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The New York Times January 13,
2014
Read the whole story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/opinion/bruni-according-animals-dignity.html?ref=opinion
According Animals Dignity
By 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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