The Fall of Man (Adam and Eve), 1504.
Albrecht Durer. (Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.) (193K)
Robert J. Hoage - Chief, National Zoo-Office of Public Affairs
ZOOGOER - July-August 1989
Perhaps the greatest challenge confronting a wildlife educator is to encourage people to see animals "as animals"--that is, without prejudice or preconceived notions or anthropomorphic projections. This goal would seem to be all but impossible to achieve given the bombardment of humanized animal characters to which we all are subjected. Perhaps most notable are the anthropomorphized creatures that abound on the comic pages of our newspapers, reaching hundreds of millions of people daily. On television a koala tells us to fly a certain airline, penguins try to persuade us to drink a particular kind of diet cola, and dogs complain they are being lied to when given anything but one specific brand of dog food. From boxes on supermarket shelves, tigers, toucans, and rabbits all tout their brand of cereal. On posters, a bloodhound cautions us to watch out for criminals in our neighborhoods. And of course Smokey Bear exhorts us. "Only you can prevent forest fires!"
There are many more examples like these in twentieth-century American society. Faced with such a barrage, how can educators reach adults and children with messages that convey the ways animals truly live and behave?
Environmentalist/songwriter Bill "Billy B" Brennan of Washington, D.C., has taken up the challenge. In a song that has become well known around Washington, he describes a boy and a girl who visit a pond to feed the ducks. While throwing out bread, the children hear the cries of a duck that is running for its life from a fox. The alarmed boy exclaims, "Ooh, he's mean!" The fox stops in his tracks and explains, "I m not mean, I'm just hungry! Hungry as I can be! That duck looks cute to you, but he looks like food to me!" Billy B's song, "I'm Not Mean, I'm Just Hungry," of course, projects human thought processes and speech onto the fox, but the lyrics help people realize that a fox kills and eats its prey without malice, in order to survive. If foxes, lions, tigers, and other carnivores are to exist in nature they must kill and eat other animals, and we should not vilify their predatory natures.
The fact that the duck in the song is considered "cute" makes it difficult for the boy to understand that the duck could also be viewed as food. How humans have come to see some animals as "cute" or "adorable" and others as "mean" or "treacherous" is a topic that has long perplexed biologists.
One animal that has been maligned since the beginning of recorded history is the snake. There are many negative references to snakes in the Bible, chief among them the serpent's temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden, which resulted in snakes being "cursed above all cattle and every beast of the field." The image stuck. In a survey of visitors at the National Zoo, the majority of respondents stated they did not dislike any animal in particular, but a highly opinionated minority (27 percent) asserted that they disliked snakes and other reptiles. No other animal or group of animals was disliked by so many people. The perception that snakes are evil and treacherous has been perpetuated in our culture even though there is some evidence that the loathing of snakes is not necessarily innate in humans; many children as young as three-and-a-half years of age show no "instinctive" fear of snakes. So, on the one hand, the loathing of snakes appears to be a learned response, an artifact of our culture, but on the other, some argue that a genetically prescribed fear of snakes would have been of adaptive value given the sizable number of venomous species. At this time the jury awaits further testimony.
In contrast to snakes and other reptiles, the preferred animal of those who expressed a favorite in the National Zoo visitor survey was the giant panda (25 percent). Giant pandas are often described as "cute, cuddly, and adorable." Why creatures that have certain physical characteristics similar to giant pandas-relatively large heads and short legs and eyes that appear large-are labeled "cute" is a subject that began to attract scientific attention more than 30 years ago. One of the first to analyze the "cute response" in humans was pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz. He found that most juvenile and a few adult animals with big, round heads, relatively flat faces, short limbs, and large eyes-all characteristics of human infants-have a special appeal to people. Other scientists suggest that large animals with human-like features and awkward or playful juvenile behavior are also particularly endearing to people.
The perceptions of animals in American culture have been influenced-negatively and positively-by innumerable factors, including myths, folklore, the frontier experience, religion, changes in economic and social structure, inventions, politics, philosophy, wildlife research, zoos, the press, films and television, and the conservation and animal rights movements. Now, near the end of the 20th century, the dominant perception seems to be based on anthropomorphism-projecting human personality traits onto animals. One has to look hard through TV listings and children's literature to find accurate portrayals of wild animals. Here at the National Zoo, our goal-and our challenge-is to encourage visitors to see animals as natural treasures: interesting and exciting in their own right, and deserving of preservation. Animals don't have to dance, sing, tell stories, be the butts of jokes, or behave like pseudo-people to be of value; they are priceless just as they are.
This essay is adapted from the preface to the bookPerceptions of Animals in American Culture, edited by R.J. Hoage and based on a National Zoo symposium of the same title.
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