MeterSometimes, some numbers tell a lot: 90% of the mammals and 70% of the birds that currently live on the planet are farm animals-where they provide food for humans. In contrast, only 10% of mammals and 30% of birds are wild, which is also related to humans. Because he not only raised cows, pigs and chickens, and then increased their numbers to ridiculous heights, but also eliminated the numbers of other animals: since the beginning of civilization, 83% of wild mammals may have disappeared from the earth. Even if you don’t know anything about factory farming, methane emissions from dairy cows, the extinction of species, and tropical rain forests that are turned into fodder crops, the numbers alone suggest that this is called human and other-or has always been.
This is your impression when you read Richard Gillin’s “Man and the Beast”, which aims to trace the relationship between man and animal from the beginning to today. Five hundred pages are full of animals, but mainly as objects of human impulse to check the availability of everything in the world. Riding out on horseback, black panthers put on chariots, foxes are used as entertainment pellets, geese are beheaded on public holidays, dog noses are raised, wolves are hated, giraffes and elephants are transported to European zoos, rhinos are hunted and disappeared At the point, pigs and cattle adapt to the process of meat production plants.
When the unicorn jumps on the virgin knee
Humans question their relationship with animals time and time again: Do they have feelings? Is it wrong to torture them? Should you eat them? Do you have any rights? How close are you to us? Like a beacon of thoughtfulness, empathy, and scientific knowledge, this consideration stands out from the overall frustrating list—but it does not change the fact that this animal with an upright gait, culture, and vision is in Surprisingly, when dealing with problems, everyone else has no scruples about them.
Richard Girling has collected such impressive material—for example, the call for 17th-century vegetarianism, or the discussion of the first animal welfare law in the British Parliament—that he apparently used The more vivid narrative skills of his chronology are unnecessarily wanted: he is determined to stay in the consciousness of the era he speaks of. The voice of the narrator is mainly an anonymous collective us, speaking out the knowledge and reservations of an era.
Are you close to us?Very
This is sometimes very attractive, for example, when the voice quotes medieval animal fables in a firm tone, the whales are so big that the seamen mistake them for islands, and the unicorns will jump to the virgin. Lap. However, in the long run, the same naive tone is too gentle to help. The central point in the history of the relationship between humans and animals is just a further plot: for example, the major requirement in Genesis is to rule “all crawling animals on earth”, the Cartesian belief that animals have too many feelings like clockwork or Jeremy Bentham’s important contribution to the theory of morality, when it comes to the question of which creatures are entitled to rights, makes the ability to suffer as the decisive criterion, not intelligence.
Fortunately, the time-bound narrator voice method that was not strictly adhered to disappeared when the science writer and environmental activist Gillin reached the 20th century in her chronology. One of the most powerful chapters involves hypothetical fault lines between humans and animals, and research increasingly recognizes that this is just a difference in degree. Recent behavior studies have pointed out that some animals also have characteristics that affect human interaction, such as the willingness to cooperate.
There are now some answers to the questions about animals that humans have been asking. Are you close to us? Very. Since climate change and species extinction are serious threats, this knowledge has other meanings, such as those that could have been foreseen by contemporary people during the Renaissance. Just to survive, people today have to admit that they are still animals, depending on a complete environment. Girling’s relationship story is a good foundation for understanding: the next chapter of the relationship between humans and animals will be the decisive one.
Richard Gillin: “Man and the Beast”. A story about domination and oppression. Translated from English by Hainer Kober. Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2021. 507 pages, hardcover, 26 euros.
