This post is in response to When Animals Wear Pants: Anthropomorphism and Learning By Boby Ho-Hong Ching Ph.D. I have learned that anthropomorphism is a deeply suspect word, used to defend cruelty to ...

At the start of Elizabeth Hobson’s career as an ecologist, she knew to stick to one rule: Never anthropomorphize the animals you study. For plenty of people, assigning human characteristics to another ...

In Disney’s new documentary Monkey Kingdom, the animals are characters: The trailer focuses on a macaque dubbed “Maya,” and describes her “dreams” for her son. This approach isn’t surprising—wildlife ...

People talk to their plants, pray to human-like gods, name their cars, and even dress their pets up in clothing. We have a strong tendency to give nonhuman entities human characteristics (known as ...

I recently gave a talk to an audience of scientists and university professors during which I referred to the "personality" of dogs and the fact that dogs can experience emotions such as love and ...

Autumn begins tomorrow. Suffused already with a seasonal nostalgia, I'm replaying scenes of summer in my head. Among them is sitting in a dark theatre, watching apes clamber across San Francisco's ...

Though anthropomorphism can often seem whimsical, giving names to inanimate objects is part of our evolutionary make-up.

The complexity of animal behaviour naturally prompts us to use terms that are familiar from everyday descriptions of our own actions. Charles Darwin used mentalistic terms freely when describing, for ...