The claim seems to be, more or less, that western urban kids interpret animals by projection or analogization of human traits rather than forming categories for the animals, more than kids in (some) other societies do. I have no idea how true that is myself (have not read anything on the subject beyond this article).
I haven't read the paper, but this seems blatantly obvious to me. Outside of most western cities, people interact with animals as food. Western children are much more likely to interact with animals as pets or, at most, "those things at the zoo". When you aren't confronted with the regular death of animals as food, you are able to form more of an emotional bond with the concept of "animal".
My thought as well. My exposure to animals as a kid was almost exclusively through cartoons, and very occasionally through zoos or other people's pets. I had no strong opinion on vegetarianism in jr. high, though some of my friends did. But I immediately developed a strong opinion on the day I actually met a chicken and a cow.
Even as an adult, I find that real animals look strange to me. I've seen so many cartoon images of skunks and giraffes and elephants in my life, and even though I know they're cartoons, when I do a google image search and photographs dominate the results, I usually find them quite alien.
Some subconscious part of my brain is totally convinced that a giraffe looks like this . . .
So as someone that grew up on a farm/ranch you are dead on. I honestly have a hugely hard time identifying with people that have only grown up in a city and have NO idea where food comes from.
I find it excruciatingly odd people hate on large scale cow lots, but seemingly find the mass murder of small animals that live in the same place as grains to be "meh". More rabbits and other cuddly creatures die from combines than all of the evil things we do to cows in feed lots.
I've had to help out cows after they've prolapsed, and also had to help out other cows that have fought each other to near death, animals are not disney cartoons. But I've dated vegetarians and vegans (no offense to anyone there) that seem to have this unnatural viewpoint of our use of animals as food.
I see cartoon cows and can't help but think its similar to lolcats. So far removed from reality that we've anthropomorphized things to the point of ridiculousness. I'll be a bit blunt, after living around cows for 18 years of my life, I really don't have much sympathy for them. They're just as evil as humans are to each other, and they are such herd creatures it isn't funny. The bulls however always seemed to be less skittish, the females, they never acted even remotely rational or consistent. Bring calves into the picture and throw even that out the window. The bulls just fought and wanted to get into the females areas.
Just to counter your city experience a bit, not trying to say feed lots are a good way to mass produce meat, but I grew up not dealing with any of that. I have zero qualms eating a cow or chicken, but free range is loads better to eat than mass produced. I just see them as no different than wheat or other plants to be honest.
I didn't mean to be misleading. I agree with you; the strong opinion I developed was that those animals are clearly food. And that some of the excessive compassion spent on them would be better spent on people, who might actually appreciate it.
I know! Art from other cultures can be so confusing!
I grew up in the pacific northwest, surrounded by a lot of examples of Inuit art. The captions always said something like, "This one is an orca," and I always thought, "If you say so!"
But I think Mickey is even more distorted! I can easily imagine someone from another culture reacting that way to the claim that he was a mouse.
I don't have a problem recognizing real mice because I've interacted with them a lot. But animals for which my only frame of reference is cartoons, well . . . my expectations of the real animals can be downright embarrassing.
I'd imagine my mental models of them would fare better if I weren't surrounded by miles and miles of endless civilization.
That still doesn't fit my example which, as far as I can tell isn't an isolated one, where a coyote was seen as a trickster (among many other things), by Native Americans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism seems paints anthropomorphism as something that ALL humans have done over time, often even going so far as to anthropomorphize deities.
But why would people without contact to "food animals" anthropomorphise them out of all things, not think of them as dumb food containers like plants? In the end, both end up shrink-wrapped in a supermarket. I know that my non-farmer, omnivore friends are basically saying this. Have I just picked friends that are more resistant to Disney movies than the general population? :)
Okay, so I looked more closely at that section. Apparently, my reading started on page 14, so I missed the first section.
From what I gathered, the difference is that, urban kids (why is it urban kids?) relate to animals by relating them to humans; whereas elsewhere, animals are related to other animals.
To quote the original article, "inferences are asymmetric, with inferences from human properties to mammals emerging as stronger than inference from mammals to humans, and (3) children’s inferences violate their own similarity judgments by, for example, providing stronger inference from humans to bugs than from bugs to bees (Carey 1985;1995)." emphasis mine.
If this is what the submitted link is talking about, I don't believe that's anthropomorphism.
Because children who grow up in rural areas generally have more contact with wild animals and livestock so they develop 'healthier' attitudes towards animals at a younger age. I have a friend who grew up on a farm and had to slaughter chickens as one of his chores. He sees it as nothing to kill an animal to eat it but a lot of his and my friends who grew up exclusively in the city or suburbs cannot imagine such a thing.
The claim seems to be, more or less, that western urban kids interpret animals by projection or analogization of human traits rather than forming categories for the animals, more than kids in (some) other societies do. I have no idea how true that is myself (have not read anything on the subject beyond this article).