The recent release of a film about the life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara has prompted plenty of the usual ‘would you wear a T-shirt with a picture of Hitler on it?’ commentary: that Guevara is a thug and a murderer and should be shunned by all right-thinking people.
I’m not going to offer a conclusive position on Guevara, nor have I seen the film, which doesn’t sound very entertaining from what I’ve read. I certainly don’t have a T-shirt with his hairy face on it. But I do have a few thoughts.
Human ideas about animals other than humans have a long history of being very wrong. So I think it’s perhaps an important part of advocating for animals to talk a bit about how they understand ‘what it’s like to be’ various animals. So that’s what this is an attempt to do. Of course ‘animals’ are not at all a homogenous group, so I’m mainly going to focus on the more intelligent social mammals and birds.
The particular phenomenon I want to focus on is cross-species friendships. There are broadly speaking two sorts of cross-species friendship. One is a friendship between an animal and a human – most obviously, the pet-owner relationship. This typically involves some degree of parent-child dynamic: the human keeps the pet in a sort of extended childhood, relating to its owner as a permanent parent. The other is friendships between two non-human animals of different species: a cat and a dog, a tiger and a dog, a cat and a crow, an elephant and a dog, a gorilla and a cat, even a hamster and a snake. All of the preceding can be seen on youtube, and I imagine pretty much any combination is possible. Here there’s likely to be a mixture of parent-child relationships, with a (usually female) animal raising an infant of another species, and peer relationships, analogous to those that would obtain between two animals of the same age.
