I always find it amusing when people discover the individuality of animals. Many of us who have lived with domesticated companion animals discovered this long ago. Evolutionarily speaking, it stands to reason that animals would have an individual identity, but it's also unsurprising that many distinctive traits are invisible to the human eye most of the time. I think this is due to not knowing what to look for (after all, they're not human), as well as a habit of regarding animals in circumstances that do not allow them to develop personalities that we are better able to recognize, i.e., animals in the wild, or caged animals. In other words, once they start interacting with us, it's easier to spot the unique characteristics of a given animal.
It's interesting for instance to note the differences between a house cat and a feral cat. A feral cat tends to be a prototypical cat: stealthy, skittish and swift, a quiet stalker. A domesticated cat will occasionally exhibit these traits, often in play with other cats. Adult house cats tend to exhibit an amount of play generally seen only in feral kittens, and they are much more talkative than other cats, a learned behavior in response to living among humans.
Much like the animals in Jon Katz's story, they simply do not have the pressures of nature forcing their evolutionarily-designed traits to express themselves so fully, and so they have a protected opportunity to express themselves more individually, just as we humans do. I can only imagine how we would behave if we didn't have all the trappings of civilization to remove these natural pressures from our own daily lives.
Many of our notions of fairness and how to treat one another stem from our continual growth as a society, and our evolving views as to what constitutes civilized behavior, but this can only happen within the construct of a civilized society. One only has to look at our own history to see the progress we've made in this regard. Hopefully we can be humble enough to realize there is still much further we can go, as in our view of non-human animals.
So much of our current approach to non-human animals is to consider them on a species level, when in fact animals are individuals, too. While all animals exhibit certain traits shared by other members of their species, humans included, when given the opportunity to do more than sleep, find food, procreate, and otherwise simply survive, many of them will express distinct personalities that even we humans can identify. Once our civilization tunes into this reality, we can make a better case for animal rights, because rights are directly related to personhood.
When you see an animal as an individual, you are able to recognize the 'personhood' of that animal. There is much debate over this notion of personhood in animals, but there is also strong support for it. For instance, Wikipedia starts out its definition of "person" with "A person is an entity having a distinct identity with certain distinguishable and persistent characteristics."
Of course, reading further into the Wikipedia entry, you will find the other (perhaps self-serving) criteria for personhood that have been suggested as the meaning has shifted with time and social context. Some of those criteria are what make this issue so contentious, like "a sense of self that persists through time." But, sticking to the core definition of a person, Jon Katz's Henrietta, and pretty much any companion animal any of us has ever gotten to know has "a distinct identity with certain distinguishable and persistent characteristics."
Regardless of whether non-human animals are as sophisticated in their personhood as, say, cetaceans (dolphins and killer whales) and primates like the great apes, or even elephants, it would should be apparent to a civilized society that, at a fundamental level, any autonomous being is an individual worthy of rights that will protect that being's interests, regardless of species.
It's time for humankind to wake up and realize that our fellow creatures are more than mere flesh machines. They are individuals that merit our respect, concern, and rights to protect them from being treated as objects.
With all that in mind, check out the story and laugh to yourself as this guy waxes on in amazement over a hen that rules the roost.
Labels: animal intelligence
