Malcolm Harris: Anthropomorphism has become this huge sin for scientists studying non-human animals, but you haven’t been shy about using the phrase “animal personality.” Why foreground the contradiction/controversy like that? Do biologists and anthropologists need to reexamine the taboo?

Laurel Braitman: Anthropomorphism – the ascription of human characteristics to other animals – has been problematized for a long time, certainly within the behavioral sciences. I think it’s high time we do away with the taboo. Some of the people doing the most interesting work about other animal minds have already done this, because it’s limiting. It’s impossible to look at them without using a human mind. If we’re trying to understand the behavior of another animal who is in some ways very similar to us and we refuse to use our own experience as a place to come from, I think that’s actually poor science. If we’re looking at a gorilla and that gorilla is acting sad in some of the same ways that we know ourselves to act sad, then refusing to acknowledge that link makes us less apt to understand the gorilla at hand.

Continue Reading...