Xenophobia by Peter Cawdron Page A

kittens, your children. When your cat brings a live mouse into the house, they’re trying to teach you and your kids how to hunt. They must think we’re stupid when we never catch any mice of our own.”
    “Damn,” Elvis said, laughing as he chewed on some gum.
    “A few years ago, a bunch of divers freed a sperm whale from shark nets off the east coast of Australia. From memory, there were five or six divers. Anyway, once the whale was free it swam up beside each of them individually and took a good look at them. It drifted up to their boat, stuck its head out of the water and looked at the support crew on deck. It was, by all accounts, a moving experience. Those divers came away saying they felt the whale expressed a sense of gratitude and appreciation, but they simply projected their own emotional expectations onto the animal.”
    “How do you know for sure?” Elvis asked. “Maybe the whale was thankful to be rescued.”
    Bower laughed, saying, “Because, if they’d rescued a polar bear from a similar predicament, the bear would have eaten them.”
    “I don’t know about that, Doc,” Jameson replied. “I remember seeing a documentary on PBS about that, and the guy that cut the whale loose said it was nervous as hell at first, treating them like sharks or something, but once he started cutting the whale loose she calmed down. He said working with the whale was like soothing a rattled horse.”
    Bower listened intently. “Oh, there’s no doubt whales are intelligent, but the whale’s response could just as well have been one of astonished bewilderment, curiosity or disbelief as much as gratitude.
    “You see, the point is, these are our emotions, not theirs. If those divers had freed a hungry Great White Shark it would have probably attacked them, but if it hadn’t been hungry, it too could be described as grateful. The reality is, those divers freed a mostly docile aquatic mammal, one that doesn’t have Homo sapiens on the menu.”
    “Isn’t it a matter of degrees?” Elvis asked. “I mean, a cricket’s smarter than a rock. A lizard is smarter than a cricket. A dog is smarter than a lizard, and on a good day, I’m smarter than my dog.”
    Jameson laughed. “You wish.”
    “Haw haw,” Elvis cried, laughing in his southern accent.
    “In some regards, it is a matter of degrees,” Bower replied. “As there’s no doubt a doe cares for a newborn fawn, but too often we read too much into these behaviors. Chimpanzees share 98% of our DNA, but that doesn’t make them 98% human. We’re not the benchmark other species are trying to attain in terms of their intelligence and emotions. They’re quite happy being themselves.
    “There’s little in the way of common ground between us and other animals. Think about dolphins. Cute, cuddly, friendly dolphins. Everyone loves dolphins, right? They’re the good guys of the ocean. And yet for all we think we know about them, we really don’t understand them at all. Dolphins will gang-rape females for days on end. Rival males will kill newborns to bring a female back in heat. As playful as they seem in a dolphin show, as intelligent as they appear, they’re not people, and we shouldn’t treat them as such. Our morals, our values simply do not apply to them.”
    “I can’t believe you’re picking on dolphins,” Elvis quipped. “Don’t they save swimmers by dragging them to shore?”
    Jameson added, “Yeah, but you never hear about the people they drag out to sea.”
    Elvis laughed.
    Bower continued, saying, “Try as we may, we can’t imagine life as a bat, relying on sonar rather than sight. We can’t imagine sensing electrical fields like a shark, or being a spider that sees four primary colors rather than three. In the same way, animals cannot imagine being human. We can teach chimps to use sign language, we can teach parrots to hold a conversation, but they’re adopting human precepts, not inheriting them as a child would.
    “Think about it. Does