Does the current image of animals really convey all there is to animals? Having rejected the caricatures reductionists have made of humans, why take their animal caricatures at face value?
To acknowledge human-animal continuity is not necessarily to indulge in biological reductionism (Noske, 1989). Another obstacle to the recognition of human-animal continuity is the fear among biologists of being accused of anthropomorphism, the attribution of exclusively human characteristics to animals. For their part, social scientists have been jealously guarding what they see as the human domain and so tend to applaud the biologists' fear of anthropomorphism. What is currently denounced as anthropomorphism are those characterizations which social scientists are keen to reserve for humans. In their critique of biological determinism social scientists point an accusing finger at anyone who credits animals with personhood. But again, how can one know how animals differ from or are similar to humans if one declines to ask the same questions about the two?
There are some courageous animal scientists who do say that animals are more human-like and less object-like than their own science will have us believe. However, they will often say such things off the record or rather apologetically. This is understandable since they are committing a sacrilege both from the perspective of the animal sciences and from that of the human sciences. Those scientists who have actually studied animals as participant observers, the common anthropological approach to human societies, reveal a tension in their writings between the accepted biological codes and their own experiences with animal personhood. Jane Goodall who is working with chimpanzees, Dian Fossey who lived and died among mountain gorillas, the Douglas-Hamilton couple and Cynthia Moss who are living and working among elephants, all write about touching experiences with animal personhood. Their science cannot handle these forms of animal reality and tends to belittle or ignore them. The animal sciences are simply not equipped to deal with those characteristics in animals which according to the social sciences make humans human.
Faced with the shortcomings of their own tradition a number of dissatisfied animal scientists, such as Donna Haraway and Donald Griffin, have called for a tentative anthropological approach to animals. What attracts them in anthropology and particularly in its method of participant observation is its intersubjective, nonreductionist way of acquiring knowledge, a method contrasting strongly with the subject-object approach applied by animal scientists in their laboratories. Anthropologists treat the Other with respect and are wary of ethnocentrism. Even though the Other cannot be fully known nor understood, anthropologists have been trained to tread upon this unknowable ground with respect rather than with disdain.
But all this pertains only to the human Other. It is curious that scientists who have learned to beware of the dangers of ethnocentrism so easily lapse into another kind of centrism ­ anthropocentrism. We are sadly stuck with two seemingly unrelated images: one of humankind and one of animalkind conveyed by two totally separate brands of science, the one typifying humans as social subjects, the other typifying animals as biological objects. The newly emerging discipline of human-animal relations will find this a formidable obstacle to overcome.