Maybe my brain is certifiably going downhill, but I watched this video of Stella, the dog, jumping over and over and over and over into leaf piles yesterday with such fascination and abandon that I actually forgot to worry for the entire 3 minutes of its duration.

I have, as you’ll know if you have followed me for the last years, never posted an animal video, I believe, outside of some scientific demonstrations of the intelligence of crows or some such. But this was what I needed. Joy, pure. Go ahead, roll your eyes already….

It mattered, because I was thinking about animals in two very different, but related contexts: For one, the horrific use of racist language – the Chinese virus, the Kung flu – by people working in our government is just one step removed from the language that comes next: dehumanizing terms that compare people to animals, humans to what is conceived of as subhumans. From a previous blog entry:

Psychological research, originally looking into Nazi use of dehumanizing language in preparation for the Holocaust, has shown that merely listening to it increases the willingness to use violence; some international agencies even consider that kind of naming a precursor to genocide. Once a class of people is dehumanized, the usual compassion and empathy that we extend to fellow human beings is weakened. The part of your brain that controls social relations becomes less active, a physiologically measurable effect when you are exposed to this kind of language. The door to systematic mistreatment is then wide open.

And secondly, I learned about the (differing) roles animals played in the Third Reich, from a by all reports fabulously researched and described new German book by Jan Mohnhaupt, Tiere im Nationalsozialismus. Here is my summary of the book review (not yet in English translation, alas):

The book looks at animals as the daily companions of Nazis, as means of propaganda, as depictions of the enemy and as pest. Horses were seen as heroic, trained to find landmines and boiled to save soldiers from starvation. Potato beetles were intended to be used as a biological weapon to induce starvation in nations at the Eastern front. Brown bear cubs were kept as a source of entertainment for concentration camp wardens, in a “zoo” on site built by inmates. Dogs were seen as part of the master race, cats as Jewish. German Shepherds in particular, represented the purest of German dogs, the idealization of the populist-national race ideologies. Apex animals like lions and wolves (Hitler’s code name was Wolf ) ranked net to ………pigs! Pigs scored high in their fanatical phylogenetic universe, setting a contrast to Jewish custom that declares pigs unclean for consumption.

Jews were soon not allow to keep pets and had to euthanize the ones they already owned, because the Gestapo did not want to deal with them after their owners were deported. Nazi scientists applied knowledge and methodological approaches extrapolated from animal research to humans once the moral borders had shifted toward labeling our own kind as subhumans or human animals. The racial fanaticism managed to elevate some animals above humans, in other words. But it also allowed to engage in plans for genetic “purification,” just like farmers attempted to perfect the breed and purge the coarser element.

This becomes particularly evident if you look at Nazi legislation. (Here is an essay in English that delivers the details.) To summarize, by 1933 laws for the protection of animals and the regulation of slaughter and hunting were passed. Herman Goering announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments” and threatened to “commit to concentration camps those who still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property.” Between Nazi leaders’ affection for animals (Hitler was a committed vegetarian) and enmity towards humans, and the political and ideological purpose served by abolishing the moral distinctions between animals and people the systematic extinction of whole groups of subhumans was just a matter of time.

How is that for downward comparison? Did I make you forget about our own situation for a minute? If not, just watch Stella again!

Yesterday’s walk – you guessed it, Oaks Bottom – served as the background for composing today’s blog. It’s a miracle that so many birds hung out, given that the place was filled with young, noisy families trying to escape cabin fever…