On Reading John Berger's "Why Look At Animals"

When the Canadian soldier Harry Colebourn showed up at Valcartier in 1914 to enlist in the Army Veterinary Corps, he brought along a companion whose life and legacy perhaps embodied the modern shift in how humans perceive animals. Winnie, a once-wild black bear cub, had been domesticated, and Colebourn had bought her for 20 dollars in Ontario as a pet. Known for her friendly nature, she accompanied him overseas and became the official mascot of Colebourn's brigade, before retiring to the London Zoo. There, she became the inspiration for the author A.A. Milne to create his cuddly cartoon character Winnie-the-Pooh. At the same time, Winnie's species was losing much of its geographical territory in Canada as a result of hunting and deforestation. 

Winnie the bear and her cartoon alter ego, along with the countless other real and depicted animals that we interact with every day, are symbolic of a widening gap between animals in the wild, and the representations of animals that humans interact with every day. In a previous blog post, I had written about how humans' historical interactions with animals had largely focused around anthropomorphisation, or the practice of attributing human characteristics and personalities to animals. This practice has been neuroscientifically attributed to humans' natural biophilia or a cognitive bias towards living things they can identify with. 

However, as the author John Berger writes in his seminal essay 'Why Look At Animals,' the roots of our need to anthropomorphise animals and to create representations of them in media are more complex and socially conditioned than inbuilt cognitive processes. They are closely intertwined with the rise of capitalism and the commodification of animal bodies that it brought in. 

Animals had always been at the center of humans' social and economic lives, and their roles ran the gamut from factors of production to companions or even sources of wonder, often playing the role of prophets or messengers. They represented an Other that shared human experiences of birth, existence, a degree of sentience, and death while remaining separate. Thus, Berger wrote, "a power is ascribed to the animal, comparable with human power but never coinciding with it." 

While humans' first symbolic and metaphorical thought revolved around the similarity of human and animal experiences, today these experiences could not be further apart. Cartesian dualism between the mind and the body attributed a higher purpose to thought and its linguistic expression, thereby relegating animals to the realm of the 'body,' and turning their bodies into machines and commodities. 

At the same time, the mechanization of animals was not unlike the concurrent mechanization of workers and the proletariat, both of which were engendered by capitalism and its need to rationalise and streamline every action. Berger quotes F.W. Taylor, whose Modern Management theory suggested that mechanical and repetitive action in production would create the greatest efficiency, and who compared this to the predictable movement of oxen. The behavioural theories of B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov, similarly, sought to build an understanding of behavior as being predictable, measurable and changeable, and did so by conducting experiments on animals and then extrapolating the results to humans.

Anthropomorphisation became a last-ditch effort to reclaim some dignity for animals, attributing to them thought and traits that were human and therefore alien to them. Moreover, as the intersections of the human and the animal worlds grew fewer and were more mediated, anthropomorphised animal characters became representations not only of human foibles, as they had been since the time of Aesop, but metonyms for their wild counterparts. 

Culturally, animal characters came to be identified with the marginalised in society in a way that echoed their physical marginalisation from humans. Many beloved anthropomorphic characters are in socially marginalised situations, ranging from Donald Duck waiting for payday, to Paddington Bear the refugee, to Babar the Little Elephant, who is an orphan. However, as the boundary between humans and animals is elided by anthropomorphism, Berger argues that animals' role as the Other is erased, breaking down the tentative balance between the animal world and the human one. 

There have been attempts to reconstruct this balance. Some of the greatest nature writing, such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, or more recently the works of authors like Peter Matthiessen and Helen MacDonald, have made attempts to give animals their rightful place as a known and yet unknowable other. However, to some degree, these books still treat their animal subjects as a mere part of a human's journey to self discovery, rather than entities in their own right. 

Some of Ted Hughes' animal poems are perhaps notable exceptions, portraying animals as having worldviews of their own, rather than being aspects of a human's worldview. In 'Crow Tyrannosaurus', for example, the crow is sentient and shocked at human cruelty, while Wodwo, a primeval creature in Hughes' eponymous poem, wonders, in a way that pokes fun at human-centric views of the animal world, "if I sit still how everything stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre." 

These poems describe a worldview of coexistence and yet mutual non-comprehension that Berger seems to suggest is necessary in humans' relationship to animals. At this point in time, many animals are disappearing not just from the human psyche but from existence, as their numbers dwindle from poaching or habitat loss. Some of the most popular stuffed animals in fact depict animals that are on the verge of extinction, creating what the journalist Jon Mooallem described as "a surreal kind of performance art." 

His daughter, he wrote, "was sleeping in polar bear pajamas under a butterfly mobile with a downy snow owl clutched to her chin. Her comb handle was a fish. Her toothbrush handle was a whale. She cut her first tooth on a rubber giraffe." Such animals, though readily available in the form of mass-produced representations, are so rare now that it is likely that the child may never see their real-life counterparts in her lifetime. 

In this context, Berger's essay seems more relevant than ever for its critique of how capitalism has warped and changed our relationship to animals. However, it is somewhat limited to urban and Westernised societies, as in many rural and non-Western communities, humans and animals do still coexist without the commodification and artificiality that Berger describes. 

Moreover, there is an inherent contradiction in the fact that the past relations he so extolled, were still detrimental to the animal - in a world where "A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork," the pig's body is still commodified for the benefit of humans. Historically speaking, the nineteenth century, the period that he described as having been the start of the rupture between humans and animals, was also the period when animal welfare became a social concern, as epitomised by incidents like the riots surrounding a report of cruelty that was dubbed the Brown Dog affair. 

Still, Berger’s description of how the loss of this coexistence has made both humans and animals "immunized to encounter," and how marginalising the lives of animals has essentially made our own a great deal poorer, is powerful and poignant. 

Image credits: Photo by Mattea Steeke on Unsplash