How ‘Being Animal’ Could Help Us Be Better Humans
About this episode
The central question is how humanity relates to its own animality — a species that dominates the world while insisting it is not an animal — and what follows from that denial. Environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger argues this estrangement is the root of interlocking crises: our justification of factory farming and ecological exploitation, and a deep anxiety that now extends to artificial intelligence. She traces the shift from reverence to domination in cave art, critiques secular humanism for replacing the soul with a cognitive dualism that reserves moral worth for rational humans, and notes that science increasingly undermines that distinction. Because we have anchored human worth in cognition, AI threatens our sense of value; Challenger suggests worth might instead be grounded in our embodied, emotional animal life. The episode closes on a hopeful note about humans' distinctive capacity to extend love and alliance across species.