What it Means to Be Animal

And why it matters to tap into our animal selves

Welcome to Being Animal. This newsletter is a space to explore human-animal relationships. Through personal stories, commentary on current events, and thought-provoking debates, I hope to challenge your assumptions and deepen your understanding of how animals are treated in our society. How we treat animals matters—for our own health, for our planet, and for our sense of morality and humanity.

I want to make the world a better place for animals. To do this, we have to change how we think about animals.

The best place to start this newsletter is with ourselves, because after all, we’re animals, too.

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So many people believe humans are superior to animals. We assume animals are lesser beings, with less moral value than our fellow humans. These assumptions allow us to kill animals, discard them, manage them, and use them. But is it really so simple? Do we humans really exist on a separate plane, morally superior and impervious to what befalls the animals living all around us?

I never used to think about things like this, because it’s easy not to. But once I asked myself what it meant to be animal, my perspective on everything completely changed.

I used to be a dancer. I loved the feeling of moving through space. Every tiny detail—the placement of your hand, the arch of your back, the direction of your gaze—mattered for the visual story you were building onstage. I loved that precision. Through dance, I moved and cracked and found my body’s limits. I touched other people, arms passing around waists or grabbing hands or shoulders. I was lifted into the air, and I had to learn to balance my weight. It was intuitive, and not at all so, this body work. I loved rehearsing in a sweaty studio with other people, watching our bodies converge into one movement pattern in the mirror, then break apart when the music stopped. We were creating something magical, and ephemeral, every day.

But I was also someone who valued my brain above everything else. I put academics first, regularly foregoing time with friends to study. I worked hard. I wanted my intelligence to be what people admired about me. I wanted to be thoughtful, and smart, and capable.

I danced through college, but my prioritization of other things soon took over. I got a job and went to law school, continuing to rely on my brain. In this tradeoff, my body suffered. I studied late into the night, back hunched over a casebook and eyes aching from strain. Now I spend most days sitting at my desk, writing on a laptop, thinking about work, or my book draft, or research I still need to do. If you’re reading this, you’re probably doing something similar. It is so easy to get caught up in the idea that we are only what we think, what we produce, what our brains put out into the world.

But every single one of us has a body. Our bodies may look different, and they may all have different capabilities. But we all breathe air. We all eat food. We all have chemical reactions happening inside of us, neurons firing, nerves twitching. We are complex, unlikely amalgamations of cells, oozing and growing and consuming and excreting while we shuffle along the crust of this earth.

We are animals.

But for millennia, humans have been obsessed with proving we are not animals. We are different because we think, because we reason, because we communicate, we protest. Our thinking selves are our ensouled selves. The fact that we built languages, and code computers, and send rockets to the moon—that is what makes us human. We are special!

We are special, it’s true. Humans have an amazing breadth of abilities, and our brains have done miraculous and terrifying things. But still, the fundamental, inescapable truth is that we are animals, too. We are mammals, and primates, and we need to eat and drink and reproduce like every other species. We are held together by our bodies.

I feel the fact of my animality most when I am doing something physical. When I run long distances, I can feel my body operating as a machine. With every sip of water or bite of food, I replenish my fuel, and I can run a little longer, a little faster. When I danced, gasping for breath, I would feel a deep connection to the sinewy, tissue-y, unsavory parts of my being: pores sweating, organs pumping, muscles ripping and tendons pulling. Even just walking along the beach, I feel connected to the tidal pull of the salt water, feel the sand squishing between my toes. The whole scene is inhaling and exhaling with me, ebbing and flowing, giving and taking. We are one with the world around us, not separate from it, no matter how much we like to tell ourselves we are, no matter how much we insist we are rational, reasoning beings led by our brains and souls.  

Salt and water and air, all of us.

So what does this mean? Being animal means admitting we are corporeal. It means understanding our brains and souls are housed in vessels. It means acknowledging that those vessels—their capacities and sensations, their needs and desires—matter for our experiences on this planet, in this life. Being animal is being embodied, and vice versa. The very fact of embodiment, damning and miraculous at once, both enables us to experience the world around us and insists on our expiration. These cells holding us together will only do so for so long.

There is joy in it, for me. We are more than human; we have been gifted an animal self, too.

I want to make the world a better place for animals. To do that, I want to change how people think about animals. The first step is understanding that we are animals, too. Finding commonality will help us empathize with nonhuman animals, feeling their pain as pain we would feel, feeling their needs and wants as mirrors of our own. Artificial distance from nonhuman animals sustains how we treat them, with both utter disregard and purposeful harm in turn.

We wouldn’t treat humans how we treat animals, breeding and slaughtering and exploiting them. But if humans are animals—if we really change our paradigm to think about our human experience as one of animality—doesn’t that shake the logical foundation of human exceptionalism? Doesn’t it at least help us build some compassion for the animals we unthinkingly use every day?

This week, try to build an awareness of your animality. It can happen in small ways. Notice the feeling of hunger before a meal, or thirst after a workout. Take a second after you stub your toe or give yourself a paper cut to think about your experience of pain. Pay attention to your desires, and your fears, and how they manifest in a raised heart rate, or a dry mouth.

The golden rule instructs us to treat others how you want to be treated. What if we applied this to animals, too? Leading with a newfound appreciation of our animal selves, we can empathize with other animals, bound by of our common fate of embodiment. Would we want to be treated how we treat animals in our society? Let yourself really imagine it, opening your mind to the idea that the fear and pain they feel is just like our own. Isn’t the answer no?

Do you want to join my mission to rethink our relationship to animals? I want to hear from you! Leave a comment if you have thoughts or questions, subscribe for more updates and animal-related content, or find me on social media (@emelampy).