And though Héloïse Cerys Raquel is our first born human child, our “first son”, Dudley the chinchilla, has his Facebook page up and running and accepts friend requests. Should he twitter too?
Real blogging returns Monday.
And for those marked as friends or family only, pictures of our Cerys are up in my Flickr account.
I am not a big fan of Twitter, so my inclination is to say no to a chinchilla twitterring. Sorry if that makes me a killjoy, lol.
Doesn’t anthropomorphizing your animals privilege your personal sentimentality over that creature’s authentic self? Let them be animals.
Robert, if I dressed Dudley up in little outfits, that would be anthropomorphizing him in a way that prevented him from living as a chinchilla. In reality, the little guy has no idea what Facebook is, and the fact that I have created a page for him doesn’t compromise his authentic self. Animal rights activism is about imbuing animals with legal and moral personhood, not about preventing anyone from projecting things on to them.
I often imagine my daughter is thinking lofty thoughts when she gets these quizzical looks on her face. She probably just has gas, but there’s no harm in my assuming that she is doing something far more intelllectually intense.