John Berger’s piece ‘Why we look at animals?’ was the reading for this week and honestly, I found it extremely interesting, if not slightly hard to understand and taxing to read. It talks about the unbridgeable gaps between humans and animals in terms of language and how we attach human emotions to them in order to cope with this.
“No animal confirms man, either positively or negatively. The animal can be killed and eaten so that its energy is added to that which the hunter already possesses. The animal can be tamed so that it supplies and works for the peasant. But always its lack of common language, its silence, guarantees its distance, its distinctness, its exclusion, from and of man.” – John Berger, ‘Why we look at animals?’ (pg 3-4)
This quote really resonated with me as it really brings home how we can treat animals somewhat because of this language barrier- what if it wasn’t there to begin with, would this change? I believe that it is animals that improve man through their understanding of the world that we then adopt as our own; what we can learn from them despite the language barrier that exists.