Beginning with the question of empathic ability in nonhumans, it is important to distinguish between affective empathy—the tendency to experience vicariously the emotional states of others (emotional contagion)—and cognitive empathy involving the capacity to take another’s perspective and experience feelings of sympathy and compassion for their pain or distress (empathic concern), as well as derived emotions such as guilt and remorse when one perceives oneself to be the cause of that pain or distress.[1] Boria Sax, Marc Bekoff and Meghan Wilt are correct to point out that mice and many other mammals display evidence of affective empathy and perhaps even the beginnings of cognitive empathy. But I challenge them to provide convincing nonhuman examples of what I refer to as zoocentric sympathy, or the tendency to identify with, and feel morally culpable for, harms inflicted on the members of other species. We know that humans are capable of experiencing these kinds of feelings,[2] but it is not at all obvious that other species can. Sax’s claim that prey animals might volunteer for death out of “curiosity” or “empathy with predators” is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary theory, and his suggestion that predators, such as wolves, might derive vicarious exhilaration from empathizing with the distress of their prey would seem to contradict most existing definitions of empathy, unless he is postulating a masochistic (or perhaps psychotic) wolf who enjoys sharing the pain and terror of the elk he is killing.

Nick Humphrey’s question as to whether the Nazi’s draconian animal protection laws might have served to compensate psychologically for the Holocaust is certainly provocative. The close temporal association between the first animal protection laws (November 1933) and those discriminating specifically against Jews (April 1933) is undoubtedly striking. However, it is also possible that this juxtaposition reflected the misanthropic and zoophiliac attitudes of many of the Nazi leadership—Hitler included—or that the animal laws were just a further excuse to discriminate against aspects of Jewish culture such as ritual animal slaughter (Shechita). These and other related ideas were explored in an important 1992 article by Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax [3] and in subsequent commentaries [4] that I would recommend to anyone wishing to pursue this topic further. As an interesting aside, A.V. Hill’s suggestion of using animal protection laws to prosecute those who brutalize humans (cited by Humphrey) was not without precedent. During the 1870s and 80s, Henry Bergh, the founder of the New York ASPCA, used animal protection statutes to intercede legally on behalf of abused and exploited children who did not at that time enjoy any legal protections.[5]

Hal Herzog and Stuart Marks take issue with my reliance on a small number of “anecdotes” to support my contention that some animal food taboos are motivated by guilt about killing animals in general, and Herzog asks whether the theory is testable. While I am vulnerable on these points, I take partial refuge behind the fact that the essay was subject to a word limit that restricted my ability to provide a more expansive review of the relevant literature. In truth, most of the ethnographic material available, including that used by Fessler and Navarette[6] (whom Herzog cites) is also anecdotal in the sense of being the product of qualitative and often unsystematic field notes by predominantly western observers. While it might strengthen my case to provide more numerous anecdotes it still wouldn’t constitute a valid test of the theory, since correlation does not establish causation. Nor would I necessarily expect to find an association between the strength and frequency of meat taboos and the degree of a culture’s dependence on subsistence hunting, as Herzog suggests. I would anticipate more extreme hunting-related anxiety in such cultures, and greater fears of supernatural punishment, but if the culture is highly dependent on hunted protein, it might be unable to risk proscribing any particular species as food. In such cases, hunters can and do resort to other methods of mitigating “blood guilt”. Sax, for example, mentions the Native American belief that game animals willingly “sacrifice” themselves to favored hunters, while Shepherd Krech refers to the widespread idea that hunters contribute to the reincarnation of wild animals by killing them. Both of these notions are what I would call “exonerative beliefs”; that is, self-justificatory beliefs that tend to exonerate the hunter from blame for the killing.

Perhaps a better test (or refutation) of my theory would be to identify examples of subsistence hunting societies that display no moral qualms about hunting whatsoever, that kill and eat wild animals indiscriminately without ritual safeguards or any apparent fear of retribution. So far, I have not been able to discover such a culture or group among the accounts I have read. Marks’s Valley Bisa hunters may provide an exception to the rule, although their anxieties about the behavior of relatives back home in the village might also reflect general concerns about the dangers of “improper” conduct during a hunt. Brian Morris has pointed out that many Central African people believe that game animals are sensitive to immoral or disrespectful human acts and may retaliate by inflicting sickness or madness on hunters. As he puts it, the act of killing a game animal is “akin to that of homicide,” and that the “blood” of the animal may “enact a kind of vengeance, entering the body of the hunter and bringing punishment,” if the hunter fails to take the correct ritual precautions. [7, p. 105-6] These precautions include maintaining a calm or “cool” state of mind before and during any hunting expedition. The imagined activities of adulterous wives or quarreling kinsfolk back at home would clearly have the potential to disrupt this state of mental equilibrium, thereby placing the hunter at serious risk of calamity.

Pat Shipman’s suggestion that the inherently risky nature of subsistence activities such as hunting and fishing would be likely, on its own, to inspire anxiety and elaborate ritual safeguards seems entirely plausible, and is precisely what Bronislaw Malinowski argued in relation to the origins of totemism.[8] A key question that needs to be addressed, however, is why so much of this ritual anxiety and fear of supernatural retaliation should be focused specifically on the animal or the animal’s spiritual guardian(s), if there were not already strong pre-existing feelings of culpability associated with the animal’s demise. As an Iglulingmiut shaman explained to the arctic explorer, Knud Rasmussen, more than 80 years ago: “The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, like we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and which must therefore be propitiated lest they should avenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.”[9, p. 56] In my opinion, we ought to take such statements at face value, unless there are robust reasons to believe that something else is going on.

Unlike Shipman, I am not a huge fan of Edmund Leach’s 1964 article, particularly in light of Halverson’s masterly critique.[10] At best, I would suggest that Leach’s perceived “structural correspondence” between dietary and sexual taboos is no more than a coincidental outcome of adaptive developmental rules that render those we grow up with (whether human or animal) unattractive from both a sexual and gastronomic perspective.[11] I am also unconvinced by Lisa D’Costa’s and Kristen Cochran’s suggestion that zoocentric sympathy and food taboos function to promote ecological sustainability by discouraging over-hunting. This idea was first mooted by Roy Rappaport in 1967 [12] and has been debated by anthropologists ever since. The problems with the theory are twofold. First, it is difficult to imagine how such cultural practices could evolve and be maintained without resorting to group selectionist arguments. Second, empirical evidence suggests that subsistence hunters prefer to maximize short-term hunting returns over the longer-term gains that might accrue from conserving wildlife resources.[13] Inhibitions about killing and eating particular animals may indeed have the effect of limiting exploitation, but this is unlikely to be the adaptive function of these cultural mores. I hope that this last statement will also help to dispel Shepherd Krech’s concern that my thesis will appeal to proponents of the “ecologically noble savage” concept. Maybe my use of the word “guilt” is inappropriate, but it is difficult to think of a more satisfactory term for the sense of culpability and the expectation of punishment that seems to characterize subsistence hunters’ relations with their prey.

Several commentators are skeptical of my suggestion that lavishing affection on pets might sometimes serve as a form of atonement for eating other animals, and both Herzog and Bekoff point to pet-loving vegetarians/vegans as evidence to the contrary. Although this idea was something of an afterthought, I believe it has some validity as long as it is understood to be the result of a largely unconscious process in which people use their positive and caring interactions with pets to define themselves as animal lovers, thereby morally neutralizing their continued purchase and consumption of meat from other animals that somebody else has killed. Also, I certainly don’t regard this as the only, or even necessarily a major, reason for keeping pet animals. Elsewhere, I have proposed a variety of other reasons why people keep pets, [14] and have also argued that the act of allowing certain animals into our affections and treating them as “members of the family” tends to engender psychological tension by undermining the moral barriers we have erected between humans and nonhumans in general.[15] Thus, pet keeping potentially cuts both ways; increasing our inhibitions about killing animals and/or using them as food (hence, perhaps, pet-loving vegetarians) while simultaneously providing us with a potential source of moral absolution for doing so. In a somewhat similar vein, the French anthropologist, Philippe Erikson, has proposed that one function for the widespread practice of caring for tame wild animal pets among Amazonian hunters and horticulturalists is to curry favor with the animals’ wild brethren who will therefore feel more inclined to allow themselves to be killed by human hunters [16].

I am grateful to Sax, Herzog and Marks for reminding me that cultural attitudes, beliefs, and traditions, including food taboos, are moving targets subject to revision over time and in response to changing circumstances. The on-and-off history of the Valley Bisa’s hippopotamus taboo (referred to by Marks) certainly presents an interesting challenge to my theory but not necessarily an insurmountable one. It appears, for example, that hippos are (or were) ritually important to the Bisa, and that in former times they were hunted by specialized hunting guilds or fraternities,[17] not unlike totemic clans. One could speculate that the disappearance of these hunting fraternities, with their ritual “license” to kill hippos, might inhibit further hippo hunting and help to explain why few Bisa admitted to killing or eating hippos in the late 1960s. It also seems reasonable to attribute the gradual resurgence of hippo consumption among younger Bisa in the 1980s and subsequently to the combined effects economic privation and cultural disintegration, as Marks suggests. In other words, even long-established social rules and conventions must remain relevant in order to survive, and under the pressure of rapid cultural or ecological change their original meaning and significance may be lost or submerged by competing priorities.

Finally, in response to Joel Marks’s comments on moral versus psychological inhibitions, I must admit to being a social intuitionist [18] in the sense that I believe that humans have an intuitive sense of rightness and wrongness, and that the rational aspects of moral decision-making are, more often than not, post-hoc justifications for these initial gut-level intuitions. The argument I try to make in my essay is that subsistence hunters are caught morally between the proverbial rock and a hard place: Obliged to kill animals for food, but also intuitively predisposed to sense the wrongness of preying upon other kindred beings who have done nothing to merit such assaults. Hunters cope with this dilemma in a variety of ways. In the case of totemism and guardian spirit belief, they seem to compartmentalize the problem by allocating moral obligations to some animals but not to others. In other situations they use exonerative belief systems to absolve themselves of blame. None of these coping strategies, however, is likely to be unique to hunters and foragers. I believe they also exist in various less obvious forms in most carnivorous cultures,[19] and that they are not fundamentally different from the techniques of moral disengagement that people have employed throughout history to justify the abuse and persecution of fellow humans.[20]

References
1. de Waal, F.B.M. 2008. Putting the altruism back in altruism: The evolution of empathy. Annual Review of Psychology, 59: 279-300.
2. Batson, D. 2011. Empathic concern and altruism in humans. On The Human: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2009/10/empathic-concern-and-altruism-in-humans/ (accessed Dec. 12, 2011)
3. Arluke, A. and Sax, B. 1992. Understanding Nazi Animal Protection and the Holocaust. Anthrozoös, 5: 7-31.
4. Comments on Arluke and Sax: “Understanding Nazi Animal Protection and the Holocaust.” Anthrozoös, 6: 72-107, 1993.
5. Unti, B.O. 2002. The Quality of Mercy: Organized Animal Protection in the United States, 1866-1930. Unpublished PhD dissertation. American University: Washington, DC.
6. Fessler, D.M.T. and Navarette, C.D. 2003. Meat is good to taboo: Dietary proscriptions as a product of the interaction of psychological mechanisms and social processes. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3: 1-40.
7. Morris, B. 1998. The Power of Animals: An Ethnography. Oxford: Berg.
8. Malinowski, B. 1954. Magic, Science and Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books.
9. Rasmussen, K. 1929. Intellectual life of the Iglulik Eskimos. In: Report of the 5th Thule Expedition, 1921-24, The Danish Expedition to Arctic North America, 7(1), 1929.
10. Halverson, J. 1976. Animal categories and terms of abuse. Man, 11: 505-16.
11. Serpell, J.A. 1990. All the King’s horses. Anthrozoös, 3: 223-6.
12. Rappaport, R. 1967. Ritual regulation of environmental relations among a New Guinea people. Ethnology, 6: 17-30.
13. Alvard, M.S. 1998. Evolutionary ecology and resource conservation. Evolutionary Anthropology, 7: 62-74.
14. Serpell, J.A. and Paul, E.S. 2011. Pets in the family: An evolutionary perspective. In: The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Family Psychology, eds. C. Salmon & T. Shackelford, pp. 297-309. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
15. Serpell, J.A. 2009. Having our dogs and eating them too: Why animals are a social issue. Journal of Social Issues, 65: 633-644.
16. Erikson, P. 1987. De L’apprivoisement à l’approvisionnement: Chasse, alliance et familiarisation en Amazonie Amérindienne. Techniques et Cultures, 9: 105-40.
17. Marks, S.A. 1976. Large Mammals and a Brave People. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
18. Haidt, J. 2001. The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108: 814-834.
19. Serpell, J.A. 2005. Animals and religion: Towards a unifying theory. In: de Jong, F. & van den Bos, R. (Eds.) The Human-Animal Relationship, pp. 9-22. Assen, Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum.
20. Bandura, A. 1999. Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3: 193-209.

The origin of our English word “guilt” is unknown, but the leading theory is that it comes from the Old English “gieldan,” meaning “to pay a debt.” The word does not appear until the late seventeenth century. The German word for guilt, “schuld,” also means “debt.” The underlying metaphor when we speak of guilt seems to be mostly economic. Guilt is cancelled by “redemption,” essentially paying off what one owes.

In a barter economy, where little or no attempt is made to divide worth into standardized units, which may then add up to vast sums, the modern concept of guilt might be incomprehensible. With respect to indigenous cultures, I think it makes sense, as Krech suggests, to speak of “reciprocity and continuing a relationship” rather than of guilt. But then we might say, reformulating Serpell’s theory only a bit, that the care we lavish on pets, for example, is an attempt to retain a sense of reciprocity in our relations with animals in general.

But my impression is that Serpell may be also attempting to address a far more elusive feeling in contemporary society. There is a pervasive sense of moral failure, which, however, does not seem to be directly connected to any particular decision or event. As Kafka dramatized in stories such as The Trial, we are often overwhelmed by guilt in the absence of any tangible crime. Perhaps this malaise might, in some way, be related to our treatment of animals?

As for the thoughts and actions of foragers and other indigenous people concerning the animals they seek as hunters, fishermen, or collectors, I’d like to raise several points from my own ethnographic work and research on North American Indians.

First, and arguably most important, many native people of North America consider their prey as animate, as sentient beings who make themselves available to human predators who think about and treat them properly. “Properly” varies with culture—that is, in myriad ways—and its content changes through time along with human lives and experiences. One must be attentive to the changes, whose origins have a way of being quickly forgotten; and one must therefore also be alert to the probability of invented traditions whose cultural depth must be determined not assumed. Not surprisingly, animals tend often to live out lives in settings that often resemble lives and societies constituted culturally by the human beings who seek them. That is, some believe that salmon (to consider a piscine example) can and do come from and (killed and handled with proper respect) return to villages whose structures and inhabitants are modeled on those of the human beings who fish for (and kill) them. In past times and even today native people who still depend on animals for sustenance think about and articulate such things.

Second is the belief, which is extremely widespread in native North America, in reincarnation. For example, some native people in the eastern subarctic believed that beaver, treated properly, would return to be killed by the hunter. Proper treatment did not mean (until recent times) conservation western twentieth-century style; instead it meant keeping menstruating women away from hunting weapons, speaking respectfully about the beaver and modestly about one’s success, placing the bones of the animal in a tree (away from dogs) or in the water—where (the latter), it was believed, flesh would re-clothe them–and the like. Failure to fulfill one’s reciprocal role in the relationship between hunter and prey meant that the prey would not return or would cease to come or that some affliction (e.g. illness) would visit the hunter. Much thought and behavior in the hunt, I would argue, is linked to the belief in reincarnation.

With regard to these first two points, it seems to me that much belief and behavior toward animals is directed not at atonement in response to guilt but at reciprocity and continuing a relationship guaranteeing the renewal of that on which one depends: a steady supply of animals so that human life will continue.

Third, Prof. Serpell’s piece is of necessity brief and his sources highly selective. There are surely examples of what from today’s vantage point would be branded mistreatment of animals. For example, some northern people (Inupiat) often treated juvenile and other mammals and birds in what might be considered cavalier fashion, from catching birds by snares that opened in their gullets to playing with animals trapped, caught, or snared. In past times other native people ran down every last animal—buffalo, for instance–corralled in a surround or fallen over a cliff, not to put them out of any misery they might have been in, and not out of any sense of atonement, but because they did not want a sentient animal to warn others of a trap that would then cease to be effective. If hunters were upset, it was because their very livelihood was under threat. Such examples, I believe, reflect not concern for “compassion” or the “rights” of animals as understood in the West today but need for the flesh and other products of animals that guarantee human existence. Thus if there is any focus is on human needs they have to do with subsistence and livelihood, with materiality, not with guilt or atonement.

Fourth, it would be interesting to bring human beings under the lens here. One’s enemies are often on a different human plane than one’s kin; they are not “real people.” How do human beings treat other human beings considered not as the real people but as others? There are multiple examples from both the archaeological and ethnographic record of aggression, torture, and mutilation of corpses. There are cases in the archaeological record of what looks like the extermination of an entire community. Cannibalism, both ritual and, some argue, gustatory, is far from unknown. Might consideration of these cases sharpen the analysis of those that pertain to non-human animals alone, if only in contrast?

I thank Prof. Serpell for his provocative thoughts. As Claude Lévi-Strauss mentioned in a different context in his classic work Le totémisme aujourd’hui, animals are indeed good for contemplation.

After the idea of guardian animals had been set, (and its anxiety coping mechanism that Serpell’s essay talked about) the rest of the religious beliefs can come from other explanations. Certain people may have gotten sick (either because they were allergic or because of coincidence) and that may have brought about the idea of individualistic animal guardians (each person having their own guardian animal that they could only rarely eat). Overall the tribes and their ritualistic views are a perfect way for one culture to justify the killing of animals (again, helping them to cope with the act of killing something living) and for them to stop over-hunting (whether they realized that’s what they were doing or not).

Serpell analyzes the effect totemism has on animal populations. Because each individual is only assigned one animal, a significant amount of meat will not be left uneaten while we are facing food shortages. At the same time, an individual is still able to provide their share of moral compensation for the killing and consumption of animals. Each individual’s share of moral compensation adds up so that from a utilitarian perspective totemism seems justified. However on an individual level the practice seems arbitrary. What qualities in your totem give is precedence over other animals. And how can this be different for each individual?

Serpell’s argument also causes us to question the reason for humans to consume meat in the first place. There are a surprising number of qualities that humans have in common with herbivores that support the fact that humans are meant to be vegetarians. For example, the intestines of carnivores are only 3 times their body length so that rotting meat will exit the body more rapidly. However both humans and herbivores have an intestinal track between 10 and 12 times as long as their bodies.

Many vegetarians are animal rights activists and have major problems with the cruel methods used to kill animals. However, there does not seem to be as much of an issue with the actual act of consuming the animal. Modern society is tailored to allow humans to think only about consuming an animal, not the act of killing it. For example, we can simply go to the grocery store, buy our meat, and cook it on the stove. If an individual had to kill an animal in order to consume it, it is likely that there would be more vegetarians in the world.

In his essay Serpell brings up the customs of different societies and cultures and how they recognize certain animals. In totemic societies, a certain respect or affinity is acquired based on what clan they were born into or where they were born geographically. In a “guardian spirit” culture, a person is born with [or acquires] a special connection to a specific species. Serpell’s argument does seem to work well with these types of societies in the not too distant past or isolated communities today, however I don’t know how they translate to the present. Today different customs are practiced and still some feel apprehensive about killing and eating animals. For those who still consider eating animals taboo, it is much rather what Serpell mentioned earlier in his essay, that humans are able to build an emotional relationship, however distant it may be, with animals and sympathize with them. This quality seems to be an exclusive human quality; as Serpell referenced Franz De Waal in his essay, even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, seem not to show any sympathy as they tear apart the limbs of prey animals. A main question I have after that statement is: does this exclusive quality to sympathize make humans morally superior to any other animal? Also, if we were to find evidence of a sympathizing emotion in other animals, would that give them the same moral standing?

I also believe that the disconnect between animal and food in today’s society has lead many people to forget about the actual killing of animals. They are completely disconnected from the “business” end of the production and only see what they are about to put into their mouths. This removes an incredible amount of responsibility from the person and allows them to go about eating without any consideration for the animal. I believe if more people got a chance to sympathize with these animals by witnessing their demise, they would feel much more obligated to prevent it.

At the same time, others seem to consume animals they consider akin to themselves without obvious anxiety over it. Cormier (2003) describes the Guaja foragers of Amazonia and their common practice of keeping monkeys as pets and also as a major food source. They consider monkeys to be part of their kin network, and even raise monkeys as human children frequently, so consuming them is a sort of symbolic cannibalism. I believe that the same individual monkeys that are kept as pets are never consumed, so perhaps the habit of keeping some as children in the home could be interpreted as reconciliation for those that are eaten.

–
Cormier, Loretta A. 2003. Kinship with Monkeys: The Guajá Foragers of Eastern Amazonia. New York: Columbia University Press

Meijaard, E., et al. 2011. Quantifying Killing of Orangutans and Human-Orangutan Conflict in Kalimantan, Indonesia. PLoS One 6(11): e27491

For the most part, Americans have little idea where their meat comes from. The production and distribution of meat has become so complex and widespread that it is almost impossible to trace it back to its origin. In such a system, the consumers form no real connection to the animals they are eating. They probably did not raise the cow, pig, or bird, and therefore have no understanding of its behaviors or tendencies. They only know it as the burger on their plate or the bacon in their pan. For this reason, the majority of Americans feel no moral responsibility for the deaths of these animals. The blood, so to speak, is not on their hands. It is easy to pass responsibility on to the farmer or to the workers at the processing plant or even to other consumers. Without witnessing the life of the animals and the killing process, consumers do not feel morally accountable for buying and eating meat.

Further up the product chain, however, things may be a bit different. As Serpell mentioned in his essay, farmers can sometimes form attachments to certain animals and not want to slaughter them. When there is an opportunity to witness the lives of the animals and understand their thoughts and behaviors, humans feel more morally responsible for their well-being.

I believe that the closer one is to the animals in their lives and in their deaths, the more morally responsible one feels for them. In our consumerist society, we often fall into an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. We feel no need to employ the coping mechanisms described in Serpell’s essay because we do not see ourselves as directly responsible for ending the animals’ lives.

I think, therefore, that there may be an additional component to the origin of these rituals that Serpell hasn’t considered. Circumstances or behaviors that are dangerous — that put one at risk — are often surrounded by rituals which are an attempt to control the uncontrollable and unpredictable outcome of such behaviors. I would submit that any interaction with something that is highly desirable and prized is likely to be fraught with dangers that are real and tangible. Dependency upon certain species as food — as the needed antidote to starvation — certainly involves a considerable element of risk. If the dependent is consciously aware of the danger — of failure, of going hungry, of being injured in the process of obtaining the “prize”, of incurring jealousy within the group — then developing rituals to try to combat these dangers would seem logical and functional. Like the athlete who wears his lucky socks, the ritual may not have any tangible effect on the outcome of seeking the prize, other than increased confidence.

By this line of argument, being grateful and respectful for success would seem to be a safeguard or an obeisance offered to the god or power (or …) who has granted success. In tangible reality, these rituals may in fact be more about the other humans in the group and their needs, wants, reactions than about any presumed deity.

In 1964, Edmund Leach wrote a paper about animal categories and abuse that drew a parallel between the categories of sexual access and those of edibility. Although this classic article has been criticized, I continue to feel Leach made an important and valid point. Even as what is suitable for eating is regulated by rituals, laws, and so on, so is sexual access. Leach’s main point was that the distance from the actor (eater or sexual participant) increased, the suitability of access also increased until a distance was achieved that rendered the object too foreign, too wild, too unpredictable

At the risk of oversimplifying Leach’s message, I will explain further. Sex (or marriage, depending upon what that means) is a dangerous situation that leaves one or both actors vulnerable to injury, whether social, financial, or physical. The individuals closest to the actor — his or her nuclear family — are taboo as sex partners; they are too closely identified with the self. Slightly more distant individuals, such as close cousins, clan sisters, and so on, can be bedded under controlled circumstances. The ideal sexual partner is a neighbor, someone familiar, someone like the actor’s family, but not kin. Those who are still more distant can be bedded with still more prohibitions and cautions. Foreigners, wild tribes, savages and the like are again prohibited.

Where Leach’s brilliance shines is in recognizing that a similar set of prohibitions pertains to edibility. The animals closest to us are family: our pets. They literally cohabit with us and are both physically and emotionally close to us. Dogs and cats, the two most common pets, were domesticated to be our working partners: essentially much the same as or family. Dogs were, I believe, domesticated as hunting partners; cats were hunters who worked for us but rarely with us. (This is not the place to go into the reciprocity involved in domestication; suffice it to say that reciprocity and mutual benefit was key.) Pets are simply too close to be eaten.

The next category might be called livestock. Horses, with which one works in great physical intimacy, are edible under some circumstances. For example, modern horse breeders in Iceland — thoroughly Western, civilized, educated people — cull substandard foals and eat them every year. Other domestic animals that are somewhat more distant from humans but are still kept and regularly interacted with by humans, are supremely edible. Even then, there may be conditions (such as immaturity and/or castration) to be met before eating these domesticates is thoroughly “safe.” Local game is Leach’s next category, which can be hunted and eaten but which are again, subject to regulations (such as breeding state, age, time of year and so on). Accounts of medieval practices of hunting, such as Master of the Game — the earliest known book on hunting — are full of rituals and behaviors that must be adhered to in order to make the hunt successful and the game edible at its end. Finally, the animals most socially distant to humans — wild animals, including unknown or rarely seen animals from strange and foreign places — are not approved for consumption or require extensive rituals before one dare to eat them.

The parallel between categories of edibility and of sexuality — jokes aside — suggests strongly that this act of setting up rules, regulations and rituals according to distance from oneself is based on the common elements of importance and danger that both sex and eating involve.

In short, I find Serpell’s argument that one of the functions of doting on particular animals as a means of dissipating guilt at the way we treat others may indeed be correct. However, I think the guilt at killing another animal to eat is a relatively recent phenomenon, not an ancestral condition. FEAR at killing (or bedding) another is, to my mind, more primal and more likely to have given rise to the morass of rituals, taboos, prescriptions, rules and regulations concerning eating animals.

Reference cited

Leach, E.R. 1964. Anthropological Aspects of Language; Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse. In E.H. Lenneberg, ed., New Directions in the Study of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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