understand and value it, even in the inherently negative context of war, which Joey is thrown into as the steed of one Captain Nicholls.  The man dies; the horse lives on to be found in the clutches of other men who, unlike the two he has been close with, regard him as without value.  Only two German boys – boys that, although being in the forces, value the war as little as their superiors value Joey – save him by suggesting he may be put to work behind the lines, before escaping with him and a second steed.  Once again, men die, but Joey survives.  It isn’t that they died for him, but that he was rescued by them but was unable to protect them, both in the case of the captain and that of the traitors.  It sets a depressing tone for the future.

This future is realized in a sickly French girl, who takes a great shine to both the horses.  On her birthday, against the preference of her grandfather, she is allowed to ride Joey – and unfortunately in doing so winds up in the middle of a German camp.  This time, the horses are taken, and as though in determination to prevent what had happened to their last two riders, they go without a struggle as the girl returns to her grandfather. 

The message of caring human-animal relationships, though, wouldn’t be as strong without its inverse: a challenge brought about as the horses are set to haul artillery, without care for their health beyond that they continue to pull, and that their corpses don’t impede the others after they are shot once they’re no longer useful.  It is here that Joey’s life is most perilous, and it is also here in the film where Albert is reintroduced as a nervous combatant – for both, the farm at which they had grown together has become a lost heaven.  This peril is also amplified at roughly the same time for both: Joey’s equine companion up until this point is killed upon collapsing in pulling the artillery, while Albert is temporarily blinded by a gas attack.  The general image is of fear, and a desire to return, embodied in Joey’s fleeing through no-man’s land, only to be caught in the barbed wire littering it.

This is the climax, and is highly symbolic: the horse is caught in a divide, an intentional divide between two sides that fight and believe themselves intrinsically different despite the similarities we have been shown in the film, having been privy to the lives of both the English and the Germans.  We have been shown another pointless and terrible divide, however: the divide between animals and humans, and we have been shown that the ideal for this as well is for the divide to be removed.  And, lo and behold, at this very time in the film, both divides are removed at once, in more than one way: the wires are cut, weakening the divide between both sides of the war, and they are cut by the combined activity of an Englishman and a German.  Naturally, Joey is then free and is soon reunited with his likewise-injured friend.  Oh, and if you didn't quite catch it the first time, the war ends.

This is a very powerful metaphor, I feel, that can be interpreted in many different fashions depending on whether your focus is upon the morality of war or upon animal-human relations, but it always leads to the same: the divisions in question are foolish and destructive, and only in the interest of a happy ending is the destruction reversed, albeit doubtless not without scars.  It’s this, and its believability on the parts of all characters, whether good or antagonistic, that I feel makes the film such a phenomenal one, and though it was released some time ago and I’m sure its time in the theatres is nearly done, I hope that it does well, because these messages are clear even without a great deal of thought on the part of the audience.  Media changes minds.