In the past couple of months, we have witnessed curiosities like orcas wearing hats, triumphs like the L-pod returning to Penn Cove after 50 years—the same place where the mass captures occurred in the 1960s and 70s—and Tahlequah’s second ‘journey of grief’ that first captured our hearts in back in 2018. We’ve seen orca calves birthed into a Salish Sea that has increasingly become hostile to their survival, and we have seen numerous calves not make it.
It’s easy to think of these events through a human lens—expressions of fashion trends, overcoming intergenerational trauma, and ritualizing grief. While we try to understand these behaviours in the conservation world, ‘anthropomorphization’ (to attribute human form or personality to things not human) is often brought up in conversations and debates. Ought we to be ascribing these human concepts of emotion and play to species that are not human? What are the ethical implications of doing this?
A variety of animals, ranging from orcas to elephants, ducks to dogs, horses to dairy cows, and many more, express emotions of joy, love, and grief. What do we know about the ways in which animals express these emotions? Join us in understanding how animal-emotion researchers answer charges of anthropomorphism regarding their conclusions, and how a deeper understanding of animal emotion and cognition will bring us closer to understanding what our animal friends are going through!
Appreciation for the deeply emotional and cognitive lives that other animals lead and hearing stories that seem oddly familiar and close to our hearts can strengthen our relationship we have with them and the world around us.
About the speaker:
Barbara J. King is Emerita Professor of Anthropology at William & Mary, a Research Fellow at PAN Works center for animal ethics, and a freelance science writer and public speaker. The author of seven books, including Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and the Wild, Barbara focuses on animal emotion and cognition and the ethics of our relationships with animals. Her book How Animals Grieve has been translated into 7 languages; her TED talk on animal love and grief has now received over 3.5 million views. Her website is www.barbarajking.com
