When One Animal Changes a Human’s Mind

Over the past week or so, my X feed has been overtaken by Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippopotamus whose glistening skin, jaunty trot, and rippling neck rolls have won the internet’s devotion. A Washington Post article last week tried to explain the young calf’s popularity, citing scientific evidence for how the cuteness of animals “hijacks our brains,” similar to the way a baby’s adorable features “strike at people’s ingrained nurturing instinct”—an evolutionary advantage that has helped humans survive.

But human attitudes toward other creatures are far more complicated than the latest internet frenzy would suggest. On the one hand, human affection for animals, which often manifests in their anthropomorphization, is well documented. As early as 1874, The Atlantic published an article asking whether they have souls. (Since then, our writers have asked how smart animals are, whether they love us, and how they think.) On the other hand, many people still believe that other species are lesser beings—to be kept in zoos or in homes as pets, to be eaten, to test drugs on.

Since its founding, The Atlantic has examined how thinking on animal welfare and rights has developed. A 1976 article by James Fallows, for instance, reflects the cognitive dissonance that many people rely on when it comes to animals. Like many other Americans, Fallows reckoned, he’d never eat his own pets, but had no compunction about digging into a steak dinner. He also predicted that that worldview might soon be out of vogue. As he wrote, “It is not just the environmentalists who have been speaking up, with their warnings that the wild kingdom is in peril, but a new and more vociferous movement, asserting that all animals, even the most abundant and least charming of them, have been denied their rights to health and happiness by an inconsiderate human race.”

Nearly 30 years earlier, The Atlantic published “Death of a Pig,” an essay by E. B. White in which he tells the story of a pig who stole his heart. White writes that he had become accustomed, over the years, to buying a pig in the spring, feeding it over the summer and fall, then slaughtering it for meat in the winter. He never questioned the practice, believing the killing to be “quick and skillful,” while the “smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.”

That all changed with a particular pig, who, one day, didn’t turn up for his regular feeding. Alarmed, and believing his pig to be sick, White called an acquaintance, who called another, who instructed him to give the pig some castor oil and a soapy-water enema. White’s son turned the pig upside down so White could pour oil down his throat. “In the upset position the corners of his mouth had been turned down, giving him a frowning expression,” White writes, projecting human emotions onto the animal. “Back on his feet again, he regained the set smile that a pig wears even in sickness.” The pig didn’t get better, and over the next couple of days, White tended to him like a parent would a child—checking his ears for temperature, attempting to entice him with milk. Nothing seemed to work, and White’s mood declined precipitously; his “sympathies were now wholly with the pig.”

White’s sudden affection for a pig he’d been planning, up until that point, to eat, might seem incongruous. But it reflects the ambivalence many human beings feel toward animals, and sheds light on why we hate to see them in pain. As White writes, the pig “had suffered in a suffering world,” and his experience became “the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness.” He realized that “what could be true of my pig could be true also of the rest of my tidy world.”

Ultimately, these questions get to the heart of how humans perceive themselves. Are we, as the Bible suggests, the pinnacle of all God’s creation? What, really, distinguishes us from all of Earth’s other creatures? In a review of two books on the discovery of dinosaurs that we published this summer, Brenda Wineapple reflects on how the finding of the first fossil challenged the privileged place that humans believed they occupied in the grand scheme of life. Though evolution is now largely accepted as fact, it’s undeniable that humans still see themselves as the top of the pyramid: We still eat animals, and we still test our drugs on them.

In 1989, Steven Zak wrote about animal-rights activists who were trying to make people contend with the question of “whether animals, who are known to have feelings and psychological lives, ought to be treated as mere instruments of science.” In his essay, Zak asked the reader to consider a world where humans were prohibited from the use of “any animals to their detriment.” He mentions a 1988 study that found that scientists could, through the use of “current and prospective alternative techniques,” effectively use fewer animals in labs. Though progress has been made in the intervening years, a world free of animal testing has not come to pass. That would require an immense shift in worldview, wherein, as Zak writes, “instead of imagining that we have a divine mandate to dominate and make use of everything else in the universe, we could have a sense of belonging to the world and of kinship with the other creatures in it.”

This summer, I toured a sanctuary in the Catskills, which is home to hundreds of rescued farm animals. I met two pigs brought there by a farmer, who, having seen how his animals suffered, had a change of heart and is now in the vegetable business. I don’t know if White stopped raising pigs for meat. But four years after his “Death of a Pig” essay, he wrote Charlotte’s Web, the cherished children’s book about Wilbur, a lovable young pig, and Charlotte, the spider who saves him from slaughter. Near the end of the book, as autumn approaches, Charlotte tells Wilbur, “the leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world”—one that White’s pig never got the chance to see.