Plants and animals are not much like us, in some ways. They follow their own rules, in their own time. The initial encounter with an orderly system that isn’t human presents a very rich field for philosophy, especially as humans attempt to apply human ideas to the natural world. There are many books that present animals as just like people, and there are some books that capitalize on the strangeness of animals. But in the middle, there are books that lead one to wonder about how much we share with animals, how much our stories about them are wishful thinking and how much those stories reflect our unity with the rest of nature. Those are the stories that might open up helpful conversations, both about what it is to be human and about our appropriate relationships to non-human beings.
One of the most disquieting facts one encounters in studying nature is that nature operates on time scales and levels of size that are foreign to human beings. We get impatient with gardens for growing so slowly; changes in species happen over vast time spans; the interesting “action” in a garden may be visible only under a microscope. If we expect natural things to happen on our schedules and to be visible to a casual glance, we will often be disappointed. People need particular help to think about the differences that appear when one turns from everyday human life to biological time and biological space.
It is possible that, besides the differences in time-scale and size that make it hard for humans to understand animals and plants, there are other, deeper differences, so that some living things are just alien to us and to our strategies for flourishing. An investigation of the natural world will always consist in experiments in understanding, checked rigorously against what actually happens in nature. Of course, the questions, “How much can we understand?” and “What are the limits of our understanding?” are among the oldest and deepest philosophic questions; nature provides many examples for articulating these questions in new ways.
Here are examples of books highlighting differences between humans and particular animal species:
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Bear that Wasn't (1946/2010) by Arthur Frank Tashlin
Gareth B. Matthews
What happens when a bear wakes from hibernation to find his forest home has been replaced by a human factory? What if the bear can't convince the factory workers, vice presidents, or president that he is, in deed, a bear and shouldn't be put to work in the factory? In reviewing Frank Tashlin's The Bear that Wasn't, Gareth B. Matthews discovers philosophical themes including dreaming and skepticism, being and nonbeing, appearance and reality, and the foundations of knowledge.
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Big Fur Secret (1944) by Margaret Wise Brown
Maughn Gregory
This little-known book by Margaret Wise Brown follows a boy as he watches animals in a zoo, first just observing, then having fantasies about them: of putting squirrels in his pocket, lying down beside the panda, hugging the polar bear. But he always interrupts his fantasy: the squirrel wouldn’t like to be put in a pocket; he knows better than to lie down next to a panda or to hug a polar bear. The Big Fur Secret is importantly about animals, and about zoos, and about the ways people integrate defenseless beings into their projects and plots. But it is also about consciousness in a more general way: it encourages the reader (or listener) to stop short of speaking for somebody (or something) else – to hold on to the idea that how it is for us may be quite different from how it is for them.
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I'm Trying to Love Spiders (2019) by Bethany Barton
Peter Shea
This is one member of a series of books about trying to love things. In funny and engaging prose, it explores this important, usually neglected, action several ways, not all of which are successful for the narrator, whose 'natural' response to spiders is squashing. It opens lots of questions about getting beyond our first impulses.
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My Octopus Teacher (2020) directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed
Maughn Gregory
My Octopus Teacher combines a carefully structured love story with astonishing information about undersea life, documenting a year of encounters between a photographer and an octopus. It is important as a non-standard love story and as a reflection on the possibility of deep connection with non-human creatures.
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Possum that Didn't (1950/2016) by Arthur Frank Tashlin
Maughn Rollins Gregory and Peter Shea
The possum ‘that didn’t’ is a very contented animal who smiles in sunshine and rain, but when a group of human picnickers spot him hanging by his tail, they read his smile as a frown and call him stupid for insisting that he is happy. They decide to take him to the city to find amusement and, because he won’t climb down from the tree, they excavate it and transport tree and hanging possum together. Frank Tashlin's book goes philosophical in two different directions. One is the direction of satire: We laugh at humans taking a possum to a nightclub, but what do we really know about animal happiness? The other direction is existential: from the perspective of the possum, it dramatize the question: What do I do when I'm understood backwards over and over again—when the world I thought I lived in becomes unrecognizable?
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The Snail with the Right Heart (2021) by Maria Popova
Maughn Gregory
When a London scientist found a garden snail whose shell that spiraled left to right—opposite from others of its species—he sent it to the University of Nottingham for study. The snail’s internal organs were also arranged on the opposite side from other snails, including a heart on the right side of its body—a one-in-a-million condition known as situs inversus, which also occurs in humans. In explaining the snail’s story in terms of genetic evolution and biological reproduction, The Snail with the Right Heart also raises philosophical questions about the role of genetics, education, and personal choice in determining who we are, and about the ethics of accommodating and not accommodating genetic differences.
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Three Stories You Can Read to Your Cat (1997) by Sara Swan Miller
Gareth B. Matthews
When a cat's human friend leaves the house and tells it to be good, the cat does many things it considers good, like shredding the curtains, eating a house plant, and digging into the garbage. In this review, originally published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 16(4), 2003, Gareth B. Matthews demonstrates that young children can understand and enjoy the irony of sarcasm. They also enjoy grappling with the story's philosophical irony: the problem of clarifying the difficult question of what makes an action good or bad.