We are accustomed to thinking about animals in terms of ourselves: how similar they are to us, what they teach us about ourselves, how they might be useful to us, how we are superior to them. It’s okay for us to anthropomorphize animals if it’s going to protect them. But when we see animals through the lens of our own identity, we can harm them in ways that we often don’t think about. We treat anxiously attached dogs as “too dominant” and punish them when we should be offering them predictable care and affection. We rip baby chimps from their mothers when in the wild they would nurse until
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