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The Others: How Animals Made Us Human
Paul Shepard has been one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in the field of human evolution and ecology for more than forty years. His thought-provoking ideas on the role of animals in human thought, dreams, personal identity, and other psychological and religious contexts have been presented in a series of seminal writings, including Thinking Animals , The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game , and now The Others , his most eloquent book to date. The Others is a fascinating and wide-ranging examination of how diverse cultures have thought about, reacted to, and interacted with animals. Shepard argues that humans evolved watching other animal species, participating in their world, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, and making tools of their bones and antlers. For millennia, we have communicated their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking them. The human species cannot be fully itself without these others. Shepard considers animals as others in a world where otherness of all kinds is in danger, and in which otherness is essential to the discovery of the true self. We must understand what to make of our encounters with animals, because as we prosper they vanish, and ultimately our prosperity may amount to nothing without them.
384 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 14, 2013
A dense, wide-ranging, intelligent, cantankerous and contentious book that lambastes everyone and everything from pastoral farmers to modern urban society, from almost every major world religious tradition (including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), to Plato and 99% of philosophers, from the domestication of animals and the abuses of factory farms to animal rights activists, from insidious myths to the cartoons of Gary Larson. Looking at representations and relational behaviors toward animals across time and culture, the book feels sprawling and overwhelming at times—best read slowly, with skepticism and patience.
Shepard’s ecological outlook demands a more integrated and earthly kind of life, one that embraces the paradox that we cannot be human without animals, and that animals are irreducibly Other. They are not “friends,” companions, objects to be tamed, dominated, or protected by charity. They embody wildness, change, life and death. The problem in our thinking is not only that we are cruel to animals (or other humans), but that our abstract thinking and disconnect with nature makes us forget how to live in the world, to know who we are. We are obsessed with avoiding pain, sickness, and death, and these denials cause our alienation and emptiness, our over-consumption and over-population. Writing, abstract thinking, and the domestication of animals (which, in the case of the horse, allowed for greater mobility, denser human settlements, centralized political power, and the waging of war on a wider scale) have led to an unhealthy, unbalance way of life.
Shepard proposes a return to a hunter-gatherer way of life. Animal lovers will object to his characterization of the keeping of pets as slavery, of Disney cartoons as the worst kind of infantilizing, while animal rights activists will object to his generalizations about them as facile absolutists who see animals in terms of political objects to be protected and kept from human contact, rather than as co-habitants of nature who share our lived reality. It may confuse some readers to see him condemn the nightmare and absurdity of factory farms on the one hand, the fat and stupid cow as the embodied monster of the worst excess of civilization, but then on the other hand to extol the sanctity of hunting, the eating of freshly killed meat as a ritual of becoming in which animals make us, literally, from the inside-out.
Despite the many generalizations, the various places one could quibble or take offense at his views, much of what he says makes sense. He tempers his generalizations with specific examples and a stunning array of interdisciplinary scholarship that draws on disciplines such as ecology, anthropology, psychology, literary and art criticism, and science. The scope helps to trace how our attitudes have evolved (or devolved) over time, and how virtually no society is exempt from the forms of dangerous thinking and practice that he critiques, but he does have more respect for the wisdom of indigenous and pagan cultures. He does not necessarily disavow all forms of “culture,” and his wide knowledge of art, novels, and poetry suggests the ambivalent valences of human craft. On the one hand, it can be a divisive and stigmatizing force. On the other hand, for Shepard, these crafts are especially beneficial when they are performed with the respect and humility of a simpler, more integrated mindset, one in which death, disease, plants, and animals are neither positive nor negative, but parts of the world to be dealt with, through ritual and ceremony as much as through hunting and gathering. Making music with bones and horns, wearing skins and feathers and dancing with animal-masks, makes more sense to him than being entertained by dancing animals in circuses or silly cartoons. Eating freshly-killed deer and fowl, or gathered nuts, berries, and fruits makes more sense to him than consuming cows or grain bred by distant, bloated agro-businesses. One of his other books is titled Coming Home to the Pleistocene, and if that book’s title is any indication, The Others seems to make a similar call that a return to prehistory is the best way to move into a less disastrous future.
I don’t agree with everything Shepard claims, and I’m not always even sure what his point always is, between the generalizations and the exhaustive list of specific examples that do not always have a clear connection. Still, I found the book highly enjoyable. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the role of animals in ecology, evolution, or culture.
Shepard’s ecological outlook demands a more integrated and earthly kind of life, one that embraces the paradox that we cannot be human without animals, and that animals are irreducibly Other. They are not “friends,” companions, objects to be tamed, dominated, or protected by charity. They embody wildness, change, life and death. The problem in our thinking is not only that we are cruel to animals (or other humans), but that our abstract thinking and disconnect with nature makes us forget how to live in the world, to know who we are. We are obsessed with avoiding pain, sickness, and death, and these denials cause our alienation and emptiness, our over-consumption and over-population. Writing, abstract thinking, and the domestication of animals (which, in the case of the horse, allowed for greater mobility, denser human settlements, centralized political power, and the waging of war on a wider scale) have led to an unhealthy, unbalance way of life.
Shepard proposes a return to a hunter-gatherer way of life. Animal lovers will object to his characterization of the keeping of pets as slavery, of Disney cartoons as the worst kind of infantilizing, while animal rights activists will object to his generalizations about them as facile absolutists who see animals in terms of political objects to be protected and kept from human contact, rather than as co-habitants of nature who share our lived reality. It may confuse some readers to see him condemn the nightmare and absurdity of factory farms on the one hand, the fat and stupid cow as the embodied monster of the worst excess of civilization, but then on the other hand to extol the sanctity of hunting, the eating of freshly killed meat as a ritual of becoming in which animals make us, literally, from the inside-out.
Despite the many generalizations, the various places one could quibble or take offense at his views, much of what he says makes sense. He tempers his generalizations with specific examples and a stunning array of interdisciplinary scholarship that draws on disciplines such as ecology, anthropology, psychology, literary and art criticism, and science. The scope helps to trace how our attitudes have evolved (or devolved) over time, and how virtually no society is exempt from the forms of dangerous thinking and practice that he critiques, but he does have more respect for the wisdom of indigenous and pagan cultures. He does not necessarily disavow all forms of “culture,” and his wide knowledge of art, novels, and poetry suggests the ambivalent valences of human craft. On the one hand, it can be a divisive and stigmatizing force. On the other hand, for Shepard, these crafts are especially beneficial when they are performed with the respect and humility of a simpler, more integrated mindset, one in which death, disease, plants, and animals are neither positive nor negative, but parts of the world to be dealt with, through ritual and ceremony as much as through hunting and gathering. Making music with bones and horns, wearing skins and feathers and dancing with animal-masks, makes more sense to him than being entertained by dancing animals in circuses or silly cartoons. Eating freshly-killed deer and fowl, or gathered nuts, berries, and fruits makes more sense to him than consuming cows or grain bred by distant, bloated agro-businesses. One of his other books is titled Coming Home to the Pleistocene, and if that book’s title is any indication, The Others seems to make a similar call that a return to prehistory is the best way to move into a less disastrous future.
I don’t agree with everything Shepard claims, and I’m not always even sure what his point always is, between the generalizations and the exhaustive list of specific examples that do not always have a clear connection. Still, I found the book highly enjoyable. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the role of animals in ecology, evolution, or culture.
March 23, 2015
Paul Shepard (1925-1996) was an original thinker who could soar far from the realm of mainstream thinking and view modern society from a perspective that saw the Pleistocene as the zenith of the human journey, and the high-water mark for the health of life on Earth. Many professors can’t do this.
Why were we furiously destroying the planet? Why was our society a crazy freak show? The Myth of Progress had no sensible answers. Shepard’s unconventional viewpoint actually provided a rational, but uncomfortable, explanation. He documented his thinking in a series of books. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human explored the many ways in which our development was influenced by evolving in a wild ecosystem, and how our growing isolation from wildness was harming us.
Animals taught us hunting skills like tracking, stalking, and ambush. They taught us how to sing and dance. We wore their skins and feathers, and made tools with their bones and horns. We ate them, and they ate us. They were central archetypes in our spiritual world. Our mental powers were largely shaped by paying intense attention to wild animals — their sounds, smells, colors, footprints, droppings. Hunting made us the highly intelligent beings that we are. We can’t be fully human if we do not live in wildness.
The domestication of plants and animals dealt a devastating blow to the ancient harmony, and things have been going downhill ever since. As the tamed world expanded, the wild world diminished, and the human world drifted farther from health and wholeness. Hundreds of millions of children now have almost no contact with wildness, or even livestock. When observing a herd of wild deer grazing in a park, they quickly become bored, and return to their electronic gadgets.
Wild people lived in a realm rich with spiritual beauty and mystery, and they spent their entire lives in paradise. Tamed people created new religions that focused on salvation and escape. Death was the ticket to heaven. Creation was no longer sacred. Animals became demons, machines without souls. The world became a filthy and horrid realm of evil. Tamed people perceived humans to be above and apart from all other life on Earth. They devoted their lives to destroying forests, wildlife, fisheries, and soils. They became masters of warfare, enslavement, and exploitation.
Shepard confessed to having been a dog owner, and he wrote almost two sentences about the positive qualities of dogs. But more than 100 pages were devoted to explaining the negative aspects of dogs and other domesticated animals — they were deficient animals, monsters, biological slaves, and so on.
Evolution was a slow motion game. Normally, if lions gradually became two percent faster, then gazelles would also become two percent faster. Ecosystems collapse if predators can easily kill anything, or if prey can escape from any attack. Shepard came to the surprising conclusion that the domestication of dogs was the crucial turning point: “The history of ecological catastrophe begins with the hound.”
“Wolves didn’t decide to become dogs and don’t want to be dogs.” In the early days, wild humans and wild wolves hunted together as informal partners. Their cooperation benefitted both, so it became a habit. Then the habit deteriorated into a master and slave relationship. With this new alliance, the predator team suddenly made a big strategic advance, unsettling the ancient equilibrium with the prey team. Since then, the disequilibrium has been snowballing, leading to our era of mass extinctions.
The domestication of dogs taught humans a dark lesson. By utilizing confinement and coercion, wild animals could be transformed into dim, neurotic, submissive slaves. By and by, we eventually proceeded to domesticate a number of other species.
Huge, powerful, and intelligent wild aurochs were domesticated into fat, stupid cattle. Shepard had no compliments: “If the auroch was the most magnificent animal in the lives of our Pleistocene ancestors, in captivity it became the most destructive creature of all.” “More than axe or fire, cattle-keeping is the means by which people have broken natural climaxes, converted forest into coarse herbage, denuded the slopes, and turned grasslands into sand.”
Shepard was especially horrified by the taming of horses. The trio of horses, humans, and hounds turned into a powerful killing team, greatly increasing the effectiveness of hunting. They also revolutionized warfare, enabled the creation of sprawling empires, and fueled sizzling growth in the casket making and grave digging sectors. Horses stimulated big advances in soil mining. They helped farmers eliminate forests, expand cropland, and feed an exploding population. Thus, enslaved horses and dogs “became weapons against the earth.”
Throughout most of history, dogs have not enjoyed a good reputation. “Over most of the planet the dog is a cur and mongrel scavenger, feral, half-starved, the target of the kick and thrown rock, often cruelly exploited as a slave.” But the Industrial Revolution expanded the middle class, which took great interest in keeping pets as status symbols. Disney has done much to alter our perception of animals by presenting them in an infantilized and humanized form — living toys. In recent decades, pets have become a huge and profitable industry. High priced four-legged fashion accessories are the latest thing. When we bring animals into our world, we destroy them.
Shepard was disgusted by ever-growing cruelty to animals, but he had little respect for the animal rights movement. It would be wiser to aim higher and focus on ecosystem rights. “The ridiculous code of medicine that prolongs human life at any cost and advocates death control without birth control has damaged life on earth far more than all the fox hunters and cosmetic laboratories could ever do — perhaps beyond recovery — and leads us toward disasters that loom like monsters from hell.”
He believed that humans have not yet been domesticated, because our genes are nearly identical to the genes of our wild Pleistocene ancestors. Thus, the genes that enabled our grand adventure in tool-making and world domination were forged by hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering. Imagine what humans might become if we were able to spend the next 200,000 years sitting indoors on couches, engorging on calorie-dense food-like substances, suffering from anxiety and depression, whilst feasting on entertainment services.
Why were we furiously destroying the planet? Why was our society a crazy freak show? The Myth of Progress had no sensible answers. Shepard’s unconventional viewpoint actually provided a rational, but uncomfortable, explanation. He documented his thinking in a series of books. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human explored the many ways in which our development was influenced by evolving in a wild ecosystem, and how our growing isolation from wildness was harming us.
Animals taught us hunting skills like tracking, stalking, and ambush. They taught us how to sing and dance. We wore their skins and feathers, and made tools with their bones and horns. We ate them, and they ate us. They were central archetypes in our spiritual world. Our mental powers were largely shaped by paying intense attention to wild animals — their sounds, smells, colors, footprints, droppings. Hunting made us the highly intelligent beings that we are. We can’t be fully human if we do not live in wildness.
The domestication of plants and animals dealt a devastating blow to the ancient harmony, and things have been going downhill ever since. As the tamed world expanded, the wild world diminished, and the human world drifted farther from health and wholeness. Hundreds of millions of children now have almost no contact with wildness, or even livestock. When observing a herd of wild deer grazing in a park, they quickly become bored, and return to their electronic gadgets.
Wild people lived in a realm rich with spiritual beauty and mystery, and they spent their entire lives in paradise. Tamed people created new religions that focused on salvation and escape. Death was the ticket to heaven. Creation was no longer sacred. Animals became demons, machines without souls. The world became a filthy and horrid realm of evil. Tamed people perceived humans to be above and apart from all other life on Earth. They devoted their lives to destroying forests, wildlife, fisheries, and soils. They became masters of warfare, enslavement, and exploitation.
Shepard confessed to having been a dog owner, and he wrote almost two sentences about the positive qualities of dogs. But more than 100 pages were devoted to explaining the negative aspects of dogs and other domesticated animals — they were deficient animals, monsters, biological slaves, and so on.
Evolution was a slow motion game. Normally, if lions gradually became two percent faster, then gazelles would also become two percent faster. Ecosystems collapse if predators can easily kill anything, or if prey can escape from any attack. Shepard came to the surprising conclusion that the domestication of dogs was the crucial turning point: “The history of ecological catastrophe begins with the hound.”
“Wolves didn’t decide to become dogs and don’t want to be dogs.” In the early days, wild humans and wild wolves hunted together as informal partners. Their cooperation benefitted both, so it became a habit. Then the habit deteriorated into a master and slave relationship. With this new alliance, the predator team suddenly made a big strategic advance, unsettling the ancient equilibrium with the prey team. Since then, the disequilibrium has been snowballing, leading to our era of mass extinctions.
The domestication of dogs taught humans a dark lesson. By utilizing confinement and coercion, wild animals could be transformed into dim, neurotic, submissive slaves. By and by, we eventually proceeded to domesticate a number of other species.
Huge, powerful, and intelligent wild aurochs were domesticated into fat, stupid cattle. Shepard had no compliments: “If the auroch was the most magnificent animal in the lives of our Pleistocene ancestors, in captivity it became the most destructive creature of all.” “More than axe or fire, cattle-keeping is the means by which people have broken natural climaxes, converted forest into coarse herbage, denuded the slopes, and turned grasslands into sand.”
Shepard was especially horrified by the taming of horses. The trio of horses, humans, and hounds turned into a powerful killing team, greatly increasing the effectiveness of hunting. They also revolutionized warfare, enabled the creation of sprawling empires, and fueled sizzling growth in the casket making and grave digging sectors. Horses stimulated big advances in soil mining. They helped farmers eliminate forests, expand cropland, and feed an exploding population. Thus, enslaved horses and dogs “became weapons against the earth.”
Throughout most of history, dogs have not enjoyed a good reputation. “Over most of the planet the dog is a cur and mongrel scavenger, feral, half-starved, the target of the kick and thrown rock, often cruelly exploited as a slave.” But the Industrial Revolution expanded the middle class, which took great interest in keeping pets as status symbols. Disney has done much to alter our perception of animals by presenting them in an infantilized and humanized form — living toys. In recent decades, pets have become a huge and profitable industry. High priced four-legged fashion accessories are the latest thing. When we bring animals into our world, we destroy them.
Shepard was disgusted by ever-growing cruelty to animals, but he had little respect for the animal rights movement. It would be wiser to aim higher and focus on ecosystem rights. “The ridiculous code of medicine that prolongs human life at any cost and advocates death control without birth control has damaged life on earth far more than all the fox hunters and cosmetic laboratories could ever do — perhaps beyond recovery — and leads us toward disasters that loom like monsters from hell.”
He believed that humans have not yet been domesticated, because our genes are nearly identical to the genes of our wild Pleistocene ancestors. Thus, the genes that enabled our grand adventure in tool-making and world domination were forged by hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering. Imagine what humans might become if we were able to spend the next 200,000 years sitting indoors on couches, engorging on calorie-dense food-like substances, suffering from anxiety and depression, whilst feasting on entertainment services.
April 10, 2009
This book is intense. The last work of Paul Shepard, it collects a lifetime of knowledge and analysis into a single volume. That Shepard has so much to teach is both why this isn't a book to miss, and why it's deeply flawed and at times frustrating.
"The Others" traces the roles animals have played in the evolutionary and cultural development of human societies. The book considers many aspects of this role, including ecology, mythology, domestication, hunting, conservation, and evolutionary. One recurring theme in the discussion of these different roles is the shift that has occurred in societies where contact with wild animals is significantly reduced. Shepard argues that this reduction leads to an abandonment of metaphorical roles for wild animals (e.g. stories about what an animal is like, based on direct knowledge of, and interaction with, the wild) to metonymical roles (e.g. stories where animals serve as referents for unrelated ideas). The core ideas Shepard keeps returning to are that our experiences with animals give us the raw material for constructing and understanding our own identities and cultures.
While Shepard is perhaps at his most passionate when discussing the paucity of the city-dwelling, pet-owning, modern's relationship to animals, the book's analytical strength is on display during his analysis of three specific cultural groups (the Lele, Nuer, and Fipa tribes) whose lifeways (hunting/gathering, pastoral, and farming/trade) are reflected in their relationship with domesticated and wild animals. He goes further to examine how these animal relationships (i.e. herding cattle, driving off herbivores, etc) relate to the construction of individual and group identity and cosmology.
The frustrating thing about reading this book is the amount of detail Shepard includes in every paragraph. The writing tends towards lists of examples and ideas that reveal the depth of the author's knowledge while also tending to obscure the point he's trying to make. On a larger scale within the work, some chapters (e.g. the ones on Music, or Augury) would work better as stand-alone essays than they do within the flow of the entire work. The breadth of the subjects Shepard wants to discuss makes it difficult to following the development of a central thesis, and that in turn makes it difficult to organize and retain many of the detailed examples and information he includes.
"The Others" traces the roles animals have played in the evolutionary and cultural development of human societies. The book considers many aspects of this role, including ecology, mythology, domestication, hunting, conservation, and evolutionary. One recurring theme in the discussion of these different roles is the shift that has occurred in societies where contact with wild animals is significantly reduced. Shepard argues that this reduction leads to an abandonment of metaphorical roles for wild animals (e.g. stories about what an animal is like, based on direct knowledge of, and interaction with, the wild) to metonymical roles (e.g. stories where animals serve as referents for unrelated ideas). The core ideas Shepard keeps returning to are that our experiences with animals give us the raw material for constructing and understanding our own identities and cultures.
While Shepard is perhaps at his most passionate when discussing the paucity of the city-dwelling, pet-owning, modern's relationship to animals, the book's analytical strength is on display during his analysis of three specific cultural groups (the Lele, Nuer, and Fipa tribes) whose lifeways (hunting/gathering, pastoral, and farming/trade) are reflected in their relationship with domesticated and wild animals. He goes further to examine how these animal relationships (i.e. herding cattle, driving off herbivores, etc) relate to the construction of individual and group identity and cosmology.
The frustrating thing about reading this book is the amount of detail Shepard includes in every paragraph. The writing tends towards lists of examples and ideas that reveal the depth of the author's knowledge while also tending to obscure the point he's trying to make. On a larger scale within the work, some chapters (e.g. the ones on Music, or Augury) would work better as stand-alone essays than they do within the flow of the entire work. The breadth of the subjects Shepard wants to discuss makes it difficult to following the development of a central thesis, and that in turn makes it difficult to organize and retain many of the detailed examples and information he includes.
September 5, 2015
A letter regarding humanity:
"Their own numbers leave little room for us, and in this is their great misunderstanding. They are wrong about our departure, thinking it to be part of their progress instead of their emptying. When we have gone they will not know who they are. Supposing themselves to be the purpose of it all, purpose will elude them. Their world will fade into an endless dusk with no whippoorwill to call the owl in the evening and no thrush to make a dawn."
- The Others
"Their own numbers leave little room for us, and in this is their great misunderstanding. They are wrong about our departure, thinking it to be part of their progress instead of their emptying. When we have gone they will not know who they are. Supposing themselves to be the purpose of it all, purpose will elude them. Their world will fade into an endless dusk with no whippoorwill to call the owl in the evening and no thrush to make a dawn."
- The Others
January 22, 2019
Incredible. Encyclopedic. Densely informative, entertaining and observant.
"Animals and people who are not clearly classifiable may become the object of anathema as signs of corruption or disarray, or they may be seen as sacred mediators, but in either case the dubious forms create excitement, thoughtful deliberation, and a rich mine of metaphorical ore."
"Animals and people who are not clearly classifiable may become the object of anathema as signs of corruption or disarray, or they may be seen as sacred mediators, but in either case the dubious forms create excitement, thoughtful deliberation, and a rich mine of metaphorical ore."
March 23, 2008
A friend of mine just gave me a copy of this as a gift (that she might later take back) in apology for keeping another book of mine for almost two years, managing to stain the cover and lose the dust-jacket for good measure. Whatever, the pages still work... and anyway, I'm glad to own a copy of this amazing book for reference (and more lending).
One of the few I would read again in a heartbeat - I've put this on my toilet for now, which may sound crass but it's the only way I can get in snippets of Shepard's amazing notions without feeling guilty about neglecting my "primary" book. In reading this I was constantly amazed at the myriad of connections Shepard weaves into his ideas... I shouldupdate this review to be an actual _review_ once I get a chance to re-read some of it.
One of the few I would read again in a heartbeat - I've put this on my toilet for now, which may sound crass but it's the only way I can get in snippets of Shepard's amazing notions without feeling guilty about neglecting my "primary" book. In reading this I was constantly amazed at the myriad of connections Shepard weaves into his ideas... I shouldupdate this review to be an actual _review_ once I get a chance to re-read some of it.
January 1, 2012
This book felt very one-sided; the author seems to have focused on research that confirmed what he already believed, and didn't bother looking too closely at other points-of-view. He also made generalizations about animal rights and non-hunting conservationists which suggests he has not met very many in his life.
November 19, 2013
As a result of this book I hate animals and people too and also I agree with the author where he says little kids should dig through their dead relatives bodies. Grandma is a great, fun way to learn about anatomy!
December 4, 2013
This was an ok book! Too dry & dense! 9 page essay for school later so glad to be done! Some interesting points, but mainly never read again!
February 23, 2014
Animals play a huge role in human history. This book examines the ways in which human beings and animals co-evolved, and how it shaped the human psyche. I love this book.
November 20, 2014
Interesting subject material. Incredibly dry.
January 10, 2015
Pretty tough read, but worth the effort
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews