Animals

And whether we share more than common ancestors

We Are All Animals by Madhav Chavan and Meera Tendolkar, translated by Rohini Nilekani and illustrated by Santosh Pujari

We are all animals. This is true. We are animals in the same way that any animal you could name is an animal. Made of most of the same elements. Performing most of the same functions. We breathe, most of us; we move about, most of us; we reproduce — or try to. Most of us.

But what is the point of calling humans animals? There are some good reasons. Mankind ought to feel a kind of fellowship with other organisms. Apes and monkeys are our brothers. They are very like us. We ought to feel the same kinship to them as we do with other humans. They are very like us, different only by degree.

Orangutans are our friends. Chimpanzees, though violent, are our very near relations. Gorillas did not go to the same school, but they inhabit our neighbourhood. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise.

But are we like other animals? We have canine teeth like carnivores of nature. But are we like tigers? Do we even behave very much like household cats and dogs? Are they our brothers and sisters or are they companions, bred to serve us, or born with an adaptable enough nature that means they can fit in with our whims, our modes of living?

What connections do we have with elephants and giraffes? Many of us, including me, like elephants. And we like giraffes. We like the ways they move. We like their social behaviours. It is interesting to observe their rituals, their performances.

But are we like them? Only in the broadest possible sense. We are only like elephants and tigers and cows in the sense that we are all animate, and that we move about and try to keep on living. And that bar is rather low.

Of course, there isn’t much other life out there in the explorable universe that matches those criteria. It might be a barren desert in which we live. But though we are like llamas and turkey hens and gars and all manner of other things, we are not like them enough. We are not like them enough to say anything big, anything profound about the analogy. We are all animals, sure. But we are also all organisms containing a fair amount of carbon. At some point a distinction becomes a difference, and an all-embracing phrase fails and falls apart. The elastic ceases to stretch.

Books like this are about getting children to love nature. The authors want children to think. To think about our attributes — our teeth, our hands and feet, our voices, our spines — and to compare. The lion has a larger head and we do. The tiger sharper teeth. The calls of birds and the songs of whales go further than our voices. And our fingernails are nothing compared to the ordinary cat’s claws, let alone those of the puma. Is that not so? And elephants have very great ears and they can hear a good deal. And giraffes have necks that put ours to shame. And many animals have tails that do things and serve functions, and we do not have tails at all.

Think of that. To that extent, then, we are subordinated by nature. It contains multitudes of traits that we, poor humanity, cannot have. We are not as various as the animals that surround us. We do not have as many shapes, as many colours.

In a way, it’s good to make children think. To make them think of the life they might see through windows and on TV. Everything that lives eats, more or less. And we eat other living things. How’s that for a discussion, not necessarily moral but practical, to be had at dinner time? A discussion to be had with the kids.

When we compare ourselves to some animals, we might get a sense of superiority. No animals think as we can. Even the most sophisticated can only use tools to some extent. The cow that appeared to buck millennia of claims of bovine stupidity by using a tool to scratch her back — she can only go so far. She won’t be managing a printing press or an oil rig or an HGV very soon.

So we are superior, as individuals perhaps if not en bloc, in intellect. We can make the earth around us move. We can make it rain indoors. We can do all manner of things. And the animals might see these things — and look at cars and vacuum cleaners — uncomprehendingly. They might be scared by the fireworks that we make for pure amusement. The things we make for fun.

But in individual ways, of course, animals have us beat. We can’t, as a species, outrun the leopard. Not many of us would want to try. And people have tried. We can’t fly, except with paramotors or complicated, heavy machines or balloons and parachutes you can barely steer.

We can’t do much. We can’t swim a thousand miles. Not without a rest, not without water from another source than the sea. We can’t survive long in cold places, even with the best gear. The polar bears, the penguins, they would all of them laugh at us. If they could.

We are animals, just like the other ones. Limited by biology, sharing the same fate, engines propelled by genes and social copying: a series of impulses we can’t fathom.

And then we write little illustrated books for children, books no animal can read, about how much humanity shares with all other living things.