Coming home and asking how your pet’s day was is slightly frowned upon in society because obviously, animals cannot understand what you are saying nor can they reply in English.
However, despite how crazy your friends and family may make you feel for attempting to have a conversation with your fur baby, science says pet parents who talk with their fluff ball are not only normal, but super-intelligent.
It’s called to anthropomorphise, which basically means you give human attributes to an object and treat it as such.
“Historically, anthropomorphising has been treated as a sign of childishness or stupidity, but it’s actually a natural by-product of the tendency that makes humans uniquely smart on this planet,” Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago tells Quartz. “No other species that has this tendency.”
In fact Nicholas, who specialises in this field, says we humans do this all the time but probably don’t even realise it. We do it when we give human names and character traits to non-human objects likes our cars, shoes, plants and of course, pets.
Just have to water Betty or she’ll get stroppy, she’s so needy.
Saying something like this to your favourite succulent doesn’t mean you’re crazy, just that your brain cognition is highly-active. In other words, you’re smart as all heck.
There’s three reasons why we anthropomorphise:
*1.** The non-human object or thing looks like it has a face so we associate it with being human.
^ Er, yep.
2. We’d like to be friends with it. That’s you, every pet parent out there.
3. We can’t explain its unpredictable behavior. Human are unpredictable by nature and so we like to think of anything as having that characteristic as being human too. Which would also explain why we think of our fur babies as little people.
So go on, feel free to get your Dr Doolittle on and talk to the animals… or plants, or your car, or phone…
