Animate summary

Around 8,000 years ago, people at Çatalhöyük, in what's now Turkey, painted animals across the walls of a room. In many ways their images were much like earlier cave art, but something had changed. In the pictures, men chase a red deer stag, pulling its tongue and tail as if it's a game rather than a hunt, while a group taunts a huge bull. The images don’t place animals in a position of power or admiration, but show them as being toyed with. It’s one of the earliest expressions of a belief that would define the next several thousand years: that humans stand apart from, and above, every other creature. This idea is known as the great divide, and it's been used for millennia to justify dominance over nature and cruelty toward it.

Over time, a philosophical case for the great divide was built. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle argued that humans alone possessed a "rational soul," which gave us the capacity to reason and speak and placed humans above every other living thing. He ranked all of nature on a ladder which he called the Scala Naturae; humans sit at the top and everything else is beneath. Religion then offered its own version of this hierarchy; the book of Genesis states that God granted humankind "dominion... over every living thing that moves on the earth."

The great divide shaped more than how humans treated animals; it altered what we believed animals were even capable of. Thanks to the great divide we saw them as less conscious, less intelligent, less able to feel and unable to truly communicate. 

Modern scientists have begun pushing back at this belief. Their discoveries suggest that we’ve badly underestimated the minds we share our planet with.

Animals occupy more than the physical world around us; they live in the mind too and often in ways we don't choose and can't fully explain. 

The American anthropologist Ernest Becker offered one theory for why this is the case. In his 1973 book The Denial of Death, Becker argued that people are caught in a dilemma. We’re aware of ourselves as something special, almost godlike, but we also know that we’re flesh and blood destined to end up as compost. Much of what we do – like building families, pursuing careers, and developing opinions – is an attempt to escape that second half of the equation. But animals make it hard to do this; they remind us more than anything else, especially after seeing them dead, that we're bodies with a limited lifespan. Putting distance between ourselves and animals, Becker argued, is one way we try to convince ourselves we're something more than that.

Wolves may have been the first animal humans ever chose to live alongside. One theory of how that happened doesn't seem like your standard view of domestication either. This theory suggests that, rather than humans deliberately taming a wild animal, wolves and early humans may have followed the same seasonal migrations of reindeer across Europe and Asia. As they did this, they discovered that each benefited from the other's presence. Existing alongside the humans gave the wolves access to meat, and the humans became better hunters by watching how wolves worked together. Over thousands of years, this shared interest may have turned into something closer to partnership, and the wolves who stuck around would eventually become dogs. It's just one of many hypotheses, but it suggests domestication wasn't something humans simply did to wolves; it could have been a process which the two species worked out together.

The long and fruitful partnership between human and wolf is surprising considering the awful reputation that wolves obtained in the following centuries. According to one Alberta wildlife official, wolves are "the most pursued species on the planet." They were hunted out of England, Scotland, and Ireland centuries ago and eliminated from much of mainland Europe by the late 1800s. The hostility is still there; in May 2025, the European Union downgraded the wolf's legal protection from "strictly protected" to merely "protected," making it easier for farmers and hunters to kill them. In northern Alberta, ranchers describe wolves with the same language they'd use for cruelty and torture. They are also determined to wipe them out entirely, even though real wolf attacks on humans remain incredibly rare worldwide. What this shows is that the divide between humans and animals isn't a relic of the deep past; it's a live argument, still being fought out in courtrooms, parliaments, and pastures today.

A few years ago, the writer Chloe Dalton found an abandoned baby hare on a farm track near her home and decided to raise it herself, certain it would otherwise die. She never named her, rarely touched her, and let the hare come and go as she pleased. The hare grew up, gave birth in Dalton's office, and treated the house as part of her territory rather than a cage. After watching her for years, Dalton learned something she hadn't expected – that we can learn so much from an animal without ever trying to tame it. "It's only the limit of our imaginations," she said, "that determines the assumptions we make about animals."

Few people get to raise a hare. For the rest of us, Susie Little offers a different route to the same closeness. She runs a charity in Hampshire called Tower House Horses, where people struggling with anxiety, PTSD, and addiction spend time with a small herd. They don’t ride the horses; they simply spend time near them. "Horses are non-judgmental," she says. "They see you as you are." One woman was referred to the charity after years of counseling that hadn’t worked. She wouldn’t get out of the car for her first session, but just a few sessions later she was doing far better than years of talking therapy had managed. The horse never told her what to do; it just showed her something true about herself, and let her work out the rest.