Voices in the Glen member Laura J. Bobrow shared with us an insightful piece that she wrote!
Do Animals Really Talk?
Excerpted from a book review by Laura J. Bobrow published in Archae 4 by Cloud Mountain Press, 1992.
As ancient as the earliest pictorial art, as early as magic-making ritual mime, from which stories may have arisen in the first dim days of language, the human attitude toward animals has been a pivotal factor in humankind’s attempt to imprint itself upon a threatening world. Humans had to deal not only with natural forces — the vagaries of climate, the change of seasons, cataclysms, eruptions, even the simple occurrence of night and day — but with the fact that they shared the world with animals. Some primitive people worshipped animal deities, distancing themselves in the process and projecting human traits upon the animals. Some of them attired themselves in symbolic costumes and assumed the totems of animals whose characteristics they wished to acquire.
Knowledge accumulated and stories about animals grew. In time the stories were written, lifted from one value to another, plagiarized, attributed or not. Almost any story could be made to support a number of widely disparate interpretations. One would have had to be a skilled literary critic, anthropologist, historian, psychologist, theologian, sociologist, linguist, geographer, philosopher, and political scientists to disentangle the strands of animal lore and human ethos.
In addition, according to Dr. Boria Sax, in his books The Frog King: On Legends, Fables, Fairy Tales and Anecdotes of Animals, and The Parliament of Animals: Anecdotes and Legends from Books of Natural History 1775-1900, there arose another factor: the popular science of natural history which consisted of observations of the behavior of various animals. Travelers reported marvelous, awe-inspiring anecdotes for the edification and titillation of the masses, rather like our ubiquitous urban legends. Animals could talk. Animals, especially beavers and elephants, had sophisticated self-governing communities. Animals practiced fidelity, paternal affection, died from devotion, had burying grounds, and exhibited extraordinary reasoning power. The stories in those anecdotes had varying degrees of credibility, but, writes Sax, almost none could be disproved!
As the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1927, “My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
The Frog King: On Legends, Fables, Fairy Tales and Anecdotes of Animals.
Boria Sax. Pace University Press, New York, 1990.
The Parliament of Animals: Anecdotes and Legends from Books of Natural History 1775-1900.
Boria Sax. Pace University Press, New York, 1992.