We often assume that if we convince people to care about wildlife they will support conservation. Of course, people are unlikely to support something they don't feel personally attached to. Unfortunately, simply caring about wildlife does not always lead to positive conservation behaviour or support for policies. So the task is not only to make people care about wildlife but to do so in a way that will inspire them to take action.

Writers, poets, artists, and conservationists have attempted to make people care about wildlife by giving them emotions and characteristics that we value in ourselves, a process known as anthropomorphism. The use of anthropomorphism has created passionate debate among naturalists and conservationists and is perhaps most famously exemplified in Disney's 1942 film, Bambi. While many people have strong opinions about it, the question we really need to ask is, can anthropomorphism benefit conservation?

I recently had a conversation with a close friend about anthropomorphism. He thinks deeply about issues and I admire his ideas. I made an off-the-cuff remark about my frustrations about anthropomorphism and was surprised to hear him say that he believes it can be beneficial for conservation. The conversation was fascinating and made me think about my own assumptions about anthropomorphism and how they are informed by my relationship to wildlife as a hunter and my observations of conservation in North America.

Anthropomorphism

Most of us have probably been bombarded with anthropomorphic messaging since childhood. Anthropomorphism is applying "humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions, and emotions" to animals. Sometimes we do this subconsciously; other times, it is a tool used intentionally to mobilize support for a cause. For further reference, see just about any Disney movie, ever.

Everyone respects him. For of all the deer in the forest, not one has lived half so long. He's very brave and very wise. That's why he's known as the Great Prince of the Forest.

- Bambi, 1942

Researchers have examined what motivates people to anthropomorphize animals. One of the conditions under which people tend to anthropomorphize is when they seek social connections or need to reduce loneliness. When we portray or talk about wildlife as though it has human emotions or characteristics, it can change how we treat those species. Epley et al. (2007) found that "treating agents as human versus nonhuman has a powerful impact on whether those agents are treated as moral agents worthy of respect and concern or treated merely as objects". There are a number of implicit and explicit reasons we might wish to see animals treated as moral agents.

I am interested in the impact that anthropomorphism might have on conservation. Certainly, anthropomorphism has been used in the creation stories, myths, and parables of cultures all over the world for thousands of years. Many of those cultures have maintained a close and sustainable relationship with nature. When discussing anthropomorphism and conservation, I'll note that I am referring to both of those concepts as they have been taken up and given form within a largely Western cultural context.

Bambi and the Nature Fakers

The hunting writer David Petersen talks about Bambi and the concept it represents in the popular imagination in his book Heartsblood (2003). Petersen opposes "Bambi syndrome" on both cultural and ecological bases. First and foremost, he notes, Bambi plants a seed of "ill-founded guilt" in the public's imagination. Ecologically, the story of Bambi completely distorts the reality of deer biology and wildlife management. Petersen presents a clear and concise explanation of the ecological sense in hunting young deer. (It is too in-depth to cover here, but in short, killing young deer amounts to what ecologists have called "compensatory mortality" and is a natural part of maintaining healthy deer population dynamics.)

Bambi presents a completely unrealistic view of forest ecology and interactions among wild animals. It is anthropomorphism to its most sinister and damaging extent. Walt Disney was an anti-hunter and it was a deliberate decision to exclude all wildlife predators from the film adaptation of Bambi in order to portray humans as the only enemies of wildlife. Walt Disney used anthropomorphism repeatedly over the years, realizing that this kind of deliberate manipulation of nature was a gold mine. So even if Bambi incidentally brought people to conservation, let's agree for a moment that it was not the film's primary intention. Petersen also notes that famous film critic Roger Ebert questioned the film's suitability for young audiences, saying, "I am not sure it's a good experience for children – especially young and impressionable ones".

But Bambi isn't fully to blame. I'm not sure when the debate about anthropomorphism officially began, but at least some of its roots can be traced to the "nature fakers" debate. In the early 1900s, a genre of literature referred to, quite ironically, as realistic wild animal stories emerged. A naturalist by the name of Ernest Thompson Seton was one of the central figures of the movement. Seton once described a fox that jumped onto the back of a sheep to elude hunters. The sheep "ran for several hundred yards, when Vix got off, knowing that there was now a hopeless gap in the scent". In his book Wild Ones (2013), Jon Mooallem describes it, "these stories claimed to be credible natural histories of wildlife. But they dramatized the lives of animals as though they were the anthropomorphic heroes of fiction". Jack London's White Fang (1906) is another well-known character in this genre.

As with Bambi, these stories distorted nature, sanitizing the realities of predator-prey dynamics and the general wildness of nature. And, as with Bambi, the stories and their authors garnered intense criticism. In 1903, the writer and naturalist John Burroughs published an essay in which he criticized Seton and others as "sham naturalists" and "nature fakers". In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt became involved and effectively put an end to the debate when he gave an interview in which he "sailed into William J. Long and Jack London and one or two other of the more preposterous writers of 'unnatural' history".

Burroughs's and Roosevelt's issue was not simply that they didn't enjoy the stories. Rather, the debate arose right at the time that the conservation movement was catalyzing in the United States and there was growing alarm about declining wildlife populations. Burroughs and Roosevelt were concerned about what it might mean for the wider public to develop inaccurate understandings of wildlife and nature and how this might hinder conservation efforts.

Anthropomorphism in Conservation

Some researchers suggest that anthropomorphism could be used strategically and deliberately as a conservation tool. For instance, in a paper published in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, Alvin A.Y.-H. Chan (2012) argues that anthropomorphism can highlight similarities between humans and animals. The author points out that humans are "naturally attracted to those that are similar to us and similarities have long been known to enhance empathy between humans, and between humans and animals". If conservationists emphasize the similarities, it can enhance people's empathy and care towards animals because it is difficult to ignore the plight of "sentient likeable organisms with human characteristics".

The author of this paper is careful to point out that anthropomorphism should not create "fictional animal personas". Rather, anthropomorphism should be used to strategically highlight specific similarities between humans and animals. In particular, conservationists should focus on three areas of similarities: the intelligence of animals, their ability to experience pain, and their social behaviour. If we portray threatened animals as similar to humans and foster a sense of connection with them, the public will be more likely to find them important and therefore be more willing to protect them and their ecosystems, "even if it requires them to make sacrifices".

In another paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Kim-Pong Tam et al. (2013) considered the connection between anthropomorphism and behavioural changes that benefit conservation. The authors return to the need for connectedness among humans and examine whether anthropomorphism creates a feeling of social connection with animals. They point out that connectedness to nature is a strong determinant of conservation behaviour - to protect something, we need to feel connected to it. Therefore, if used effectively, "anthropomorphizing nature could be a relatively low-cost but useful strategy in environmental promotion".

Three Concerns with Anthropomorphism

While the papers discussed above outline strategic uses of anthropomorphism, Root-Bernstein et al. (2013) caution about its potential as a "powerful but double-edged sword".

First, people who support the strategic use of anthropomorphism focus on creating connections with animals and propose that this will lead to the public feeling connected to nature as a whole and willing to protect "those species and their ecosystems". Both of the papers I discussed above are focused on individual animals or, at most, individual species. They do little to demonstrate that the public will extend empathy for particular species to a wider commitment to habitat protection, which is the key factor in conservation. I'm not at all convinced that anthropomorphizing certain animals will lead to broader awareness about ecology and conservation and even if it does, increased awareness might not be enough.

Second, those studies argue that anthropomorphism can change people's attitudes towards nature. The environmental sociologist Thomas Heberlein notes that because "many conservation biologists believe attitudes are behavior, they often propose to change behavior simply by educating the public". However, research has also shown that changes in information and attitudes do not automatically lead to changes in behaviour. As Heberlein notes, this approach "usually fails because it is difficult to change attitudes and because attitudes have so little to do with behavior". In general, people are more focused on their immediate lives and, understandably, tend to put their families and households first on a day-to-day basis.

Third, the anthropomorphic strategy relies on being able to identify similarities with animals, such as intelligence. It has proven fairly easy to convince the public to identify with species such as bears, whales, and elephants. Consider the public's support for Roosevelt when he refused to kill a bear because he felt it would not conform to principles of fair chase and the ensuing craze over the Teddy bear. However, when we need to address conservation issues that concern less charismatic species, highlighting similarities could prove more difficult. It is notoriously difficult to rally public support for insects, yet they are extremely important for services such as pollination. On the flip side, how might the public treat a species when it is given negative human characteristics? We almost lost wolves in North America from that kind of anthropomorphism. On the other hand, anthropomorphism can create a false sense of connectedness with wildlife that can lead to conflict with humans, as in the case of a well-known grizzly bear in Alberta in 2017.

Going Forward

This entire discussion can seem like a luxurious philosophical exercise at a time when we are witnessing massive worldwide declines in species and biodiversity. However, there is a long-term relevance to deconstructing and evaluating the use of anthropomorphism in conservation. Someone could reasonably say that given the current global conservation crisis, if anthropomorphism will get people to care, then we should do anything we can to mobilize support. Perhaps.

The problem with anthropomorphism is that it distorts the larger landscape context in which wildlife exists and the social-political realities in which conservation operates. Misrepresentations of nature can make it difficult to filter and evaluate conservation options based on the realities of wildlife and their ecosystems. Consider the popular images of lions and elephants in Africa. The social, family-oriented nature of these species is often highlighted in film and television. These stories make it difficult for the public to objectively evaluate the merits of hunting as a tool to generate revenue for the conservation of these species and the social considerations in their management. We also commonly see the use of value-laden language such as "slaughter" or "murder" to describe hunting, portraying wildlife as something other than wild.

I started this post with a great deal of cynicism about anthropomorphism. I have a ways to go before I'm convinced that it can be an effective long-term conservation strategy. Researchers who have promoted its use have pointed out that it is not a "miracle cure" and have suggested that we instead work to create a kind of "enlightened anthropomorphism" whereby messaging is accompanied by arguments in support of natural biodiversity and processes. I'm just not sure if people will read that kind of fine print. But perhaps my friend was correct that anthropomorphism can create a sense of fascination with wildlife and convince people that they should care. If we achieve that first and most fundamental step, then we at least open the possibility to shape the public's ideas more positively and can work on creating long-term conservation behaviour.

There is a saying that the only things we all have in common are birth, death, and taxes. If there is a fourth thing common to every human being on the planet, it is that human lives depend on killing animals. This is true for hunters, trappers, animal-rights activists, vegans, and everyone else, regardless of where we live, our cultural differences, or our lifestyle choices. I don’t say this out of callousness or for shock value; rather, to put every one of us on the same page, in the same common history book of our species. If only for a moment.

I would like to think we can all have the humility and honesty to acknowledge the fact that human life depends on the death of animals, despite how uncomfortable we may be with this truth. To that end, I won’t spend time going over the various ways that human civilizations and settlements displace wildlife and affect habitat. Many of us do our best to reduce our direct and indirect impacts on the natural world, but close as they may come, these impacts will never reach zero. None of us is exempt from the effects of human civilization on wildlife. The task as I see it is not so much to accept or refute this fact, but rather to reflect on our own understandings of it and what it means to have a relationship with animals that involves death.

One of the most common points of disagreement in conversations about animal ethics centers on the consumptive uses of animals. Concerns over the treatment of both wild and domestic animals and their use for food, fur, and other products is an important conversation and one that I believe should be of highest ethical importance to human beings; however, we often bring a set of unstated and embedded assumptions to these discussions that need to be examined if we are to ever truly understand our own ethics, have productive conversations with others, and be effective at conservation.

Reflecting on Foundational Concepts

One of the underlying assumptions that we need to critically reflect on in discussions over the use of animals is the very concept of killing. Our individual and collective understanding of the moral defensibility in killing animals and the nature of the human-animal relationship that is established through an interaction that involves killing are informed by our views of death itself.

In discussing the ethics around the use of animals, we must be thoughtful to the fact that understandings of central concepts such as death and killing are not universal. Cultures throughout the world have vastly different understandings of what it means to die, what happens after death, the relationship between life and death, and therefore what it means on a deep ethical level to kill an animal. Therefore, we cannot approach discussions with the assumption that we all understand the moral foundations of the topic in the same way. More importantly, we must be conscious not to assume that our own culturally-grounded way of understanding these concepts is correct. To approach conversations of such ethical gravity in that way is to demonstrate a sense of cultural centrism that has proven dangerous to both human cultures and ecological systems in the past.

It is possible that some of us have never really taken the time to deeply reflect on our own relationship with the death of wild animals. For the majority of the world that lives in urban centers and will never be personally involved in killing an animal, thinking about this may never be a necessity. In his examination of humanity’s relationship with nature and our own natural history, the author J.B. MacKinnon in The Once and Future World poignantly describes watching a grizzly bear feed on an elk calf. MacKinnon reflects on nature’s experience with death: “springtime in Yellowstone is not the season of gambolling fox kits ... but of the hungry bear and wary bison. Of death, that ordinary horror”. Killing is all around us all the time; whether and how we choose to understand that fact of life on a primal and philosophical level is our choice. MacKinnon goes on to suggest that “to endure among other species, you must experience the world as a place you share with them”. If we wish to share the world with wild creatures and natural processes, we owe it to ourselves to engage with them on their terms.

Consider the fact that most modern human beings eat next to nothing that is hunted or gathered from the terrestrial surface of the earth. This is an outcome that would strike our ancestors as bizarre if not apocalyptic, and yet it can’t be said to be the product of choice. We drifted to this point, generation by generation.

J.B. MacKinnon in "The Once and Future World"

Let me clear about what this is not. I dislike dead-end arguments in discussions about ethics. It might be tempting to dispute the suggestion that death and killing are equal parts culturally contingent concepts and natural parts of the world, as simply a hunter’s way of justifying his own actions. That has been suggested to me before and I will humour that idea, but it is far more complex than that. Human ethics change over time to incorporate new ideas and knowledge and this changing is precisely what keeps ethics strong and meaningful. Therefore, the suggestion that any single argument can settle an ethical debate is unconvincing at best and suspicious at worst. This is not a claim that killing wildlife is morally defensible because “we have always done it”. I don’t believe that historical precedent justifies continued practice. However, in the same way that history does not justify the present, neither can it be disregarded as irrelevant. So I do think that the long history of interaction between humans and wildlife that has always involved a predator-prey relationship makes the conversation worth having in light of that history and not in exclusion of it. Cultures and belief systems are built upon shared experiences and give rise to knowledge systems and worldviews that are rooted in the places of those experiences. It is the diversity of these cultures that contributes to different understandings of what it means to kill an animal and our conversations on the ethics of killing and using animals must include space for the wide variety of cultural views that exist in the world.

Multiple Worldviews

Our evaluation of the ethics in killing animals for our own uses is bound to be informed in some measure by our understanding of what death means and the subsequent emotions we attach to dying and being dead. It is helpful to consider examples of different cultural understandings of death. These contrasting worldviews around death mean that understandings about the relationship enacted with an animal in the act of killing it can also be very different. Bear in mind that I am highlighting two examples here and that the diversity of human cultural perspectives is nearly as wide and deep as the biodiversity of the natural world itself.

The dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country

"Hamlet" by William Shakespeare

The Reverend Charles A. Curran, Professor at Loyola University of Chicago, discusses an understanding of death informed by Judaeo-Christian traditions. Curran explains that in Christian worldviews, death “immediately invokes in us the emotion of fear”. This fear of death is not so much a fear of the physical process of dying, but rather “the notion of the beyond that the word ‘death’ brings to us, because its fear is a fear of the beyond”. This fear is also related to the gravity of having to weigh the morality of our lives and what Curran describes as an “extreme ego anxiety about passing into nothingness” – the fear of irrelevance and being forgotten. There are other more obvious teachings in Christianity about what killing means for the morality of our own lives.

A Judaeo-Christian view of death has been imprinted on some of Western culture’s most influential pieces of art and literature, and it is perhaps only natural that our feelings around our own death would be imparted onto animals when we consider their death. Daniel E. Van Tassel, Professor of English at Muskingum College, notes “the stamp of such Christian views of death” in the “expression of fear at the imminence of death” among a number of Shakespeare’s characters. Van Tassel cites three reasons to fear death in Judaeo-Christian traditions: we fear losing the enjoyment of life and worldly pleasures, the emotional and physical pain that comes with death, and the eternal misery after death. In considering how such a culturally-dominant, if latent and subconscious, understanding of death may impact our view of killing animals, we can certainly identify in animal-rights and other anti-hunting/trapping campaigns references to the second fear of death: fear about the pain and suffering that killing brings. In this fear we see MacKinnon’s characterization of death, “that ordinary horror”.

Like other northern hunting peoples, many Yukon First Nation people conceive of hunting as a reciprocal social relationship between humans and animals.

Paul Nadasdy, in "Agricultural metaphors and the politics of wildlife management in the Yukon". 

In a book chapter I have frequently returned to in discussions over human-animal relationships, Paul Nadasdy, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, discusses the contrasts between Western and Yukon First Nations’ understandings of the concept of wildlife management, focusing particularly on contrasting notions of ownership and control between cultures. Within a Yukon First Nations worldview, humans and animals interact on the basis of a reciprocal social relationship defined by the need to uphold certain responsibilities. Humans hunt wildlife but do so within the context of specific practices designed to maintain the relationship, practices that vary between cultures, but “commonly include the observance of food taboos, ritual feasts, and prescribed methods for disposing of animal remains, as well as injunctions against overhunting and talking badly about, or playing with, animals”. Maintaining the social relationship one has with animals is of utmost importance and in this particular cultural worldview, involves killing.

There is an element of control and agency that is important in understanding the contrast between different worldviews. In a Western worldview, humans are most commonly positioned above and in control of nature: the world is here to be used by humans. In, for example, a Yukon First Nations worldview, animals have agency and can choose not to present themselves to human hunters. Humans must therefore fulfill certain social obligations towards animals and these obligations are often carried out through hunting. The concept of killing and what it means to kill an animal is thus conceived of quite differently in a Yukon First Nations context than one dominated by Western knowledge and cultural traditions.

The idea that there exists a plurality of knowledges informed by one’s culture must accompany us into ethical conversations and decision-making around the use of animals. We must remember that in many cultures, a context of respect and gratitude is the very the foundation of how humans have come to understand a relationship with animals that involves killing.

Conclusions

I am not a religious person and I would not even suggest that I am spiritual. I have come to understand my actions and morality on my own terms and I have tried to inform that understanding as much as possible by lessons in nature, though inspiration for this understanding can come from many places. I want to make it clear that caring deeply about wildlife is not dependent on religious or spiritual guidance; I have thought and felt deeply about both the individual animals I have killed and about the populations and species of which those individuals were a part. When I kill an animal, there is an intense and undeniable connection with that individual – from the moment I first see it to every single time I cook a portion of it – and there is also a connection with that animal that feels more historic, a sense of shared history on the landscape. Animal-rights campaigns often focus on individual animals that have been given human names. This kind of anthropomorphism often loses the ability to situate the relationship between human and animals on an evolutionary scale. For me, it is precisely the simultaneous feelings of intense personalization with an individual animal and a depersonalization with the awareness that there is a deeper historic interaction that we are a part of that gives the encounter so much meaning.

One thing that many of us can agree on is that healthy ecosystems and wildlife populations are critical for the survival of our species and this planet. We might also agree that maintaining healthy ecosystems and wildlife populations depends on human appreciation and valuation of those places and species and in order for humans to care about and take care of the natural world, they need a personal relationship with it. It may be that some wish to redefine the foundation of this relationship in a way that reflects changing social and cultural norms, but this cannot be taken for granted and this new foundation cannot be laid without conscious and thoughtful reflection, otherwise we risk losing the historic relationships within which both humans and animals have mutually evolved.

We may personally disagree with particular conservation policies or strategies, but it is imperative that we maintain our connections with animals and understand that there are cases where this connection takes place through an interaction that involves death. I personally consider ethical concerns about animal welfare as one of our most important considerations in killing animals. However, when engaging in discussions with one another over the ethics of using animals, we need to be conscious of the foundational assumptions on which these conversations are built. We need to identify and critically reflect on the culturally specific concepts we bring to our decision-making around killing and understand and respect that ethics are a sliding scale throughout the world.

In doing so, we may find that misunderstandings and disagreements run deeper than the specific applications and policies we find ourselves debating and that we gain much more from engaging with a plurality of ethical perspectives than from disregarding them.