Assigning human qualities to animals is dangerous for them — and for us.
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This February news sites around the world shared footage of a rarely seen black seadevil anglerfish who took the internet by storm. The bizarre deep-sea animals, who have a bioluminescent “fishing lure” used to draw prey toward their fang-like teeth, normally live in complete darkness at depths of up to 4,900 feet below sea level. When this one was spotted near the Canary Islands, people quickly started speculating about why and how the creature had made such an extreme vertical ascent. Some got sentimental and poetic about the fish’s experience, making remarks about how the fish finally got to see other lights — the sun — besides its own before its demise.
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And yes, the fish died not long after.
Beyond the bizarre phenomenon, the way people reacted to and interpreted the fish’s unusual behavior is worth unpacking, because what seemed like an effort to empathize with the fish turned instead into something more troubling: anthropomorphism, a fancy term for attributing human characteristics to nonhuman entities.
The case of the black seadevil anglerfish illustrates the problem. The species’ name is a poetic allusion to notions of demons and fishermen — two very human concepts we impose on a fish that knows neither. Their natural habitat is the twilight zone of the deep ocean, where sunlight doesn’t reach. Creatures inhabiting this zone have developed fascinating ways to adapt to extreme conditions: high pressures, frigid temperatures, and never-ending darkness.
The wayward seadevil had no reason to swim so close to the surface as long as it was doing fine in its habitat, except that it probably wasn’t. Some experts speculated that it might have eaten a smaller fish with a gas-filled swim bladder (which could force the seadevil to go upward uncontrollably), while others thought it was either sick, stressed, injured, or escaping a predator.
Those expert theories are plausible, so why did so many of us instead romanticize the fish’s unusual behavior? People got so emotional over the fish’s fate that they made poems, comics, and even artworks that proposed the fish wished to see the sun, wanted to be understood, or was on a sort of philosophical journey to find something bigger than its own life.
While that speaks volume about our capacity to try to sympathize with other beings, it raises important questions: Is it true? Is it accurate? And more importantly, is it necessary? This was my genuine concern when scrolling through all the comments and contents regarding the black seadevil.
Don’t get me wrong: I was an animal lover before I became a science journalist, so I always have a soft spot for animals. Still, I know that anthropomorphizing a fish found far from its home range is not a good idea. “That fish was probably dying” was my first thought when I saw the footage.
Instead of anthropomorphizing, we should instead try to understand animals based on how they experience the world with their own senses. Empathy should be the goal. Instead of making assumptions like, “If it were me, I would have felt uncomfortable too,” we should try asking a different question: “I wonder how it feels for them?”
This fundamental framework is the central theme of Ed Yong’s book An Immense World. Through its pages Yong tries to explain the philosophical concept of Umwelt, which posits that animals experience the world differently from us because they rely on different and often enhanced senses to navigate their surroundings.
In other words, sensory stimuli that might feel normal to us — like bright lights or loud sounds — might be overwhelming to other animals.
That is why it’s so problematic when we try to understand animals’ experience by generalizing our own sensory experiences; it risks overlooking or mischaracterizing the distressing signs the animals may be displaying.
There are other reasons, too. Research has suggested that the popularity of Pixar Animation’s Finding Nemo movie may have spurred overfishing of reefs. Other researchers have cited how North American raccoons were imported to Japan as pets due to the popularity of the 1977 cartoon series Rascal Raccoon, which anthropomorphized the animals as harmless, cute and humorous — none of which is true, at least from the raccoons’ point of view. As a result of this pet craze, raccoons became an invasive species in Japan and damaged crops and fruits, as well as preying on native species. Researchers believe that it was partly due to the cartoon’s misrepresentation of raccoons’ nature as wild animals that caused the human-raccoon conflict in the first place.
Anthropomorphizing certain species creates another problem: It establishes a narrative suggesting that other species we care less about aren’t worth protecting — or in some cases, even need to be exterminated. This was the case with the imperial parrot, the flagship species of the Caribbean Island of Dominica. It got so much attention that Dominicans started to disregard the conservation efforts of its sister species, the red-necked parrot. What’s more, the red-necked parrot was portrayed as an antithesis to the imperial parrot — and researchers were concerned that such a narrative could even lead to the culling of the parrot’s population.
Yet another drawback of anthropomorphizing one species over another is that we can forego conservation efforts for species that don’t necessarily win our heart for their cute demeanor.
In many cases we don’t even realize it when we anthropomorphize animals. For example, we interpret the upturned mouths of snakes, dolphins, and chimpanzees as smiling expressions, with dangerous consequences.
While some of this is harmless, it can also lead to subtle consequences that endanger both animals and humans. For example, tourists in destinations like Ubud, Bali, feed monkeys because they appear cute and remind them of human babies. As a result, the monkeys no longer fear humans. Problems arise when these monkeys turn aggressive and start, as one magazine recently wrote, “stealing” tourists’ personal belongings. (Even the way the news is written screams anthropomorphism because it assumes that a monkey understands the concept of “stealing.”)
Our motives are usually good, and understandable. Anthropomorphism helps us make sense of nonhuman behavior that might otherwise seem scary or confusing. In some cases it may even make us care about living beings we would otherwise ignore or even harm. But we should resist the temptation, because it creates more risks than benefits.
Promoting empathy toward animals, on the other hand, retains all the potential benefits of anthropomorphism without the dangers.
One way to cultivate empathy is to consider how animals would normally behave if they were in their natural state. For instance, if a wild dolphin or orca swims dozens of miles each day, imagine how it must feel for them to be confined in a pool — no matter how big the pool looks to us.
It’s of course very hard to understand animals’ experience when we don’t even know what the world looks like to them and how they perceive it. While biologists work to find this out, the least we can do is to resist the temptation to impose our own senses and feelings on life forms that are profoundly different from us. By avoiding the trap of anthropomorphism, we can make room for empathy built on the recognition that we really do not know what they’re going through.
As for the black seadevil, the anglerfish lived and eventually perished on its own terms, not ours — and that should be enough.
This story by Miriam Bahagijo was originally published by The Revelator and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. WhoWhatWhy has been a partner in Covering Climate Now since its inception in 2019.
