To Anthropomorphize, Or Not To Anthropomorphize, That Is The Question

Should we anthropomorphize animals for our own benefit? Last night I saw the Jeep Grand Cherokee commercial where wild animals in nature are interviewed about their takes on the car’s features. They give rave reviews of this gas-guzzler that’s usually depicted trampling through their wilderness. It pissed me off. Jeep shouldn’t be allowed to speak for these creatures. And I recognize the hypocrisy in my next comment, but I think I know better than Team Jeep what these animals would actually say about this foreign, human-created object disturbing their peace and sometimes turning them into road-kill. They’d say “get the f*ck off my land”, and then bite that interviewer’s head off.

This commercial makes me think about the Rights of Nature movement and the act of granting legal personhood to nature and animals in order to give them a voice and protect them against human harms. I wonder, if these animals had legal protections, could a concerned party sue Jeep for defamation? The ad literally has a bald eagle with a southern male accent saying “I love the smell of a two-liter Hurricane Four Turbo Engine in the morning”. It’s insulting to bald eagles to suggest they love inhaling toxic fumes from a combustion engine’s exhaust, or to suggest these birds love cars and roads, when the proliferation of both threatens their habitat and survival. I fear that depictions of animals like this, making them out (even when intended to be taken fictionally) to support environmentally irresponsible human actions, aims to manipulate the consumer psyche into thinking that the humanistic status quo is actually just fine and dandy with the animal population.

Maybe that sounds absurd. But I believe many people subconsciously choose not to see certain realities in front of them, especially as it relates to environmental harm, and it doesn’t take much to fertilize that inner blocking mechanism with ‘validation’ of any sort. The purpose of this Jeep ad is to sell, and most of the time, selling involves a manipulation of the mind. Corporations are brilliant in doing just that. It should be noted that Jeep’s parent company, Stellanis, recently pivoted away from an ambitious all-electric strategy to one focused on gas and hybrid vehicles. In any case, I don’t think Jeep should be allowed to speak for nature in support of their climate-warming and nature-destroying products. That’s defamation.

To play devil’s advocate here, I will share this article by climate journalist Sammy Roth about the new Pixar movie “Hoppers”, which has talking animals teaching good environmental lessons. The animals are helping a human try to save a forest from a freeway construction project that would cut straight through it. Pixar anthropomorphizes with cartoon animals, in contrast to the AI-generated animals in the Jeep commercials which were intended to look real. Should that detail be factored in to this argument?

I haven’t seen “Hoppers” yet, and even though it was reported that Pixar stripped back its original plan for a strong environmental message, Sammy says the sentiment is still very much there. “Hoppers” has cute little cartoon animals saving nature. I fully support it. I am more than ok with instilling in children and adults the values of environmentalism, respect, and care for our non-human co-habitants by any means necessary, including anthropomorphism.

So the jury is out. The question of whether or not humans should create content that puts subjective words into the mouths of our nature friends is a moral one, so long as these nature friends do not yet enjoy the human-made legal protections that they should.