The Others: How Animals Made Us Human Book

A dense, wide-ranging, intelligent, cantankerous and contentious book that lambastes everyone and everything from pastoral farmers to modern urban society, from almost every major world religious tradition (including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), to Plato and 99% of philosophers, from the domestication of animals and the abuses of factory farms to animal rights activists, from insidious myths to the cartoons of Gary Larson. Looking at representations and relational behaviors toward animals across time and culture, the book feels sprawling and overwhelming at times'best read slowly, with skepticism and patience.

Shepard's ecological outlook demands a more integrated and earthly kind of life, one that embraces the paradox that we cannot be human without animals, and that animals are irreducibly Other. They are not "friends," companions, objects to be tamed, dominated, or protected by charity. They embody wildness, change, life and death. The problem in our thinking is not only that we are cruel to animals (or other humans), but that our abstract thinking and disconnect with nature makes us forget how to live in the world, to know who we are. We are obsessed with avoiding pain, sickness, and death, and these denials cause our alienation and emptiness, our over-consumption and over-population. Writing, abstract thinking, and the domestication of animals (which, in the case of the horse, allowed for greater mobility, denser human settlements, centralized political power, and the waging of war on a wider scale) have led to an unhealthy, unbalance way of life.

Shepard proposes a return to a hunter-gatherer way of life. Animal lovers will object to his characterization of the keeping of pets as slavery, of Disney cartoons as the worst kind of infantilizing, while animal rights activists will object to his generalizations about them as facile absolutists who see animals in terms of political objects to be protected and kept from human contact, rather than as co-habitants of nature who share our lived reality. It may confuse some readers to see him condemn the nightmare and absurdity of factory farms on the one hand, the fat and stupid cow as the embodied monster of the worst excess of civilization, but then on the other hand to extol the sanctity of hunting, the eating of freshly killed meat as a ritual of becoming in which animals make us, literally, from the inside-out.

Despite the many generalizations, the various places one could quibble or take offense at his views, much of what he says makes sense. He tempers his generalizations with specific examples and a stunning array of interdisciplinary scholarship that draws on disciplines such as ecology, anthropology, psychology, literary and art criticism, and science. The scope helps to trace how our attitudes have evolved (or devolved) over time, and how virtually no society is exempt from the forms of dangerous thinking and practice that he critiques, but he does have more respect for the wisdom of indigenous and pagan cultures. He does not necessarily disavow all forms of "culture," and his wide knowledge of art, novels, and poetry suggests the ambivalent valences of human craft. On the one hand, it can be a divisive and stigmatizing force. On the other hand, for Shepard, these crafts are especially beneficial when they are performed with the respect and humility of a simpler, more integrated mindset, one in which death, disease, plants, and animals are neither positive nor negative, but parts of the world to be dealt with, through ritual and ceremony as much as through hunting and gathering. Making music with bones and horns, wearing skins and feathers and dancing with animal-masks, makes more sense to him than being entertained by dancing animals in circuses or silly cartoons. Eating freshly-killed deer and fowl, or gathered nuts, berries, and fruits makes more sense to him than consuming cows or grain bred by distant, bloated agro-businesses. One of his other books is titled Coming Home to the Pleistocene, and if that book's title is any indication, The Others seems to make a similar call that a return to prehistory is the best way to move into a less disastrous future.

I don't agree with everything Shepard claims, and I'm not always even sure what his point always is, between the generalizations and the exhaustive list of specific examples that do not always have a clear connection. Still, I found the book highly enjoyable. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the role of animals in ecology, evolution, or culture.