The Cat Psychic, Rachel Monroe
Most of us who live with animals have been guilty at one time or another of that particular flavor of solipsism that involves projecting our own human thoughts and feelings onto the animals we live with. (I once dated a guy who told me the key to understanding his mom was to take every sentence where she talked about what the dog was thinking/feeling and replace his name with her own: Daisy is so excited to meet you! Daisy is tired. Daisy gets over-excited when there are too many people in the house.)
Hence the moral objection to anthropomorphism: “To imagine that animals think like humans or to cast animals in human roles is a form of self-centered narcissism: one looks outward to the world and sees only one’s own reflection mirrored therein,” write Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism can also reflect a lack of imagination: “To assimilate the behavior of a herd of elephants to, say, that of a large, middle-class, American family or to dress up a pet terrier in a tutu strikes these critics as a kind of species provincialism, an almost pathological failure to register the wondrous variety of the natural world-a provincialism comparable to that of those blinkered tourists who assume that the natives of the foreign countries they visit will have the same customs and speak the same language as at home.”
Hence the moral objection to anthropomorphism: “To imagine that animals think like humans or to cast animals in human roles is a form of self-centered narcissism: one looks outward to the world and sees only one’s own reflection mirrored therein,” write Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism can also reflect a lack of imagination: “To assimilate the behavior of a herd of elephants to, say, that of a large, middle-class, American family or to dress up a pet terrier in a tutu strikes these critics as a kind of species provincialism, an almost pathological failure to register the wondrous variety of the natural world-a provincialism comparable to that of those blinkered tourists who assume that the natives of the foreign countries they visit will have the same customs and speak the same language as at home.”