Word: humanism
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...premise of The Well-Dressed Ape is that everybody knows human beings are really animals but nobody cops to it linguistically. Just talking about ourselves the way we talk about animals is a step toward self-knowledge. "We Homo sapiens," Holmes writes, "so eager to describe the rest of the world, have been chary about committing our own species to paper." Holmes describes us quite wonderfully, and she's a tireless compiler of biological trivia. She scours the extremes of the earth for anomalous and specially adapted humans, like the Tierra del Fuegians, who (before they died out) wore...
Grandin isn't much of a writer (nor, on the evidence, is her co-author, Catherine Johnson), but she's at least as astute an observer as Holmes, plus she's an actual scientist and an influential designer of humane cattle-handling systems. Grandin is also famous for being one of the world's most professionally eminent autistic people, which gives her work an ineffably distinctive perspective. In Animals Make Us Human, she's particularly interested in a kind of behavior called a stereotypy: an abnormal action that someone can't stop repeating. Autistic people often have stereotypies...
Animals Make Us Human is a practical, species-by-species guide to making animals happier, grounded in Grandin's belief that "all animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain." For most people, her chapters on dogs and cats will be the most immediately rewarding--it never would have occurred to me that one reason cats' emotions are so hard to read is that they have no eyebrows--but there's a world of insight to be gained from her work on farm animals as well as more exotic zoo animals. Grandin shows a startling tenderness...
There aren't many worse insults for a human than to be called an animal, but these books--which do just that, at great length--are instead strangely ennobling. They make you realize how much effort we expend every day convincing ourselves that we're different and what a relief it is to admit that we're not. It's lonely here at the top of the tool-using hierarchy--why don't we let down our fur and join the club? If they'll have us, that is. If animals could describe us in return, the results might...
...dies but at the end of a long, mischievous life. The Chihuahua flirts, but the only doggy style in the movie is her couture. There are few worthier--or safer--recipients of a child's affection. "Dogs are not attached to any gender," says Alan Beck, a professor of human-animal studies at Purdue University. "They have no age, no race, no background. You don't have to justify anyone's love for them." With a few Cujo-like exceptions, dog movies are the nutritious comfort food of cinema, exactly what parents seek in uncertain times...