A Response to Mr. Gaudet

In response to the question Humans and animals. Humans or animals. Humans vs. animals. Are these legitimate separations? There is an interesting battle with words when it comes to distinctions, especially between "humans" and animals, since, as Mr. Gaudet put it, "Humans are animals; so, from where does this fictional distinction come?" I feel this is a very difficult question to answer, especially because I am not as well acquainted with semantics and linguistic history as some people may be. In my best way of understanding this question, I feel it comes down to the human's (and I believe animals share a similar a similar state of mind as well) fear of being attacked by the unknown.

To define this "Unknown", we will call it some unknown other animal. For instance, I have a fear of dogs I am not personally familiar with, as I do not know how they will react to me being around them or trying to pet them. They could be happy with me petting them, or seeing a hand move, they could think I am going to hit them, thus bark and bite. The animal (be it human or otherwise) does not know how the other animal will react to it and thus it will likely try to avoid it if possible, distancing itself from a possibly hostile encounter. Us as Homo sapiens with our language systems, we like to classify things, and classify we do. Since the "wilds" are lands with other animals that haven't been domesticated, killed by us, or possibly discovered by us, we tend to avoid that area of uncertain encounters. Any being that we do not know, without reasonable doubt, how it will react to us, is considered unknown, and thus, wild.

"wild humans" are "humans" who act in ways that are unpredictable, or against the "norm" and thus are regarded with fear for their unpredictability. Much like animals that act in ways we can't predict are termed "wild" animals due to the nature of the "wilds" for which we assume they hail from. I believe this is where the term "wild animals" comes from. We refer to Dogs as "pets" as an overarching umbrella meaning companion animals such as fish, cats, dogs, gerbils, etc. While pigs, cows, and sheep are considered "livestock", minnows and worms and other small creatures are termed "bait".

In colloquia  I believe that anything that is not within our species is termed an "animal" as an overarching umbrella term for "non-Homo sapien beings in the Kingdom Animale".  Humans is a term we made for ourselves I believe to delineate these non-"human" animals from us. This could possibly date back to the time before Darwin's putting together of the concept of evolution, whereby we as Humans were created separately from the other creatures of the earth, and perhaps that term has stuck with us like slang and swears have. We may not want to use them because they don't make sense, but they are there through time so we have to deal with it wether we use them or not.

Dealing with the initial question of using the terms humans and animals as legitimate separations, I believe if we take "humans" to be slang for Homo sapiens, and we take "Animals" to mean "non-Homo sapien species" then I believe we can use those words... however it would be easier to understand if we just said "Homo sapiens vs. non-Homo sapien animals."

An Animal, or a  "Human"?