What Do Humans Owe Animals?The many dangers of anthropomorphism.

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If Grandin looks through a microscope, species by species, to determine what they want, Olmert gazes through a telescope at the history of human-animal relations to see what we have gotten from them. She is the romantic to Grandin's realist and focuses on our emotional similarities with animals where Grandin calls attention to the distinctions. The transformation of humans from frightened prey to hunters and finally to farmers, Olmert argues, was owed in large part to the flow of oxytocin, the mammalian hormone that facilitates feelings of love, devotion, and connection. Drawing on interesting research on the social role played by the hormone, she makes the case that our interactions with animals boosted its levels in us—and in them.

Her scenario is often highly speculative, based as it is back in that transitional, lost time when humans breeched the barriers between us and the species we domesticated. Olmert invokes a new, controversial theory about the human-wolf bond that Grandin, too, briefly cites in an earlier book of hers, Animals in Translation. An array of biologists, archeologists, and anthropologists propose that one reason we are so different from other primates is that we learned much of our kinship and hunting behavior from wolves, whose transformation into dogs began a great deal earlier than has generally been supposed—some 135,000 years ago, they say, rather than a mere 14,000. Olmert describes a cozy co-evolution, in which humans became so close to ever more domesticated wolves that we suckled wolf pups (try blocking those photos, Facebook!). The release of human and wolf oxytocin during our intimate encounters made each species gentler and more nurturing toward the other.

Olmert also credits the wolf-dog that guarded human enclaves with making us smarter as a species. Finally, she hypothesizes, we could stop being permanently sleep-deprived, twitching in fear all night; thanks to long and deep sleep, our brain function improved. Other oxytocin-enabled feats of cross-species bonding followed, with the taming of the horse for travel and for accompanying us into battle and then the domestication of other animals for farming.

Olmert falls in love with her theorizing, as Grandin warns us humans are prone to do, and like all romantics, she mourns a lost, golden age, which for her features constant, intimate human-animal partnership. In her idyll, we have dogs at our sides, helping us hunt mammoths who may be running for their lives, but at least are running free. Where Grandin has devoted her career to thinking about what animals have lost in the journey from the wild to civilization, Olmert closes her account by lamenting the toll that journey has taken on humans. She speculates that we gobble mood-altering drugs because we are suffering from deprivation of the oxytocin fix animals provided. Today, the untamed beasts are kept at bay, the livestock is hidden away, and to satisfy our longing to connect with other species all we have left are our pets.

But they can provide the wholesome therapy we need, Olmert promises. She ennobles animals as caregivers whose "love" doesn't come with all the messy complications inherent in human relationships. Olmert unskeptically invokes studies that say that pets help us live longer and better, that pets are more soothing companions than humans, and even that most pet owners care more for their pets than for any human loved one. "Animals make us better people," she writes. But to replace the scientific fallacy that animals have no emotions with the pathetic fallacy that they have human emotions does the kind of disservice to animals that Grandin warns against. Seeing animals' highest function as serving our needs surely doesn't make us better people or them happier animals.

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