In referring to animals, I sometimes in an unthinking way find myself using the word “who.” But I always try to catch myself, and change to “that.” The personalizing expression “who” should be reserved strictly for humans, since only a human being is a person.

However, we live in a culture that is largely hostile to the idea of humankind’s exceptional status. So word engineering has become a weapon wielded against maintaining proper distinctions and moral hierarchies separating us from fauna.

At Slate, Mary Bates reviews a couple of books that argue it is time to use language that helps transform animals into the personalized “who.” Let’s anthropomorphize! From “If I Could Talk to the Animals“:

Perhaps, observing the wildlife in our backyards, we’ve thought about how birds plan for the future by storing seeds or admired the tenacity and cleverness of a squirrel defying the latest “squirrel-proof” bird feeder. But many scientists are still trained to think of animal minds as unknowable — that is, whether animals have minds at all.

The influence of behaviorism (the theory that emphasized observable behavior over thoughts and feelings) made speculation about the inner lives of animals off limits to science until fairly recently. This dogma is slowly changing, thanks to advances in neuroscience and detailed field observations of animals living their lives.

This approach was led by Jane Goodall, who made valuable observations of chimp behavior, and then invented inner lives for the animals to humanize them. That’s why I call her a novelist.

He [author Carl Safina] reviews the research showing that humans and other animals use the same brain regions to handle emotions, which in turn implies that we all experience the same basic feelings.

No it doesn’t. We don’t just feel emotions and act on them the way animals do. We also engage our unique rational abilities and capacity to think abstractly. Animals don’t have those capacities. We are different from them and they are different from us in morally meaningful ways.

Indeed, when a human being “loses it,” and acts purely on emotion or desires of the moment, we sometimes say he is acting “like an animal.”

There is also a lot of projection — a uniquely human attribute — poured into this kind of thinking. Example:

One animal that many people will agree is a who and not a what is the dolphin. While swimming off the coast of Maui, writer Susan Casey had a profound experience with a pod of spinner dolphins. The animals’ playfulness was transformative for Casey, helping her emerge from a two-year-long period of mourning over the death of her father.

Please. The inner emotional change came from Casey’s uniquely human subjective ability to perceive and react to the beauty and majesty she saw in the dolphins. Others have had the same uplifting experience looking at a beautiful sunset, thunder storms, or the Grand Canyon.

I was once in a deep funk as a child. For some reason, I lay on the ground a few inches from my pet tortoise and watched him eat lettuce. Suddenly, I was very happy.

I have no idea why watching the tortoise eat so lifted my spirits. Whatever it was — perhaps my first comprehension of incredible wonder of life or a spiritual understanding — the inner change came from within me, not the tortoise. It was just being.

And then, the argument for animals as “who”:

In making the case for animals possessing thoughts and feelings like our own, these books implicitly and explicitly argue for treating our fellow animals with more compassion and respect.

Only a few decades ago, books like these would not have been possible. Animal minds were considered by many scientists to be unknowable “black boxes.”

Recent trends in brain studies and field research have made understanding animal minds a possibility. These two books demonstrate how interested we as humans are in the minds of other animals and just how much we still don’t know about other animals’ subjective experiences. But Safina and Casey both persuasively argue that the question isn’t “What are animals?”; it’s “Who are they?”

In other words, we are the lodestar of value — we are exceptional. But here’s the thing: Animals do not appreciate or comprehend their own splendor. They act on instinct and emotion in a distinctly non-human way. Indeed, they are wholly incapable of perceiving and acting toward each other in the ways books like these and the reviewer claim we are to act toward them.

Of course animals love, experience exuberance, feel pain, and can suffer. No one for a very long time has denied that animals “feel,” despite the pretense by animal-rights types and other anti-human exceptionalists, to the contrary.

But it is their very capacities that impose upon us the duty to treat them humanely — simply and merely because we are human — not for the reason that underneath the fur and behind the dolphin squeaks, they are people too.

Because they are not. They are (wonderful) “whats,” not “whos.”

Image by waferboard (taking a swing at itUploaded by Snowmanradio) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.