Thank You, New York Times! There’s this growing obsession with animal cognition,” he said. Referring specifically to pets, he added: “We don’t want animals just for comfort. We really want to know them.” He mentioned another widely emailed story in The Times, from October, by a neuroeconomics professor who was doing M.R.I. scans of dogs’ brains and finding suggestions of emotions like ours. Its telling headline: “Dogs Are People, Too.” Lauerman wasn’t merely musing. He was explaining the rationale for a new website, The Dodo, that’s dedicated to animal news and features and made its debut this week. He’s its chief executive officer and editor in chief, and came to it from the influential online publication Salon, where he was the editor in chief from late 2010 to mid-2013. One of The Dodo’s principal financial backers is Ken Lerer, the current chairman of BuzzFeed and one of the founders of the Huffington Post. His daughter, Izzie Lerer, created and developed the site with Lauerman. Additionally, she’s finishing up her doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University, where her research focuses on the evolving compact between people and animals. The Dodo’s pedigree speaks to a broadening, deepening concern about animals that’s no longer sufficiently captured by the phrase “animal welfare.” An era of what might be called animal dignity is upon us. You see signs everywhere. A story in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported a sharp rise over the last few years in the fraction of American dog and cat owners with provisions in their wills for their pets. Nearly one in every 10 have made such arrangements. One of the most fervently embraced documentaries of 2013 was “Blackfish,” shown over and over on CNN. It doesn’t just depict mistreatment of killer whales at SeaWorld; it makes the case that these glorious mammals have rich social and family connections and a profound capacity for grief. There’s been extensive discussion lately of elephants’ emotional lives, and Hillary Clinton, with her famously active political antenna, recently found time to narrate a documentary, “White Gold,” about the bloody wages of the ivory trade, and to speak at its premiere. People who go on lion hunts encounter stern public shaming. (The Dodo recounts a recent example.) Bill de Blasio has prioritized the retirement of Central Park’s carriage horses. Several prominent retailers, including Gap and H&M, stopped procuring angora last year after a widely shared video of the fur being yanked from rabbits’ bodies. The movement to accord chimpanzees and some other kinds of apes legal rights is accelerating, and greater scrutiny of food production has prompted keener disgust over the fate of many farm animals, along with state legislation to spare them florid suffering. This is only going to build, because at the same time that scientific advances force us to gaze upon the animal kingdom with more respect, the proliferation of big and little cameras — of eyes everywhere — permits us to eavesdrop not just on animal play but also on animal persecution. It’s all documented, it all goes viral, and we can’t turn away, or claim ignorance, as easily as we once did. “Those creatures big and small that have fed, frightened, entertained, comforted and awed us are no longer just them,” Lauerman writes in a letter to The Dodo’s readers. “Increasingly, they are us.”
Posted on: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 15:45:15 +0000
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