Rex Smith: Animal tales draw notice, but why?

AnimalsHumans have always struggled to figure out how to share the planet with other animals. Some of them we bond with. Others we eat. Most of them we ignore, although there are some creatures that we’re inclined to exterminate on sight, like rats and rattlesnakes.

But we get a bit weird if an animal emerges outside what we’ve defined as its appropriate space in our lives. Take, for example, the black bear that climbed a tree in an Albany neighborhood this week and seemed ready to settle in for a while.

The “Albany Bear,” as it came to be known in headlines, became a minor phenomenon. It drew crowds of onlookers and crews of journalists as state wildlife officers tried over two days to lure it down. The stories tracking its sightings and ultimate demise drew more than a quarter-million pageviews on, making it by far the week’s biggest story. (A typical popular posting is seen by perhaps 10,000 people.)

Folks were so upset by the idea that the bear was going to be euthanized — “put to sleep,” as we gently tell children — that the Department of Environmental Conservation issued updates on its behavior and statements on the department’s protocols for dealing with bears, explaining that “relocation does not always work” and that a “nuisance bear” that repeatedly returns to human settings, as the Albany Bear did, must be dealt with in a very final way, indeed.

DEC’s usual way of dealing with bears — encouraging people to “harvest” them — had been laid out just a week before. There are 6,000 to 8,000 black bears in the state, too many to co-exist comfortably, it seems, with almost 20 million human New Yorkers. So after 120 human-bear interactions in the state in 2012, a number that had grown from just 50 in 2006, the state decided to expand the bear hunt to a longer season and in more zones than previously allowed.

This is fine with me. While I don’t personally wish to hunt bear — a friend who has done so says it’s unbelievably messy — the state ought to manage wildlife populations so we don’t get bears marauding through suburban trash cans, not to mention pesky white-tailed deer wandering city streets. Nobody wants species wiped out, and given the shrinking of wild habitats as humans take up a greater share of the planet’s space, it’s humane for smarter creatures to allocate resources in a way to make life as good as possible for all.

Yet when people treat animals differently than we’ve come to expect, we’re horrified, and we bring down the force of law. This week in Washington, for example, legislation moved forward to block the planned re-opening of horse slaughter plants. Slaughtering horses for food has been prohibited in the U.S. since 2007, but politicians rather routinely feel compelled to do something so they can issue press releases denouncing a notion that most Americans consider repulsive.

But why do we? Most of us eat cattle, lambs, chickens and pigs. Hippophagy (the fancy word for horse-eating) began to gain popularity after World War II, during a shortage of conventional meats, but soon fell out of favor here. It’s not uncommon in some parts of Europe.

Actually, the unease with hippophagy goes back a long time: In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III described it as “a filthy and abominable custom.” Popes have changed their minds about plenty of things they used to consider sinful and disgusting, but this taboo has persisted.

Perhaps our aversion arose from the mutual dependency humans developed with horses over millennia. And as a former horse owner, I understand well that you can’t imagine slaughtering a creature whom you communicate with in such a profound way.

Any editor will tell you that stories about animals draw huge interest from readers, whether in print or online. Sometimes, in fact, it seems that people care more about abuse of animals than of humans. A study last year by psychologist Richard Topolski suggested as much.

Topolski projected a fantasy in which an out-of-control bus was barreling toward a person and a dog, and asked: If you were the only bystander, able to save only one or the other, which would you choose? The study varied who the person and pet might be (a sibling, a tourist or a friend, and “your pet” or someone else’s). The result: Under some circumstances, 40 percent of the test subjects would save the animal rather than the person.

Is that shocking? Some people say we shouldn’t be “speciesist,” and that there’s no reason to value a human life over an animal’s. Most of us would consider that view extreme.

So we each find our own moral and emotional comfort zone. We worry about a bear in a tree, maybe, but not a pig being raised for bacon. It’s not always easy to figure out why, but it’s part of who we are as humans.

Rex Smith

3 Responses

  1. Magpies says:

    I will try to encapsulate:

    True AR/AW folks look down upon those who partake in “blood and guts” activities.
    Animal abusers (those who prey upon the weak) rate lower than what sticks to the bottom of shoes.
    Animals have as much right to exist as people. They belong. MOST people appreciate wildlife.
    There are millions of AR/AW folks and thousands of daily issues.

  2. Jango Davis says:

    Rex-How big a sample did Topolski use in his study? Where the subjects an even mix of genders? What were their income levels? Where they Americans or from another culture? Rural or urban?

    Furthermore, who is Topolski and what are his credentials that make him worth citing?

    If you are going to cite a psychological study you might want to give us the particulars before we buy into you assumptions.

  3. Grafmil says:

    My neighbor will sob loudly when an ASPCA commercial hits the TV but her reaction to the recent school shooting was “how sad”, then went about her business. Can’t explain it; don’t understand it.