The "Otherness" of Animals

I just finished reading Dogs Never Lie About Love by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a writer whom I have only recently learned about. I heard an interview with him on NPR recently about his latest book—The Face on Your Plate—and discovered among his dozen or more books are several on animals. A vegetarian and "near-vegan" (his words), and a PhD Sanskrit scholar, he brings wide-ranging research to his writing. I've acquired four of his books on animals and they are all heavily footnoted, yet very easily read.

In Dogs Never Lie About Love I read a passage that struck me as very helpful—about the "otherness" of dogs; that the world they inhabit is different from our own, and how often we overlook the deep sensibility and sensitivity by which they operate in their own world. The context of this quote is as follows: the emotional way in which his German Shepherd dog, Sasha, (one of his three dogs) relates to his two cats:

"Whatever [Sasha's] behavior means, it is clear that [she] is filled with feeling for these little kittens. It is clear because she moans and groans and follows them from room to room, and cocks her head and looks puzzled and intrigued. That is why I say she is possessed. She wants something from them, she feels something for them, and she seems to want to express those feelings.

"It is hard to empathize with her because humans generally do not walk behind kittens sighing and groaning. There does not seem to be an equivalent for us. Perhaps, then, Sasha is demonstrating to me one of my 'pet theories:' As well as the emotions animals and humans have in common, animals can also access emotions that humans do not share, one different from those we know, because animals are other; they are not the same as human beings. Their senses, their experiences, open them to a totally different (or new) set of feelings of which we know little or nothing. That a whole world of canine feelings remains closed to us is an intriguing notion. Some of these feelings could be based on the dog's sensory capacities. According to one early authority, a dog can smell 100 million times better than we do (I will return to the topic in Chapter 5). But even if the true figure is significantly less, the fact remains that when Sasha puts her nose to the ground, she becomes aware of a world about which I can only make guesses. Similarly, when Sasha cocks her ears, she hears sounds of which I am altogether unaware." (p. 6)

Masson is self-described as "not religious," so writes purely from an evolutionary perspective. But the above perspective holds interest for me as a Christian for how it addresses the issue of the animal kingdom created by God. I have thought (and stated in various stumbling ways) that Christians don't have a workable "theology of animals"—a way to describe what animals are "for;" why God created them. We enjoy the domesticated ones, eat the mass-produced ones, fear the aggressive ones, and are clueless about what to think about the rest. It is their "otherness" that confuses us. They are not like us, yet we haven't recognized that the sensory and feeling world in which they live is just as valid as ours in its own way. God understood their "way" since He ordained it, but we have not given them credit for having a way that goes much beyond responses of petting, eating, and fearing them.

I don't know what the answers are, but am interested in finding them for many reasons—not the least of which is supporting the (biblical, I believe) idea that animals were created for a higher purpose than being eaten or mistreated by humans. And I found Masson's simple description of the interaction between his dog and cats as illustrative in a helpful way of how much more we have to learn about the "other" animals. I think most sensitive Christians would agree with all this if they were asked to think about it. Most curious to me is that, among evangelical, Bible-believing Christians, it is for the most part not even on the agenda—so they continue to do what they've always done: pet, eat, fear, and cock their own heads at the curiosity of the animal kingdom.