I’m only able to offer a few thoughts this week, due to the severity of a personal ongoing condition affecting my campus, but I did give this question some consideration. I also wanted to bring in two pieces from outside the readings.

I watched Jaws and Blackfish over the past few weeks, titles which seem hardly fit to share the space in a science-fiction oriented class, but which have a great deal to do with animals and cognition. In each film, it comes as a surprise to the characters, entertainers, or researchers involved that this shark or these orcas actually have a great deal of intelligence. The titular man-eater from Jaws (though never actually called that!) shows innovative ways of dispatching his prey, whether by eating holes through boats, using the air-barrels as weapons, or picking off victims from more isolated areas. His hunters express astonishment that there could even be a smart shark at all, describing his eyes as flat, black, and dead, his only goal as swimming, eating, and potentially mating. They’re only happy to dispatch this predator, at great loss to life, limb, and property, because they don’t consider him to be anything other than a menace to their population. In comparison, viewers come into Blackfish with the understanding that orcas are capable and smart. Why? Because they can learn tricks. The orca eyes are described as being warm and human and full of life. They live in family units, they enjoy playful activity, they afford humans the same respect and intelligence that they presumably expect in turn. Interviewees describe ways that orcas tried to protect their young by discerning the amount of bubbles in the water as indicative of human presence, creating a feint-group of adult orcas to ferret away the mothers and their young. Just like the monster-sized shark, the monster-sized orca from Blackfish, Tilikum, has racked up a body count. The depictions of the two are vastly different; despite being a ‘killer whale’, despite having his own legacy of inaccurate violence agains man in the wild, Tilikum receives more compassion in his depiction, while sharks in general are limited to endless, bloody feeding machines. ‘Jaws’ from book to film was intended as a larger-than-life depiction of shark behaviours that we now know to be untrue, and the inherent violence and animal brutality of sharks is emphasized throughout both versions even as they grimly appreciate their prey’s intellect.

Why do I focus in on the sharks and the orcas? In the contrast between these two films, most notably in reception and depiction of these creatures, we see one clearly anthropomorphized: he’s given a name, he’s referred to in the male gender, he’s described with humanlike traits, his history is carefully detailed out not only from his captivity, but from what life was like prior to capture. Where there depictions of sharks we’re given leave it at their violence, Blackfish is careful to provide proof of family units, bonds, intimacy, their gentleness in the wild. While humans are said to have descended from apes, we are more morphologically similar to the orcas and the dolphins, especially with their lungs, milk, and live-births, and tests have indicated that they may be of equal intelligence to us, if not superior. Their brains are larger and more developed than our own, and they have additional sensors down their CNS, each, their own dialect and language for their family pods and other groups. Sharks, who are not equipped with lungs, and who must actually keep swimming night and day to keep breathing, have not had the same rigorous tests on intelligence. We haven’t paid attention to shark communications, if they even do, because their shed teeth and sandpaper-like skin encourage a primal fear that ends discussions.

But largely, we also see that humans like to rank animal intelligence. The most common three are dogs, apes, and dolphins, all behind humankind, and depending on which researcher you talk to, that rank could be in any order, with interlopers like orcas taking one of the spots in the top-three. It’s presumptuous. We haven’t deciphered the language or dialect of each orca, whale, or dolphin. We don’t know if dogs send chemical signals for communication, or if apes have a complicated touch-language that is simple and elegant and profound in ways that human speech can’t come close to. And even if we did discover some way of mapping that and confirming communication on that level, the question of intercommunication between the species comes up.  So how then are we ranking the intelligence of these animals? They can learn tricks. They can follow human orders. They know when the pink or brown thing makes a certain vocalization, they’ll be rewarded with free food for pandering to it. We rank the intelligence of animals based on their willingness to comply, their servitude and acceptance of human orders. ‘Disobedience’, or ignoring the researcher constitutes ‘dumb’. Parading the animal around and making it do tricks for an audience in a circus-like environment over and over and over again is perhaps the most dehumanizing thing we could do to such a creature and its capabilities.

I wonder if we make aliens researchers, here to capture and study humans because it’s what we do to the animals. I wonder if those fictional aliens are more interested in dressing humans up in tutus and making them ride on unicycles for their entertainment on the assumption that we’re lower life-forms. And I wonder, though we share a planet, if these intelligent creatures don’t view us the same way that those cold, emotionless aliens.