As an avid fan of The Golden Compass"" in print form, I entered the movie theater as a skeptic, but it doesn't say much for the film that the 15 mph return trip through a snow storm was the least tedious part of the evening. Still, the story's depiction of a world where everyone gets their own animal incarnation did remind me strangely of working as a SOAR adviser.
When helping incoming students pick out their classes this summer, a good ice-breaker question was integral to a pleasant morning. In large groups, overly involved responses were just as bad as uncomfortable silence, so we looked for questions that would be answered succinctly and without great deliberation.
For whatever reason, asking people what animal they'd most like to be turned out to be a magic bullet, to the extent that almost everyone seemed to have a response in mind before we had even asked.
Getting a student's class schedule sometimes felt like a forced confession, but no one seemed to give a second thought to committing to an entire lifetime as a ring-tailed lemur or a koala. These discussions captured the imagination of the staff, as well, particularly on busy days when picturing a peaceful life eating insects atop the rainforest canopy was a popular coping method.
Part of this kind of wishful thinking is probably the apparent simplicity of animal life. Even complicated varieties like cats and dogs enjoy perks such as constant nudity and 16 daily hours of sleep. The most demanding item on the average house pet's agenda reads something like ""2 pm: Eat grass clippings until I vomit on dining room table.""
The other big draw to being an animal is just its innate cuteness. I can't watch meerkats for more than 30 seconds without imitatively going stock-still and hitching up my arms like a Tyrannosaurus Rex every time my attention shifts. Even relatively frightening animals like octopi are kind of adorable, and there's just something hysterically funny about moths.
But while we're observing the mannerisms of pandas to remake ourselves in their furry image, animals everywhere are doing the same with us, emulating our most characteristically human traits. I know this because for two years, my family's Siamese cat, Lily, has engaged in the ritual of taking our laundry from the basement and distributing it around the house according to some kind of secret logic, then howling mournfully for a quarter of an hour.
Explanations of the phenomenon differ. My own theory is that Lily has glimpsed the terrifying absurdity of feline existence and now carries our clothing around as part of a desparate struggle against meaninglessness. The more popular belief is that she has discovered religion at the age of 13 (69 in cat years) and is making offerings to Gracie, our departed Tabby.
Whether Lily has formed a connection to the spiritual plane or is just laying socks on the floor of unhappiness it seems that, in the absence of a struggle for survival, animals, like people, start to grapple with existential issues.
This raises some difficult questions. The thought of gibbons engaging in philosophical discourse while picking each other's nits is cute, and the thought of kittens huddled around a copy of ""The Stranger"" and smoking clove cigarettes is almost intolerably adorable. However, if animals are battling existential dread and forming belief systems, it kind of undercuts the idea of human superiority built into things like art, religion and vanilla yogurt.
Given adequate language skills, would Shamu write a powerful book about animal bondage or would house cats express everything through song instead of head nuzzling? I hope not. The ""Aristocats"" kind of sucked.
Share your thoughts on moths with Matt. E-mail him with mothbits, mothmembrances and motherobilia at hunziker@wisc.edu.
