The New Paradigm: Animals Are Just Like Us

An article,  “Watching Whales Watching Us,” the cover story in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, illustrated how profoundly anthropomorphic writers about the natural world are becoming.  This is the quote that caught my eye:

Somehow the more we learn about whales, the more we’re coming to appreciate the sublimely discomfiting reality that a kind of parallel “us” has long been out there roaming the oceans’ depths, succumbing to our assaults. Indeed, when that baby gray calf bobbed up out of the sea and held there that first morning, staring at me with his huge, slow-blinking eye, it felt to me as if he were taking one impossibly long and quizzical look in the mirror.

When a writer rockets that far over the top, it ruins his credibility.

The “animals are people too” meme is ubiquitous and, I think, destructive. More over at Secondhand Smoke .