A topic the writer and thinker is well-known for. Berger describes the how a wild animal may look at in the same way as they look at another animal-wary and without comprehension. Meaning that their view of us didn't set us apart, but rather it was our view of them. Throughout history animal has been related to nearly every creation story. In fact, they only exacerbate our nostalgia of real interaction with the animal world. Both pets and animals in zoos are kept in an unnatural environment: castrated, fed artificial foods, limited in space and sex.
The collection also includes the essay A Philosopher and Death , in which Berger describes the day he spent with Marxist thinker and politician Ernst Fischer in Styria, Austria—the last day in the life of his friend, with whom he shared many of his views. John Berger — is an English writer, painter and art critic. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them. Berger laments:. In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared.
Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy. Berger goes on to trace how animals went from caves to carts to cages. The Industrial Revolution gave us the internal combustion engine, which displaced draught animals from both streets and factories. But while this was undoubtedly an upgrade for both animal rights and human productivity, removing animals from our view was detrimental to our sense of shared everyday reality.
Meanwhile, as urbanization and industrialization spread, the extinction of wildlife continued removing animals from that reality — more than that, it forcibly denied them the chance to share it with us and instead confined them to the artificial reality of the zoo. Berger draws an unsettling parallel:. This reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units.
Indeed, during this period an approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man. Noting that at the time of his writing the United States was home to an estimated 40 million dogs, 40 million cats, 15 million cage birds and 10 million other pets, Berger contextualizes our compulsion for domestic animal companionship:. The practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness, the keeping, exactly, of pets in the 16th century the word usually referred to a lamb raised by hand is a modern innovation, and, on the social scale on which it exists today, is unique.
It is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit, decorated or furnished with mementoes from the outside world, which is such a distinguishing feature of consumer societies. Equally important is the way the average owner regards his pet. Children are, briefly, somewhat different. The pet completes him, offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed. He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else.
Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react as though it, too, recognizes this. The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected. But, since in this relationship the autonomy of both parties has been lost the owner has become the-special-man-he-is-only-to-his-pet, and the animal has become dependent on its owner for every physical need , the parallelism of their separate lives has been destroyed. Monkeys are nearly extinct in Indonesia. Many people all over the world go to animal shelters or even shelters in the zoos, not knowing what the animals in there are there for.
Some maybe in there for animal neglection from humans, other animals, or even animal testing. Many people judge him for his experiments on these animals. They said that they were animal cruelty , because Harry mentioned that he didn 't like animals and didn 't care for them.
But did people realize what was the outcome of these experiments. The separation of a mother changes you. Reproducing animals for sale, it is a selfish business where they are only contributing to the animal proliferation. The animals like cats and dogs dies in shelters just to the reason of the reproduction done by breeders. Animals feel pain and they suffer while being tested on, and it is not right for us to imprison and abuse them.
Animal researching should be outlawed in the United States because there are other alternatives, it is unethical, and does not always provides a reliable result. What many people do not realize is that various alternatives to animal testing exist and it is not a necessity to tests on them. Rather than exposing animals to painful tests- other means of experimentation, as well as food, cosmetic, and drug testing are an option.
Things such as human-patient simulators, computer modeling, and human research volunteers can easily take the place of animals "Alternatives to Animal Testing" PETA. Essays Essays FlashCards.
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