12-19-2017, 05:09 PM
I can contribute another occurrence of an animal turning down mating attempts from the own species, preferring to mate "outside" of it. As I have written in the zoophilia subreddit, my mare and me usually walked by a pasture that held the only two stallions of the stables she was boarded. The two guys always tried to raise her attention, kept whinnying at her, especially when she was in heat. What she did? She always used to hide behind me, keeping me between her and the two jerks on the pasture trying to get her attention, always keeping body contact to me.
I really don´t know how to differently interpret her behaviour but as "Protect me from these two, I´m happy with you and don´t want any other". Sure , there is a possibility of anthropomorphisation , but I don´t see why animals are anthropomorpised when we grant them feelings like romantic love. That alone is not anthropomorpisation and animals seem to have these feelings even towards their own species sometimes. I remember a mare that absolutely refused to mate with any other stallion, she even became very aggressive when another one except her "favourite", a gelding (!) standing in the box next to hers, approached her and came too close to her. When one of those two was led out of the box, the other one immediately started to become upset, whinnying loudly. I even know of two geldings who obviously were very close friends. When one of them died from a colic, the other one kept searching for his friend in unrest until he died too roughly 3/4 of a year later.
I´d say that animals can have "human" feelings too...feelings of friendship and love...but one mistake has to be avoided to prevent any anthropomorpisation, and that is to file these feelings as aequivalents of human feelings. Anthropomorpisation happens when you´re trying to "translate" animal feelings to your human "vocabulary"...even if you "know" a foreign language, you probably fail completely on all those meta connotations and the only way to really understand actually is practicing and improving your expertise until you literally think like native speakers of that foreign language. Same goes for animals...sadly, many zoos fool themselves into thinking they gained full understanding of their animals , yet they have only conquered the first step of a very looong ladder. And that is in my opinion the first and foremost reason for anthropomorphising animals in our community. The moment you are convinced you know "their language " beyond any doubt, the anthropomorphisation starts.
Sure, animals and humans are "flesh from the same flesh", but mankind chose to erect an imaginary wall between animals and itself. This wall has solidified over time and now isn´t an imaginary wall anymore, but real. The emotions on either side of this wall have the same origin, but acquired entirely different connotations as mankind distanced itself more and more from the animal kingdom through "civilisation". So, same origins, but I never would say animals can actually have "human "feelings...that´s almost an insult to the animals....and me... [img]<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/wink.png[/img]/emoticons/[email protected] 2x" title=";)" width="20" />
