"Evil" penguins: The reason you shouldn’t anthropomorphize animals | Lucy Cooke | Big Think

[Music] So I think that a lot of popular natural history likes to portray the animal kingdom in very human terms. And also, stories that are popular seem to be ones where animals are behaving like us. They're providing us with some kind of reassurance in some way, you know. Animals on television tend to have nice nuclear family setups.

And I think that what's sort of fascinating to me is that this sort of desire to see animals behaving in a nice moral, Christian family values even way is something that we've been propagating for millennia. I mean, actually, this trait can be traced all the way back to the beasts' trees, the medieval beasts' trees, which were the very first animal encyclopedias, if you like.

These books were written by religious scribes, and they all copied one book, which was called the Physiologus. What that translated as... and that was written in the sort of 4th century. What these books, what the Physiologus did, was it popularized natural history and it took it to the masses. It became a massive bestseller; I think it was second only to the Bible—hugely popular.

But what the Physiologus and the moth and the bee stories did was to look for moral tales within animal behavior. They weren't interested in trying to tell the truth about animals or enlighten their audience about animal behavior or even the animal kingdom. They wanted to use... they believed that God had implanted moral lessons in animals to teach us.

So the stories that they told about animals, which were hugely popular, were all very moral. Animals were good or they were bad, and they taught us lessons about what's sinful and what isn't. And I think that to a certain extent, we still do that today. We are still peddling these same myths to a very large extent.

You know, popular press and newspapers, they love to tell stories about how... you know, there was something the other day that went viral about a stork that was returning to its partner after many years and showing this love affair. We love to see these sort of heroic or very kind of Christian stories being told in popular zoological stories in the papers or even on television.

I think the risk of anthropomorphizing animals in this way is that we just will fail to understand them. We won't appreciate them on their own terms for what they are. To paint the animal kingdom with a Christian moral brush is to deny it in all of its sort of sibling-eating, you know, blood-sucking, corpse-shagging glory.

And the thing is, we shouldn't be afraid of animals to behave as they do in these ways that are maybe even morally repugnant to us. They're not there to teach us a lesson; they're just there to live their lives. If we want moral guidance, we should be looking inside of ourselves for that. We shouldn't be looking to a penguin, for example, to tell us how to teach our lives.

No, but you're probably thinking all penguins are really cute and they're monogamous and they mate for life. Well, actually, that's not true either. Penguins are birds with small brains that live in a very brutal environment. They have a short window in which to reproduce and so they're flooded with hormones.

And the males, particularly the Adelie penguin—which is your classic little black and white penguin—the males are pumped full of hormones and so they'll basically have sex with anything that moves and quite a few things that don’t move, like dead penguins.

So penguins' nefarious sexual activity was first discovered by a member of Scott's Antarctic team, and he was so horrified by what he saw that he encoded his observations of penguins' sexual behavior in Greek in his notebook, lest they fell into the wrong hands.

And then his diaries are absolutely hilarious to read because he starts off and he's there observing the penguins and he's like, “Oh, look at them! They're so lovely, they're like little children, they're so cute.” And then, after a few days with them, he starts writing about how there are gangs of hooligan...