{"id":782065,"date":"2026-10-05T09:43:38","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T13:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=782065"},"modified":"2026-10-05T10:11:47","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T14:11:47","slug":"the-imaginary-wall-how-we-lost-our-kinship-with-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=782065","title":{"rendered":"‘The Imaginary Wall: How We Lost Our Kinship With Animals’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The process of evolution that unleashed the world\u2019s biodiversity literally has no mechanism for creating a species that is categorically distinct from all others. Darwin said it himself: there are always intermediate forms. For decades, taboos prevented science from naming the continuities between us and our animal kin for what they are. In effect, our kinship with other animals was obscured by a conspiracy of silence. Why? In part because the imaginary wall was such a huge boon for the business of building empire and industrial society. By erasing the agency, subjectivity, and individuality of the rest of the animal world, the wall turns them into inert natural resources, available for our consumption.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

SONIA SHAH:<\/strong> In her latest book\u00a0 ‘The Imaginary Wall: How We Lost Our Kinship With Animals’, author Sonia Shah explores the big-history of the idea of humans as a special category in nature, told intimately through personal narrative and reportage… For centuries, industrial society has believed that there is something about humans that makes us special in nature. We\u2019re uniquely intelligent, uniquely creative, uniquely self-aware, uniquely linguistic \u2014 the list goes on. Accordingly, industrial society organizes itself as if there is a categorical division between us and all other animals. I call it the imaginary wall. On one side of the wall is all things human and on the other, all things \u201canimal”…<\/em><\/p>\n

The idea of humans as special in nature is so fundamental to how we think of ourselves and our place in the world that it seems irresistible, like bedrock. But just poke at the imaginary wall a little and it becomes quickly apparent that it is a social construction. The imaginary wall has a story. And, I learned, it arose in a world that resisted its logic, from pagan Europe and Indigenous America to Hindu and Buddhist Asia, in which people considered themselves animals among animals, a sense they expressed in art, mythology, philosophy and cultural practice.<\/em><\/p>\n

The most striking thing about the wall, though, is that it is upheld by modern science, despite never being truly supported by scientific evidence. The evidence for human exceptionalism, once I started looking into it, reminded me a lot of the \u201cevidence\u201d for biologically distinct racial groups. One weird thing would be put forward as an explanation for it, and then when scientists discovered that weird thing in other animals, they\u2019d just put forward another weird thing. The absence of evidence is never taken as evidence of absence. After each dead end, the hunt is renewed once again.<\/em><\/p>\n

But the fact is: the process of evolution that unleashed the world\u2019s biodiversity literally has no mechanism for creating a species that is categorically distinct from all others. Darwin said it himself: there are always intermediate forms. Biodiversity is a tapestry, not a striped flag. For decades, taboos prevented science from naming the continuities between us and our animal kin for what they are. In effect, our kinship with other animals was obscured by a conspiracy of silence.<\/em><\/p>\n

Why? In part because the imaginary wall was such a huge boon for the business of building empire and industrial society. By erasing the agency, subjectivity, and individuality of the rest of the animal world, the wall turns them into inert natural resources, available for our consumption. What we might once have understood as our fellow animals\u2019 homes and lands is rendered \u201cvacant\u201d territory, available for paving over and cutting down; fellow humans who embrace their kinship with other animals become \u201csavages\u201d \u201cbrutes\u201d and \u201csubhumans\u201d whose lands we may occupy and cultures we may destroy. The wall even erases the peculiarities specific to other animals\u2019 species distinctions, collapsed under the anonymity of the word \u201canimal,\u201d a peculiar term which denotes all the millions of other species lumped together, except for the one known as Homo sapiens…<\/em><\/p>\n

The wall won\u2019t go down without a fight. The AI evangelists and their allies tell us that the unique qualities of the human brain\u2014the uniquely human ability to string words together in grammatical order, to write software and play games like Go and chess\u2014constitute a kind of intelligence so otherworldly that a technological facsimile such as AI should be entitled to the last vestiges of the planet\u2019s land and water, whether that burns the planet to a crisp and kills us all or not.<\/em><\/p>\n

But for the rest of us, the calculus is different. We can all see the limits of humanity\u2019s rejection of our animal kinship in the form of out-of-control human appetites and the wildfires, melting glaciers and vanishing birds and butterflies that follow. A future beyond the wall, in which nature no longer revolves around the figure of the human, now swings into view. <\/em>SOURCE<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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