Creature Comforts

Though man may be the measure of all things, as Protagoras said, the relationships man forms with animals may also be a measure of man. Indeed, one of the first tasks of Adam in the Garden of Eden was to name the animals that God had created. Contemporary cultural critics are right to push back against anthropomorphizing animals and equivocating our relationships to them—pets are not people, after all. Yet there is something noble in the human spirit that leads us to admire the strength of a galloping horse, the serenity of a pod of dolphins, or the soaring heights of a peregrine falcon while recognizing that we are not them, and they are not us. Portraying this balance in cinema is something seldom done well, but a recent film does this beautifully: H Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthrope and adapted from a 2014 memoir of the same title.