Not surprisingly, one of the casualties of high-speed transmission of news has been the decreased concern about fact-checking. Perhaps this explains the trend toward “creative nonfiction” with its greater wiggle room than the stricter standards that used to apply to journalism.
I’m the first to admit that blatantly false statements regarding basic animal facts that are so easy to check in this age of high-speed connections and electronic data bases strike me as particularly egregious errors. But I also realize that those who make them may feel the same way about false statements related to their particular area of expertise.
Given how often this happens, though, I wonder whether animals are so much a part of our cultural heritage, if not necessarily our daily lives, that we assume that we possess all of the knowledge that’s necessary to know about them by virtue of some prenatal process of osmosis. This would seem to imply an inherent feeling of human-animal kinship even within those people remote from the natural world. And that would seem to be a very good thing.
But the down side of this is that such a belief could result in the contempt with which some regard the familiar. When that’s the case, the result could be those cavalier approaches to reporting about animals. It never dawns on these folks that, relative to animals, they fall into the category of those who know not and know not that they know not…
Which also strikes me as a most uncomfortable place to be, particularly regarding a collection of living beings with whom we share the planet and who also happen to greatly outnumber us.
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