The Animal That Therefore I am (Following) by Jacques Derrida is a very strange story, at first. As I read on I got a better understanding of what he was talking about. At first I was confused about the whole thing about his cat seeing him naked, but the cat is naked, so why would he run off. But as I read on I started to realize that everything in this world is naked except for humans. Humans only put clothes on because we think that it is what we are suppose to be doing.
But that is besides the point. The thing I am going to focus on from this story is the fact of how people perceive animals and the relationship between Humans and Animals. Humans and animals are supposedly different even though sometimes humans are referred to as being "animals". Even though what actually makes it being "animals" and not something else? A quote from the Oxford English Dictionary, said by Helps, says, "When I use the word 'animals' I mean all living creatures except men and women"(230). Now here shows that humans have definitely tried to draw a line between them and animals even though I am not so certain that we are any different at all.
In the passage they discuss how Alice "seems, at this moment at least, to believe that one can in fact discern and decide between a human 'yes' and 'no'"(219). It's interesting that this is discussed because before this Derrida was discussing how Alice wished that a cat could purr and meow for yes or no to tell her the answer when she would talk to cats. We sometimes don't realize that animals have a sense for yes and no and that they do try to let us know how they feel about certain things, even if we can't understand them or even if we choose not to. If you think about it don't pets and animals let us know when they do not like something or love something by either showing us some kind of affection about what we have done? My dog Max use to love the little kibble shaped meat that came in his food but wouldn't eat anything else and we knew this because he would push all of his other food on the ground and just eat the red pieces of meat. So what really does set us apart from "animals"? Walking around, communication, higher brain activity? But wasn't there at some time or another when animals and humans lived at equal levels and both had to do the same amount of work as the other just to get by in life? You know, before the industrial age. Farmers had to push plows up and down fields and they "recruited" horses to help them do the work.
A quote from the Oxford English Dictionary under the world Empathy really struck me as a great quote. "It is true that in both sympathy and empathy we permit our feelings for others to become involved"(242). It makes you think about how human rights and feelings started getting involved. When people stopped thinking about themselves and started thinking about the rest of the world and the rest of the creatures that are on this earth, it made people sympathize and empathize with animals needs. Derrida started talking about how man named animals and so man feels like it has the power over animals. That animals are treated the way they are treated because man has that right to do so. But I very much disagree. "the animal is without the right and power to 'respond' and hence without many other things that would be the property of man" (228). We have put this catch-all concept on the term "the Animal", but I mean this category is just a category. If you look deeper into the term their are many different creatures that deserve the honor and respect that we humans get.
Bentham said it best when he said, "Can they suffer" (227)? And the answer is of course they can. So don't they deserve the same rights as anyone else who suffers? In the story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip Dick, he talks about how having an animal, in a time when animals were scarce, was an authority figure. That having an animal means that you are rich and that you have made something of yourself. Now in the story if you didn't take care of your animal people look down on you and a little after the war it was a crime. "But they'll look do
wn on you. Not all of them, but some. You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and anti-empathic"(13). If only this was how society was in real life. If people helped take care of the animals on this planet and treated them more on an equal level instead of humans showing there superiority over them; then there would be less cruelty to any type of animal and we wouldn't have to worry about endangered species or anything.I just feel that animals of all types should have some kind of civil laws with humans and since we are the more advanced race maybe we should be setting them to help out later on in life. What if there isn't a world with real animals and you had to buy robotic ones to replace them in the world? That would make us empathize with the creatures because they wouldn't be around anymore.
