As usual.
Now, cute puppy love. And I apologise if this sounds crosser than I really am. It's just that I've been out in the heat maaaybe a bit too much today, and the headache I started my day with is getting worse by the minute.
Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, cute puppy love.
I was looking at some of the Illustration Friday entries on my lunch break today (which... mine is incredibly lame this time around, so no need to bother looking for it) and I found myself getting more than usually annoyed by them for a few reasons. The first was an ongoing thing there which I don't think can be helped, but it gets old after a while: people randomly choosing stuff they've done ages ago and stretching the limits of the prompt word's definition to try to make a phony fit. Like I said, ongoing thing that can probably never be fixed in the non-juried format they use, so let's move on. The second thing? Cute. Man, do I get tired of cute. I do know that it says more about me than about the artists, and that cute has plenty of fans (and probably makes people plenty of money), but seriously? That place can be cute overload. It gets so that I have to avoid whole categories -- and probably end up missing some things that I'd really like -- because I just can't take the thought of more cute.
Third? Well, this is where the puppies come in, and where I'm going to have to tread a little lightly. Anthropomorphism. The word this week was gesture, and already I'm noticing an awful lot of depictions of dogs and cats (and probably other animals that I'm forgetting) making gestures of "love".
But can they?
I trained as a zoologist, and we were always warned to be very careful about assigning human emotions to animals. However, I also grew up with a lot of pets, and it's not hard for me to think of a dog or a cat loving its owner (incidentally, it probably says quite a bit that I was about to put quotes around the word loving just then). I had somewhat of a think about why the whole thing in art annoyed me today, and here's what my opinion seems to be at the moment. And yes, you'll be able to read a fair amount of my schooling into this:
I honestly think we should question ourselves when we're ascribing human feelings to animals. It's easy to see them, yes; we're wired to see ourselves in everything (don't believe me? Just try to look at a North American style electrical plug-in without seeing a face there). However, until science progresses radically there is NO WAY that we can really know if animal behaviours can be translated to human emotions. That's the bare fact. We don't know. Do I think that a dog love its owner? Yeees... but at the same time I know that most if not all of a dog's actions can be extrapolated back to pack behaviour in wolves. If your dog saves you from a fire is it because he loves you, or because he's trying to protect his pack as a matter of his own survival?
I can't answer that, and I suppose that's why I get uncomfortable around people who act as if their pets are their babies. It's not a baby; it's a pet. It's a different species. It may, in fact, have emotions (and I do believe that animals have emotions. Don't get me wrong there), but its emotions may have very little to do with yours.
When our last dog was a puppy, if she was stretched out on the floor and you sat down anywhere near her, she'd practically amoeba her way across the carpet until at least part of her was touching you. That could be looked at as "ahhh. Puppy loves you!!!" or "the puppy must miss her littermates", I guess. I think you can figure out which side of that debate I fall on by now.
So, yeah. I guess in the end it was a combination of too much cute and too many loving puppies that got to me with this week's word, and I'd really like to thank all of the artists who posted gestural figure drawings instead for saving me from the treacle morass for another week.
Just noticed that somewhere along the line I managed to drop cats from the puppy love rant. And why? Well, as much as I like dogs, I'm admittedly a cat person. I like the cats; the cats like &/or tolerate me. And we both like our mutual space, I think. It doesn't really get into wondering if the cats looove me, and I'm good with that. I guess that's why there are so few cats making grand gestures then, eh?
1 comment:
I fall into (of course you knew this) of those who treat their pets like their baby. And if only my husband was in my same category. Tiny would be sleeping with his head beside me on the pillow. Actually, he likes to take over all the pillows, sometimes even burrowing into the pillow case (as his previous deceased owner, our Auntie used to let him do this) When Ralph has been away I have let Tiny sleep on the bed. It becomes his bed. I don't mind when he spoons me, but I draw the line at that french kiss he tries to slap on me while i am asleep.
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