C oronaviruses stopped us in our tracks and forced us to rethink our position as the rulers of the world. You could say that it has helped us. Our treatment of the non-human world and the planet we share has been challenged by an invisible enemy.
Humans have thought of themselves as the Earth's apex predator for about 2,000 years. An article in a special issue of Scientific American praised the richness of our subjective experience and the fact that elephants have bigger brains.
Our species has not always been taken for granted. If we were to go back 200,000 years, we would find the earliest Homo sapiens acting like rabbits, huddling at the sight of a pack of hyenas, and shivering at the sound of rustling in the tall grass. The men who conquered the marauding beasts were often remembered in myth, but how much of our existence was spent battling and dodging more dangerous animals we don't know.
Humans didn't rise from their status to anything resembling global dominance in a single leap. Civilised states embraced religions in which humans and non-human animals appeared to be more or less equal. The Roman and Greek gods behaved like the lead stars in a reality show when they spoke to and understood each other. Only with the arrival of monotheism, between 1200BC and AD 700, did the unique gods of each polity acquire names.
As these monotheistic super-gods grew and incorporated the attributes once spread among the many gods of polytheistic religions, they became more abstract and removed from the material world. Hinduism made no distinction between human beings and other life forms.
The complexity of the human species, with its overgrown brain and its mobile limbs, and the simplicity of a microbe or sub-microbial particle, are both present in the Covid pandemic.
In the late 19th century, humans who had fought megafauna as prey and had gone on to fight each other, were confronted for the first time by invisible enemies that frequently attacked them and their children. Pasteur, a leading European scientist, proved that diseases could be spread from one vessel to another.
Over the course of thousands of years, a pyramid of creatures had arisen on our planet, ranging in size from viruses tobacteria to the cells that comprise whole living bodies. Humans have learned to make use of some of these tiny beings, for example in food production and medicine, but now we find ourselves in a less powerful position. We have to come to an accommodation. The idea of our supremacy will be reconsidered.
There is hope for a better arrangement between the Earth's species. In 2012 an international conference in Cambridge, Consciousness in Human and Non- Human Animals, issued a formal acknowledgment that many non-human animals, including mammals, birds and cephalopods, also possess the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. This was a huge shift in human consciousness, which had been giving no thought to the idea that non-human animals are capable of imagination, curiosity and other human-like qualities. It raised a lot of questions about the state of the world. What did the conference-goers mean byconsciousness?
Why were scientists only discovering animal consciousness after putting animals to work in their laboratories as sources of tissues and cells? Who should decide on the ethics of using animals?
The questions are not easy to answer. The questions about practicalities are more difficult. Is it possible to share the Earth with other earthlings? What happens to animals in abattoirs? If large parts of the planet are rewilded for optimal animal life, how will humans survive? We may be on the verge of making peace with our planet-mates, we may finally see the moral as well as practical reasons for doing so, but can we work out how?
The burden of peace talks between humans and non-humans lies with us. Our kind emptied the once crowded rivers and plains, silenced the chatter of the forests and planted grassy fields. We have a lot to learn from each other, assuming that the non-humans among us are still willing to make contact with creatures as bloody-minded as we have proved to be. Humility is the foundation of everything else.
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