Beasts, Brutes, and Brothers — How We’ve Used “Animal” to Define Ourselves

From empire to playgrounds, the word animal has never been neutral.

It began in a conversation with a dear friend.

We were sitting together, talking about the world — the violence, the cruelty, the pain people cause one another. She said something that stopped me:

“Human beings are horrible. It’s because of our animal nature.”

I felt it land — not just in my mind, but in my chest.

I knew what she meant. I’ve heard versions of that belief all my life. That beneath all our advancement and culture, we’re still beasts. Violent. Primitive. Savage.

But in that moment, something in me stirred.

Not defensiveness, not disagreement — just a deeper question.

Is that really true?

Is the horror we cause others… because we are animals?

Or is it because we’ve forgotten what being an animal actually means?

That single comment cracked something open in me.

And down the rabbit hole I went.

My Rejection of the Animal Frame

For a long time, I couldn’t stand the idea that we were “just animals.”

It always seemed like a justification — a way to excuse bad behaviour as unavoidable, coded into our instincts.

I heard it used to explain betrayal, selfishness, domination. As if to say: Well, of course we hurt each other. We’re animals, after all.

To me, that framing felt like a lowering of the bar.

Like it dismissed our capacity for mercy, for kindness, for choice.

But when my friend said those words — “human beings are horrible… it’s because of our animal nature” — something flipped.

What if we’ve misunderstood the animal in us entirely?

What if the real danger isn’t that we’re animals…

But that we’ve built a whole society pretending we’re not?

A History of the Divide

Let’s rewind a few thousand years.

Aristotle called humans zoon politikon — political animals — distinguished from other creatures by our ability to reason and speak.

We weren’t just animals. We were rational animals.

The animal part was base. The rational part elevated us.

Over time, that idea metastasized.

In religious texts, we were made in God’s image — granted “dominion” over the animals.

In Enlightenment thinking, reason became our highest virtue.

Emotion, instinct, wildness — those were signs of inferiority.

But here’s the part many of us weren’t taught:

That same divide — human above animal — was used to justify horror.

• Indigenous peoples were called “savages.”

• Enslaved Africans were compared to apes.

• Poor, disabled, and neurodivergent people were categorized as “closer to the animal.”

The logic was chilling:

If some humans are more “animal” than others, then they can be treated like animals.

And just like that, animal stopped being a biological term.

It became a weapon.

We Still Do This

We like to believe we’ve evolved past that kind of thinking.

But listen to how we talk:

• A woman who defies norms? “She’s animalistic.”

• A child melting down in public? “He’s acting like an animal.”

• A protest gets loud or fierce? “They’ve gone feral.”

We rarely use animal when someone is soft, generous, grieving, or wise — even though animals do all of those things too.

We’re not just drawing a line between humans and animals.

We’re upholding a moral hierarchy:

Animal = bad.

Human = good.

Unless a human misbehaves — and then we say they’ve become “animal” again.

The False Boundary

Here’s the truth I eventually had to face:

We are animals.

That’s not a degradation. It’s a grounding.

We breathe, bleed, birth, grieve.

We’re made of the same carbon and water.

We live in bodies shaped by rhythm, instinct, and need.

But we’ve built entire civilizations — religious, economic, political — on the idea that reason is superior to emotion.

That civilization is superior to wildness.

That man is superior to beast.

And in separating ourselves from animals…

we’ve separated ourselves from ourselves.

From our bodies.

From our ecosystems.

From our instincts.

From the rhythms that could keep us in balance.

And the cost of that disconnection is staggering.

Returning to Kinship

To call someone an animal with contempt is to forget that you are one too.

But what if we remembered?

What if being “like an animal” was a compliment?

• Loyal like a dog.

• Playful like an otter.

• Grieving like an elephant.

• Fierce like a mother bear.

• Still like a heron.

What if animal meant alive?

What if it meant embedded — in a world of kinship, mercy, and interdependence?

Let’s Reclaim the Word

This blog series isn’t about denying the dark things humans do.

It’s about asking:

What if the horror isn’t because we’re animals…

But because we’ve forgotten that we are?

What opens when we stop rejecting our animality — and start remembering what it was meant to teach us?

This Blog Series Is an Invitation

Not to deny the horror.

But to ask:

What if the horror isn’t because we’re animals…

but because we’ve forgotten that we are?

Let’s walk this remembering together.