Are Humans Animals?

As humans, we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body - we live our bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle...We receive from them countless gifts of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. Yet they still remain Other to us, inhabiting their own cultures and displaying their own rituals, never wholly fathomable (Abram 10-11).

The other part of our newly emerging compact with elephants, however, is far more difficult to codify, it requires nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way we look at animals and, by extension, ourselves. It requires what Bradshaw somewhat whimsically refers to as a new “trans-species-psyche”, a commitment to move beyond an anthropocentric frame of reference and, in effect, be elephants. (Siebert 537)

Even though a human is technically still an animal, we treat animals with disrespect as though humans are somehow better. According to Siebert, the only way to view animals as physical and psychological equals is to closely empathize with them. Siebert believes that as humans, we will have to completely change our way of thinking. On the other hand, Abram suggests that “[w]e cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle”. Abram’s belief is that current mentality of humans’ cannot change as we have no way of communicating with other species, and consequently no way to empathize. Additionally, Abram poses the idea that animals “remain Other to us”, emphasizing by capitalization the notion that we are not animals.