According animals dignity
Frank Bruni
As of late Monday
afternoon, when I was finishing this column, the most frequently emailed story
on The Times’s website for the previous week wasn’t about the polar vortex,
Chris Christie or “Downton Abbey.”
It was about cats.
I suppose that’s no big
shock. On blogs, on Facebook and all around the Internet, claws and clicks go
hand in hand (or is that paw in paw?). While the meek may be inheriting the
earth, the furry have already claimed cyberspace.
But what is surprising —
and indicative of a new chapter in the interactions of Americans and the
animals around us — is the focus of the cat story in question.
It wasn’t about kittens
doing the darnedest things. Under the headline “What Your Cat Is Thinking,” it
examined the new book “Cat Sense,” by a British biologist, John Bradshaw, who
flags his seriousness of purpose with his subtitle, “How the New Feline Science
Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet.” Bradshaw means to get into the cat
brain.
He’s already plumbed its
canine counterpart, in the 2011 book “Dog Sense,” which was also grounded in
research, not sentiment, and in the idea that pets have inner lives more
complicated than we imagine. “Dog Sense” was published just two years after the
huge best seller “Inside of a Dog,” by the psychology professor Alexandra
Horowitz, which pivoted on the same notion.
It was “Inside of a Dog”
in particular that caught my friend Kerry Lauerman’s attention, cluing him in
to a quickly shifting human perspective on animals.
“There’s this growing
obsession with animal cognition,” he said. Referring specifically to pets, he
added: “We don’t want animals just for comfort. We really want to know them.”
He mentioned another widely emailed story in The Times, from October, by a
neuroeconomics professor who was doing M.R.I. scans of dogs’ brains and finding
suggestions of emotions like ours. Its telling headline: “Dogs Are People, Too.”
Lauerman wasn’t merely
musing. He was explaining the rationale for a new website, The Dodo,
that’s dedicated to animal news and features and made its debut this week. He’s
its chief executive officer and editor in chief, and came to it from the
influential online publication Salon, where he was the editor in chief from
late 2010 to mid-2013.
One of The Dodo’s
principal financial backers is Ken Lerer, the current chairman of BuzzFeed and
one of the founders of the Huffington Post. His daughter, Izzie Lerer, created
and developed the site with Lauerman. Additionally, she’s finishing up her
doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University, where her research focuses on
the evolving compact between people and animals.
The Dodo’s pedigree
speaks to a broadening, deepening concern about animals that’s no longer
sufficiently captured by the phrase “animal welfare.” An era of what might be
called animal dignity is upon us. You see signs everywhere.
A story in The Wall
Street Journal on Sunday reported a sharp rise over the last few years in the
fraction of American dog and cat owners with provisions in their wills for their pets. Nearly one in every 10 have
made such arrangements.
One of the most fervently
embraced documentaries of 2013 was “Blackfish,” shown over and over on CNN. It
doesn’t just depict mistreatment of killer whales at SeaWorld; it makes the
case that these glorious mammals have rich social and family connections and a
profound capacity for grief.
There’s been extensive
discussion lately of elephants’ emotional lives, and Hillary Clinton, with her
famously active political antenna, recently found time to narrate a
documentary, “White Gold,” about the bloody wages of the ivory trade, and to
speak at its premiere.
People who go on lion
hunts encounter stern public shaming. (The Dodo recounts a recent example.) Bill de Blasio has
prioritized the retirement of Central Park’s carriage horses. Several prominent
retailers, including Gap and H&M, stopped procuring angora last year after
a widely shared video of the fur being yanked from rabbits’ bodies. The
movement to accord chimpanzees and some other kinds of apes legal rights is
accelerating, and greater scrutiny of food production has prompted keener
disgust over the fate of many farm animals, along with state legislation to spare them florid
suffering.
This is only going to
build, because at the same time that scientific advances force us to gaze upon
the animal kingdom with more respect, the proliferation of big and little
cameras — of eyes everywhere — permits us to eavesdrop not just on animal play
but also on animal persecution. It’s all documented, it all goes viral, and we
can’t turn away, or claim ignorance, as easily as we once did.
“Those creatures big and
small that have fed, frightened, entertained, comforted and awed us are no
longer just them,” Lauerman writes in a letter to The Dodo’s
readers. “Increasingly, they are us.”
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