Animate by Michael Bond review: New Scientist recommends a smart new account of human exceptionalism

Animate
Michael Bond
Pan Macmillan UK, Pegasus USA (August)

Imagine taking an animal, tripling its lifespan, putting the knowledge of the world in its pocket (actually, giving it pockets), and for good measure, telling it about death. What might you end up with? An extremely confused and distressed animal would be my bet, and I would highly recommend reading Michael Bond’s work. Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind to at least begin to understand his twisted state.

We are animals, nothing more, nothing less. We evolved among other animals and are still perfectly attuned to their presence, even though we have spent a lot of time trying to deny and erase this connection.

Animate’The enchanting and disturbing story of the human animal begins after the last ice age. This, said Bond, a former New scientist editor-in-chief, was an Edenic era. It is true that we competed for food with cave lions, wolves and leopards, and for sleeping space with bears and spotted hyenas. It was a world so dominated by other animals that we would all be lucky to celebrate our 30th birthday.

But there were compensations for being in the middle of the food chain. Witness the extraordinary and emotionally articulate art made in the caves of places like Les Combarelles, Rouffignac and Lascaux (pictured above) in France. They capture the essence of the animal as well as its shape, movements and sensations. They are, says Bond, “visceral and unadorned – more reincarnation than art”.

There are few depictions of people and these tend to be quite superficial. For what? According to Bond, this is because the animals are, or were, the focal point. They not only outnumbered us; they were us. The barrier between human and animal simply did not exist.

In the Neolithic, something changed in humans. Art is more ingenious, less generous. The animals present on pottery from Turkmenistan, Iran and Iraq in the 4th millennium BC are no longer individuals. They have “been appropriated, as abstract forms for… decoration”. The exploitation of animals has begun, and they will be everything from decorative figures on pots to moral exemplars in medieval bestiaries. Most notably, almost universally, they will be fed, raised and slaughtered with meat on the bone. They are no longer us. A theoretical boundary between humans and animals has been erected, which we monitor.

But why? This was explored by Ernest Becker in Denial of deathwhich I was delighted to see Bond discuss with such sensitivity. Becker argued that we have such an awareness of mortality that it leads us to madness and greatness. Animals die, but we convince ourselves that this is not the case; we have immortal souls or survive through good works.

Human exceptionalism may have been a bad turn and was certainly a disaster for most non-human life, but without the great separation and the comforting lies it made possible, it is hard to imagine how we would pick ourselves up each day. Bond likes to think we can make things right, but since that involves overcoming the fear of death, I’d say the outlook is poor.

For centuries, writers have seen us as not so different from animals. Bond reminds us that the philosopher David Hume believed that animals used observations and experience like us, to “hypothesize about the future and adapt means to ends.” Later, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution dealt a fatal blow to exceptionalism.

Or did he? Nearly 170 years later, people like me still eat sausages. Bond gently skewers my meat eater. It’s true, I’ve never seen a pig slaughtered and I don’t plan to. Bond says that without the rituals, taboos, and traditions that previous cultures used to ease the psychological burden of killing and eating other creatures, the only psychic defense is distance (in my case, the supermarket).

Bond’s instinct is to make the world a better, friendlier place. In the previous books, this pushed him into Panglossian territory, where everything works out for the best. Animate is a very different beast. The story is solid, its implications devastating, and Bond’s pill is not sweet.

Suppose there is a confused and distraught animal who convinces itself that it is not an animal. Can this story end well?

Simon Ings is a writer based in London

Another excellent book on the animal-human relationship

A huge world
by Ed Yong

Each species views the world through a small keyhole, shaped by its needs and specialties: no one discerns the entirety. Science journalist Ed Yong’s best-selling book, subtitled “How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us,” shows the radically different ways in which animals perceive the world.