Fans by Michael Bond

Author:Michael Bond [Bond, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2023-03-27T17:00:00+00:00

The scale of the challenge that therians face in trying to reconcile their human bodies with their animal minds – and in convincing non-therians to take them seriously – may be partly a function of the culture they live in. In the West, for much of the past two millennia we have considered ourselves distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, elevated by cognition, intelligence, language, morality and culture. In the first chapter of the book of Genesis, God granted humans ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth’,13 and the Judaeo-Christian tradition wasted no time in making that creation story gospel. Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have emphasized our superiority over nature, reasoning that animals, lacking souls or anything approaching the human mind, are simply – as Descartes put it – mindless automata or brutes.14 Human exceptionalism has led to the reckless exploitation of the planet and a narrow attitude towards the moral status of animals. But this is almost exclusively a Western view, and if you look back over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, you’ll realize that it is a very recent one. The line separating human and other has not always been so well defined.

Many cultures recognize animals as either deities or ancestors. A popular Tibetan creation myth maintains that Tibetans are descended from a meditating monkey, while in Turkic mythology all Turkic peoples originate from a she-wolf named Asena. Many indigenous groups have an animistic perspective, believing that animals, plants, rivers, rocks and other natural features have a spiritual essence, just as humans do. Ancient Egyptians considered certain animals sacred; they treated cats with great reverence and mourned and mummified them on their death. Today, plenty of cat owners think of their pets as possessing an intuition far beyond the human. Treating a pet like a person is acceptable even in the Anthropocene.15

In certain cases, the divide between species has been conspicuously absent. Some of the earliest pieces of art depict human–animal hybrids. Famous examples include the Lion Man, a 35,000-year-old lion-headed figurine carved from the tusk of a mammoth, which was found in Hohlenstein-Stadel, a cave in southern Germany, and the Sorcerer, a 15,000-year-old cave painting in south-western France that resembles a humanoid stag. It is hard to know what they mean, though their existence is suggestive of a worldview quite different to the modern anthropocentric one. They may represent a shaman’s attempt to communicate with an animal, to transform into one or to tap into its physical or spiritual qualities.

Stories about people who ‘shape-shift’ between human and animal form have persisted throughout recorded history. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written around 4,000 years ago, describes the friendship between a king and a primitive wild man – thought to be a version of the bull-man that frequently appears in ancient Mesopotamian art – who lives like an animal until he is seduced and tamed by a prostitute.

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