Anthropologists who write about indigenous peoples often note their tendency to anthropomorphize the animals around them. Even though !Kung and Nanai hunters (among countless others) have used this approach to great effect while hunting, the ascription of recognizable emotions and motives to animals causes problems for Western scholars, not least because they are awfully hard to prove in a lab or defend in a dissertation. Such claims are what lawyers and philosophers refer to as “arguments from inference”: anecdotal and unprovable. Under these circumstances, the potential for hair-splitting,
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