The Professor
		9.14.05
	Monkeying with Humans So the London Zoo has opted to dismiss its traditional charge of educating humans and try something of the post-modern: to host an exhibit that features humans, instead. The new exhibit is entitled, appropriately enough, Humans. According to Zoo spokesperson Polly Willis,       Seeing people in a different environment, among other animals ... teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate. This certainly begs some questions. First, what are we to make of the fact that humans have unique characteristics that enable them to conceive of and construct zoos? Second, what are we to conclude from the fact that humans are able to categorize themselves as primates? Finally, how are we to take in the decision of the exhibitionists to wear bathing suits and fig leaves to cover their genitalia? For Tom Mahoney, apparently, these questions seem to miss a more fundamental point:               A lot of people think humans are above other animals. When they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we're not that special. It kind of reminds Tom that we're not so special. Okay. Human reasoning is somehow tantamount to an apes ability to memorize a few gestures in order to win a pot of granola. Human linguistic capacities are about equivalent to the chirps and caws of dolphins in heat. Human constructions ranging from the Hoover Dam to my house the not really so different than the work of beavers and birds. I get it. We all think, we all talk, we all build. We're all God's creatures. I can't decide what irritates me more: the fact that Tom thinks I'm more or less the same as a baboon, or the fact that Tom thinks more or less like a baboon. The sheer inanity of his statement leads me to wonder whether the poor guy just found himself swept into an ad hoc interview at the wrong time: in the middle of what may have eventually become a real live thought. I can't say. Even if he did, though, it's less than clear that the thought was going anywhere promising. That's because it seemed likely to be heading to the same conclusion that the Zoo is aiming for: a greater sense of humility in the face of our close similarity to other living creatures on Earth. The problem, of course, is that we are not like other living creatures on Earth, and trying to pretend otherwise is not being honest with ourselves. We are highly developed entities, endowed with an array of instruments for manipulating our material and mental (and, some hope, spiritual) worlds in ways that other animals simply cannot. We are, in a word, special. We do what we do extraordinarily well, and we should celebrate that by continuing to do so. We should shun attempts by the well-intentioned yet ultimately misinformed to drag us into the thin and shallow end of the primordial gene pool. Not only is pretending to be less than what we are disingenuous, but it's also unhelpful to the very creatures we are professing to help with such tactics. If the eventual aim of the London Zoo is to engender greater empathy for the notion that we're all God's creatures and worthy of protection and respect (and there's every reason to think that such is their aim), then their method is exactly wrong. Instead of knocking humans down a few pegs to show us our place alongside our animal brethren, the zookeepers in the world should be devising interesting ways to exhibit the unique talents and abilities of the animals in our midst. That way, we come to see them as something other than free labor or culinary delights. We learn to see animals as something special, in a word.
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