Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good and Evil
Masson (Dogs Make Us Human, 2011) has written extensively about emotions in animals and what studying animals can teach us about being human. Here he examines the negative emotion, anger, and its manifestation as aggression. Humans often refer to each other as animals, meaning that the other person’s behavior is dangerous or cruel, but how true is this characterization? Masson argues that the comparison is not at all apt, that we display much more violence and cruelty against our own species than any other animal on the planet, and that we can actually learn to change by observing the purported “beasts” that share our world. Examining such human endeavors as war, exploitation, and hatred, Masson delineates the differences between humans and other animals and points out that we are the only species that ever shows these behaviors. Even the supposedly positive human traits of kindness and altruism, which we like to think separate us from the “beasts,” have been frequently demonstrated in other species. Heavily footnoted and with an extensive bibliography, this one will make you think about the definition of human. --Nancy Bent