Man, I watched The Fox and The Hound a few weeks ago. I cried a bit.
While watching the movie, a friend commented “so… they know that foxes are *also* predators, right?” and, yes. They do. This is not a movie that was supposed to be about predation except it didn’t notice all the ramifications about its lesson. This movie just isn’t taking a stand about predation.
This is a movie about… kinda classic de-facto tribal morality. Where you have your family and your tribe and a few specific neighbors/travelers that you welcomed into your home. Those are your people, and the rest of the world… it’s not exactly that they aren’t *people*, but, they aren’t in your circle of concern. Maybe you eat them sometimes. That’s life.
Copper the hound dog’s ingroup isn’t even very nice to him. His owner, Amos, leaves him out in a crate on a rope. His older dog friend is sort of mean. Amos takes him out on a hunting trip and teaches him how to hunt, conveying his role in life. Copper enthusiastically learns. He’s a dog. He’s bred to love his owner and be part of the pack no matter what.
My dad once commented that this was a movie that… seemed remarkably realistic about what you can expect from animals. Unlike a lot of other disney movies it didn’t require suspending disbelief much.
A baby fox and hound might totally play together because they haven’t figured out yet that they’re supposed to be enemies.
If that hound then went away for 6 months to learn to hunt, and came back, it might initially be hesitant to hunt down its fox friend, out of a vague/confused memory.
But interspecies friendship isn’t *that* strong, and doing-what-your-species/tribe does is often stronger, and yeah later on the hound is like “okay I guess we’re hunting this fox now. It’s what master wants. I do what master says, that’s who I am.”
And then...
...well, and then the hound gets attacked by a bear. And the fox comes back to save him. And on one hand, I bet 99+% of foxes would not do that. But, having seen a bunch of youtubes of animals doing impressive things, I’m willing to buy that the occasional hero foxes exist, and I’m willing to buy a fox who remembers enough of his interspecies friend to intervene bravely.
(weakly held, if someone who knew a lot more about foxes than me was like “nope, this is outside the space of what foxes do”, I’d believe them)
And what gets me is… man, this is what my morality is built out of. People who were mostly doing what nature of society incentived, who are still on the verge of eating their friends, but there’s little sparks of friendship/compassion/abstract-reasoning that build up along the way, combined with the abundance necessary for them to grow. And that’s why my morality comes from. Man.
Man, I watched The Fox and The Hound a few weeks ago. I cried a bit.
While watching the movie, a friend commented “so… they know that foxes are *also* predators, right?” and, yes. They do. This is not a movie that was supposed to be about predation except it didn’t notice all the ramifications about its lesson. This movie just isn’t taking a stand about predation.
This is a movie about… kinda classic de-facto tribal morality. Where you have your family and your tribe and a few specific neighbors/travelers that you welcomed into your home. Those are your people, and the rest of the world… it’s not exactly that they aren’t *people*, but, they aren’t in your circle of concern. Maybe you eat them sometimes. That’s life.
Copper the hound dog’s ingroup isn’t even very nice to him. His owner, Amos, leaves him out in a crate on a rope. His older dog friend is sort of mean. Amos takes him out on a hunting trip and teaches him how to hunt, conveying his role in life. Copper enthusiastically learns. He’s a dog. He’s bred to love his owner and be part of the pack no matter what.
My dad once commented that this was a movie that… seemed remarkably realistic about what you can expect from animals. Unlike a lot of other disney movies it didn’t require suspending disbelief much.
A baby fox and hound might totally play together because they haven’t figured out yet that they’re supposed to be enemies.
If that hound then went away for 6 months to learn to hunt, and came back, it might initially be hesitant to hunt down its fox friend, out of a vague/confused memory.
But interspecies friendship isn’t *that* strong, and doing-what-your-species/tribe does is often stronger, and yeah later on the hound is like “okay I guess we’re hunting this fox now. It’s what master wants. I do what master says, that’s who I am.”
And then...
...well, and then the hound gets attacked by a bear. And the fox comes back to save him. And on one hand, I bet 99+% of foxes would not do that. But, having seen a bunch of youtubes of animals doing impressive things, I’m willing to buy that the occasional hero foxes exist, and I’m willing to buy a fox who remembers enough of his interspecies friend to intervene bravely.
(weakly held, if someone who knew a lot more about foxes than me was like “nope, this is outside the space of what foxes do”, I’d believe them)
And what gets me is… man, this is what my morality is built out of. People who were mostly doing what nature of society incentived, who are still on the verge of eating their friends, but there’s little sparks of friendship/compassion/abstract-reasoning that build up along the way, combined with the abundance necessary for them to grow. And that’s why my morality comes from. Man.