A little while ago, I went for a walk and spotted a frog in the middle of the pavement. I stopped and squealed – partly because I live in London and the closest I’ve ever come to wildlife is living in mould-infested flats, but also because I was worried he’d get squashed.

Before I could figure out how to ensure the safety of my new slimy friend – who I quickly named Kermit – two men walked around the corner. I ushered them to walk to one side as I pointed at Kermit. One of them laughed, and, in a French accent (which didn’t alarm me until afterwards when I realised his potential appetite for frogs) said: “Oh, don’t worry. She’ll find her way back to safety.”

As I walked away, I realised he’d referred to Kermit as a “she”, when I’d assumed he was a “he”. I wondered if my tendency to think of animals as male had anything to do with the English language, so I asked a French person.

“If I saw a dog walk past,” Jesse said, “I would be more likely to say ‘he’ was cute. A frog, for me, is a she: une grenouille, the same way a spider is une araignée.”

French dog lovers might not instinctively think of Lupin as female. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
French dog lovers might not instinctively think of Lupin as female. Photograph: David Marsh
As well as the English speaker’s freedom to determine the sex of a new animal, we have another unquestioned animal norm: talking to and about animals as if they’re human. We might call a parrot mouthy, a dolphin happy or a shark evil; this unconscious anthropomorphic habit is ingrained in our language.

I spoke to George McGavin, an academic and TV presenter on shows including the BBC’s Monkey Planet. For such an animal-obsessive, even he struggles with his own anthropomorphic tendencies. As soon as we began talking he was ruminating aloud over calling an orangutan cute, and how unprofessional it was.

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“It’s hard not to fall into the trap of saying an animal is sad or happy. We don’t know for sure – we bring into it how we would feel. We say elephants are sad when grieving their parents because this is how we would feel in that situation.

“We want to bring our own experience into the narrative we tell ourselves about animals, and assume they feel emotions.”

At this point in the conversation it was difficult not to think of McGavin as slightly cold, even if he was making complete sense. But then he said: “I try not to be anthropomorphic at work, but I am at home with my cat,” who he likes to think of as a cuddle-loving, intelligent creature who’s not just in it for the food.

If McGavin had begun with this confession, I’d have thought nothing of it. But after everything he’d said, I realised how we swing between rational thinking and the automatic, ingrained ways we talk about our furry friends. Lila Gleitman, a US professor of psychology and linguistics, admits: “Though I always think of dogs as males and cats as females, I also know that can’t really be so.”

Just in it for the food? Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Just in it for the food? Photograph: Alamy
In the zoology world, anthropomorphising is met with disdain. In an interview, David Attenborough denied being an animal lover for this reason. But the rest of us can be forgiven for attributing human tendencies to animals, for using words idiosyncratic to our world to tell their stories. Language is there to help us make sense of the world, after all.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says humans are “very much at the mercy” of language, and speakers of different languages think and see the world differently. Because animals don’t have a language, we extend ours to them – helping us understand them better and fit into the world as we see it.

Some of the very first words we learn are animal noises: among the alphabet and numbers were woofs, moos and meows. Alongside “mum” and “potty” we learned “cat” and “dog”. Surely we can be excused for permeating the animal world with our own language, for filling its relative silence with our explanations. You never know: perhaps the animal kingdom has its own narrative about us.

 

Jessica Brown
Friday 13 March 2015 08.00 GMT