ANIMAL

From Philosopedia

ANIMAL

An animal is distinguishable from a plant by the ways in which it obtains food. As a member of Kingdom Animalia, it differs from members of Kingdom Plantae in its capacity for locomotion, nonphotosynthetic metabolism, pronounced response to stimuli, restricted growth, and fixed bodily structure.

Philosophically, humanists and freethinkers are aware that they are a fellow animal, not a "lord" over other animals. They also recognize that their species has evolved, as have other species of the animal kingdom. The scientific study of animals is called zoology, and the study of their relation to their environment and of their distribution is animal ecology.

The largest and heaviest of contemporary animals is the blue whale, which weighs about 150 tons as much as 1,750 average American men. It is nearly 100 feet long, about the length of a basketball court. The very largest was a female blue whale caught in 1947 – it weighed 209 tons and was 90 feet, 6 inches long. Blue whales can eat about eight tons of krill, a tiny shrimp, each day. The largest land animal is the African bull elephant, which weighs about six tons. The largest was a bull African elephant shot in Angola in 1974, one that weighed 13.5 tons and was thirteen feet tall.

Bruce Bagemih's Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999) showed that animal sexuality is diverse, that animals are sometimes heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered. "Gay" or "lesbian," he found, are terms not suitable for non-human animals inasmuch as they carry cultural, psychological, historical, and/or political connotations. Bagemihl cites research indicating same-sex behavior in reptiles/amphibians, fishes, insects, and other invertebrates and domesticated animals. For example, he found some same-sex behavior in bedbugs, red ants, and fruit flies; in sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, pigs, cats, dogs, rabbits, rats, mice, turkeys, and chickens; in apes, dolphins, whales, seals, deer, giraffes, geese, swans, ducks, sparrows, and hummingbirds. "Over the years," he found, "some scientists have used double standards when observing sexual behavior in animals. If they couldn't tell the gender or genders of the animals involved, they would assume the pair were of opposite sexes. When observed, homosexuality has been dismissed as aberrant, unnatural, even criminal. To the contrary, Bagemihl found homosexual behavior in more than 450 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects in his deconstruction of the all-heterosexual Noah's Ark myth.

In a 4 April 2010 New York Times Magazine article, "The Love That Dare Not Squak Its Name," Jon Modallem also cites the number of 450 as how many species in the animal world from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs have been documented as involved in same-sex activities. See photos.

(See entry for Homosexuality and Bisexuality in Animals.)

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