r/aww • u/thetinydancer1 • 5h ago

Our Pomeranian plays Bruiser Woods in Legally Blonde. She waits for her cue, then walks onstage all by herself

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u/MothmanIsALiar 4h ago

Anthropomorphize is a nonsense word because humans are animals.

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u/Cactuas 4h ago

It's not nonsense to point out that animals are usually not experiencing certain situations exactly as humans would. We are all animals and we all experience emotions, but it's a leap to assume dogs experience the same emotions as humans do, just as it would be a leap to assume a cat experiences the same emotions as a dog.

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u/MothmanIsALiar 3h ago

I think its silly to assume that emotions are new rather than an integral part of the evolutionary experience. I have emotions. Chimps have emotions. Why wouldn't squirrels have emotions? We all have a common ancestor.

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u/Ppleater 2h ago

It's not about assuming that animals don't have emotions, it's about understanding that animals don't always express the same emotions in the same way for the same reasons. It's the species version of being ethnocentric, assuming that your experience is the default. It's arrogant and often results in harm for the animals. Chimps showing a fear grimace look to a human like they're happy because it resembles a smile, but chimps are chimps, with their own unique experiences, culture, and ways of expressing emotions that are not going to be the exact same as humans. If you assume that a chimp is happy when it isn't, you will continue to do things that make the chimp afraid while assuming you're making it happy. That is not fair to the chimp. And then the chimp freaks out lashes out, hurts someone, and people on reddit go around talking about how chimps are violent, psychopathic, and evil, instead of recognizing the chimp's perspective and experience as something that does not conceptualize the world the exact same way humans do.

Anthropomorphizing is assigning human motivation, logic, and morality to something that is not human, then judging it by those human standards, instead of acknowledging and respecting the animal for what it actually is.