How can we develop a more positive relationship with animals and the natural world?

We need to recognize that we are animals. Culturally, we have this notion that we are separate from and superior to nonhuman animals. If we can accept that we are also animals, and acknowledge that we share many emotional and psychological experiences with them, we may develop a sense of kinship with nonhuman animals that drastically changes the way we treat them. If we can look at nonhuman animals and see ourselves, we may begin to take care of them and end animal abuse and exploitation.

An important first step is promoting the ways in which humans and nonhuman animals are similar. We can talk about how nonhuman animals have thought processes, feelings, and form social connections, just like humans. Importantly, death anxiety may make this very difficult. It may be the case that emphasizing the ways in which humans and nonhuman animals are similar actually exacerbates humans’ mistreatment of nonhuman animals because it is existentially threatening. We need to continue to consider the ways in which death anxiety influences our behavior and explore how we can talk about humans’ similarity to nonhuman animals in a non-threatening way.

Humans may unconsciously exploit and harm nonhuman animals to reinforce their feelings of being fundamentally different from and superior to them.

How does death anxiety drive our exploitative and harmful relationship with nonhuman animals?

There is an important connection between death denial and humans’ relationships with nonhuman animals. As Becker proposed, one of the ways we deal with our death anxiety is by distancing ourselves from other animals and nature to protect ourselves from the reality of our own mortality and animality. Humans may unconsciously exploit and harm nonhuman animals to reinforce their feelings of being fundamentally different from and superior to them. Furthermore, if humans distance themselves from nature and feel that they have no meaningful relationship with nonhuman animals, it gives them more license to use  and harm them.

What are the ecological consequences of our relationship with nonhuman animals?

The consequences are disastrous. Our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the rest of the natural world has brought forth catastrophic rates of extinction, toxic pollution of land, sea and air, and dramatic climate change. Recently, the last male Northern White Rhino passed away. This species has survived for millions of years, yet was poached into extinction by humankind. Poaching and habitat loss are symptomatic of humans’ sense that the Earth’s resources and animals are to be used to benefit humans. Humans are even driving Great Apes, our closest relatives, to extinction. Humans’ desires to disconnect from and control nature have contributed to the sixth mass extinction we are experiencing today, and it is ecologically devastating. In the next hundred years, it is expected that human actions, such as polluting, land clearing, and overfishing, will drive half of the Earth’s marine and land species to extinction.