# Whether humans are animals or not **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 26, 2018, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760 "2018-12-26T23:07:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/21 "2018-12-27T03:15:43Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > Are you asking about biology, philosophy, or something else? Biologically, there’s no coherent argument that humans are not animals. Philosophically, or legally, there may be, but those are entirely different conversations. Philosophy mainly. I.e., there has always been the debate - do animals have souls? (Always phrased as humans have souls.) ---
**Author:** ![WernhamHogg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/a587f6/32.png) [@WernhamHogg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WernhamHogg)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/22 "2018-12-27T03:20:02Z")
The earth is a planet. It is a celestial body in orbit around a star. Is there a nearly infinite list of things that make it measurably different than other planets? Yes there is. Does the earth have special status in pretty much all aspects of earthling life, that is reflected in the inventions of earthlings? Unsurprisingly, it does. Go figure. Let’s all ponder this great mystery of why earthlings give the earth special consideration in a separate thread. Does any of that have the slightest bearing on whether or not the earth is a planet? Does it make the earth in any way more than, less than, or something other than a planet? No. ---
**Author:** ![JB99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/439d5e/32.png) [@JB99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JB99)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/23 "2018-12-27T03:37:25Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > So every society considers there to be something about humans that makes us different than animals - and even in places like Auschwitz, the SS guards had to be really dehumanized (or rather, dehumanize their victims.) Some animals are more equal than others. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/24 "2018-12-27T03:39:19Z")
I didn’t vote, because I fully agree with both choices. ---
**Author:** ![Civil\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d78d45/32.png) [@Civil\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Civil_Guy)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/25 "2018-12-27T03:58:12Z")
Physically, no question. Head, body, limbs. Eyes, nose, ears, mouth. Fur, like many animals. Come to that, similar internal organs. Eat, reproduce. To the OP’s binary question, I said ‘yes’. We don’t look much like other animals, but other animals don’t look much like other animals. But yeah, you can get us to do things you just can’t get other animals to do. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/26 "2018-12-27T04:02:58Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Well, there are the legal norms of virtually every nation and society since ancient times. Every society has treated the killing of animals (such as pigs, chickens, fish, etc.) as being of far less severity than killing a human - if such a thing were even bad (being able to hunt vast numbers of animals was a source of pride for many). Wolves don’t mourn the deer, sheep, rabbits, etc that they kill but they don’t cotton to some wolf killing the rest of the pack either. Hell, for that matter, we don’t question if dogs and cats are animals but you’ll get a lot more blowback for your cat fur ranch than you would for a pork farm. _All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others_ 😉 ---
**Author:** ![snoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@snoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snoe)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/27 "2018-12-27T04:08:45Z")
For a literary treatment of this question, check out Coetzee’s “The Lives of Animals.” A philosophy lecture by a novelist in the form of a novella about a novelist who gives a philosophy lecture — on animals, and their status under law and in our culture. PDF of the text: [https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/\_documents/a-to-z/c/Coetzee99.pdf](https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/Coetzee99.pdf) And yes, IMHO: we’re animals, and our failure to keep that in mind is one of our many failures as a species. ---
**Author:** ![Drunky\_Smurf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drunky_smurf/32/449_2.png) [@Drunky\_Smurf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Drunky_Smurf)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/28 "2018-12-27T04:17:47Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > do animals have souls? Some do. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/29 "2018-12-27T04:31:59Z")
> [@Drunky\_Smurf](#): > > Some do. No such thing. ---
**Author:** ![snoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@snoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snoe)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/30 "2018-12-27T04:32:45Z")
> [@Drunky\_Smurf](#): > > Some do. From Coetzee: > [@](#): > > “What is it like to be a bat? Before we can answer such a question, Nagel suggests, we need to be able to experience bat-life through the sense-modalities of a bat. But he is wrong; or at least he is sending us down a false trail. To be a living bat is to be full of being; **being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being.** Bat-being in the first case, human-being in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. **To be full of being is to live as a body-soul.** One name for the experience of full being is joy. > “ **To be alive is to be a living soul. An animal — and we are all animals — is an embodied soul.** This is precisely what Descartes saw and, for his own reasons, chose to deny. An animal lives, said Descartes, as a machine lives. An animal is no more than the mechanism that constitutes it; if it has a soul, it has one in the same way that a machine has a battery, to give it the spark that gets it going; but the animal is not an embodied soul, and the quality of its being is not joy. > “ ‘Cogito ergo sum,’ he also famously said. It is a formula I have always been uncomfortable with. **It implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second- class. To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being — not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation — a heavily affective sensation — of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world.** This fullness contrasts starkly with Descartes’s key state, which has an empty feel to it: the feel of a pea rattling around in a shell. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 5:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/31 "2018-12-27T05:51:55Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Philosophy mainly. I.e., there has always been the debate - do animals have souls? (Always phrased as humans have souls.) Oh, jeez - well I misinterpreted your OP. I was a biology student, so I always think in those terms first. I voted yes because biologically of course we are animals. But I am not an animal rights extremist, so no in a philosophical/legal sense. ---
**Author:** ![Drunky\_Smurf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drunky_smurf/32/449_2.png) [@Drunky\_Smurf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Drunky_Smurf)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 6:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/32 "2018-12-27T06:32:23Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > No such thing. Unheard of. > [@snoe](#): > > From Coetzee: Are you talking about Bill or Jeff Coetzee? Because I grew up with them boys and they are nuttier than a squirrel with nuts in their mouths. ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 6:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/33 "2018-12-27T06:44:55Z")
It’s like how history is written by the victors. We are only separate from the “animals” because we say so. If you could ask a moose or a tuna they might opine that humans are animals, just like the rest. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 7:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/34 "2018-12-27T07:13:09Z")
Are humans monkeys? If you exclude humans from _Aminals_, then _Animals_ becomes paraphyletic, but the same is true for _Monkeys_. (But this “reasoning” fails. _Fish_ becomes paraphyletic with mammals et al excluded.) ---
**Author:** ![nelliebly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nelliebly/32/5422_2.png) [@nelliebly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nelliebly)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 7:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/35 "2018-12-27T07:46:49Z")
Are you asking whether human animals are somehow special and superior to other animals? Because for the life of me, I can’t see how we’re not animals. I can see, however, that some of us believe human animals have souls or more intrinsic worth than other animals. ---
**Author:** ![Isamu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7c8e57/32.png) [@Isamu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isamu)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 7:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/36 "2018-12-27T07:58:34Z")
> [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > Of course humans are animals, have you ever lived with one? > > Even the females fart in bed. Girls don’t fart! :smack: ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 8:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/37 "2018-12-27T08:27:17Z")
Also, the OP is a trick question. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/38 "2018-12-27T12:18:58Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > Oh, jeez - well I misinterpreted your OP. I was a biology student, so I always think in those terms first. I voted yes because biologically of course we are animals. But I am not an animal rights extremist, so no in a philosophical/legal sense. Biologically, “chickens” are more different from “dogs” than “people” are from “animals”. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/39 "2018-12-27T13:45:27Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > In a biology class or textbook, our special is a member of the animal kingdom. In all other contexts, which is to say 99% of those that matter, humans are not animals. This is blatantly obvious, and the fact that anyone disputes it is a clear example of the moral and logical confusion that so many otherwise smart people live in. > > People have the right to vote. Cows do not. > > A jury consists of twelve humans, not nine humans and three zebras. > > Humans can receive Social Security and other such benefits. Turtles can’t. > > Humans are entitled to an education. Fish aren’t. > > Anyone with a brain could continue this list at great length. Since one of the definitions of _animal_ is “pertaining to the physical, sensual, or carnal nature of humans, rather than their spiritual or intellectual nature”, saying that humans are animals leaves out something important. All that makes us a specific kind of animal: the animal which (usually) wears clothes. And your examples don’t even cover all humans, not even all humans nowadays or all humans in your own country nowadays. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2018, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760/40 "2018-12-27T13:52:55Z")
The only thing more conclusive than the outcome of a Dope poll on scientific/pseudoscientific questions is an Italian court ruling. :dubious: If you don’t believe humans are animals, just visit a “family” restaurant. :eek: [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whether-humans-are-animals-or-not/826760.md?page=3)