Are animals people? Theologians have scoffed at the notion as heretical: humans are numinous, animals savage. Behaviorists warn that warm feelings will cause us to misunderstand the ways animals live and react. (Do not pet the fuzzy grizzly you meet in Yellowstone.) Hunters fervently dismiss the thought as ridiculous and extreme. Bioethicist Jessica Pierce cautions that it is a mistake to apply the concept personhood to other animals. “The concept of personhood,” she writes, “should be introduced only when we are trying to solve purely human questions.”
Are Humans Exceptional?
We cannot expect a dolphin to keep a bowling score, a squirrel to calculate cube roots, or a river otter to follow Taylor Swift on TikTok. Still, the time-honored idea that humans are exceptional has begun to falter on the grounds that it is both ill-informed and self-interested.
Neuroscientists point to the close (or identical) similarity of neural structures and neurochemistry among mammals. Ethologists note how social animals express ranges of emotions—including loyalty, love, longing, chagrin, grief, mutual trust, and laughter—that seem very like ours. And closer to a shared experience, dog-lovers sense self-awareness, sentience, and loving sentiment in their best friends.
Which Brings Us to Play
We also share a keen appetite and a basic aptitude for play with a long list of non-human animals. Rats wrestle and laugh, dolphins frolic, squirrels tirelessly scamper, river otters romp, and so on throughout the peaceable kingdom. If “play makes us human” as the evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray reasonably maintains, then it is a small step to inquire not whether animals are “people” as such,........