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The Compass: Dominion: Dominion: The animals and the linguists

Factual

The animals and the linguists

02/10/2019 GMT

Dominion: The animals and the linguists

Dominion

BBC World Service - The Compass, Dominion, Dominion: The animals and the linguists

What part does language play in how we think about other animals?

Zimbabwean author and essayist Panashe Chigumadzi asks what part language plays in our regard for other animals.

Zimbabwean author and essayist Panashe Chigumadzi asks what part Language plays in our regard for other animals. In wild animal reserves in the south of the country, she talks to ethologists to understand lions, rhinos and vultures. She asks if our greatest problem in entering the mind of another animal has been its inability to communicate as we do? She looks to her ancestral culture of animal totems and praise poems, and the relatively recent explosion of scientific interest in the animal’s point of view

Contributors include animal behaviourists Frans de Waal, Peter Mundy, Noxolo Mguni, Beks Ndlovo, Francoise Wemelsfelder, Ian Harmer and Anele Matshisela.

Producer: Kate Bland

(Photo: Panashe Chigumadzi and rhinos in Matopos Park, Zimbabwe)

The Compass: Dominion

Writers explore our attitude to animals and attempt to uncover what our human values are.

As awareness grows of the destructive impact of people on the natural world, four writers explore our attitude to animals and attempt to uncover what our human values are.

Two vivid stories of human dominion over the natural world infuse the Abrahamic faiths: Adam’s naming of the animals and Noah’s stewardship of animal pairs to safety during the floods. In both, God is said to have given mankind dominion “over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

Today, whether dominion means stewardship or power, non-human animals are in serious trouble. The human population is 300 times what it was, while non-human animals are diminishing in species and number.

Set in Holland, Zimbabwe, India and Scotland and building on a story by JM Coetzee called The Lives of Animals (1999), this series explores attitudes to non-human animals at a point in human history when it has never been more important to reflect on the impact of people on the natural world. 

Four different writers from the sciences and the humanities take a different perspective to frame their inquiry.

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Dominion: The animals and the linguists

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