![](\"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/eagle-scavenger_8361.jpg\")
\nI had an odd and surprising exchange with my boss today regarding what constitutes an animal.<\/p>\n
\nI had an odd and surprising exchange with my boss today regarding what constitutes an animal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We were working on choosing an important image and she suggested a shot of an eagle.
\n“What do you think?” she asked as we looked it over.
\n“It’s good,” I replied, “the first time we’ve featured an animal since I’ve worked here.”
\n“The first animal in this placement, ever,” she corrected.
\n“No. You used salmon a few years back.”
\n“That’s not an animal.”
\n“Salmon? Sure it is.”
\n“It is?”
\n“Yeah. It’s a fish. Fish are animals.”
\n“Well …” she scrambled to regain her conversational footing, “it’s not a mammal.”
\n“Well, neither are eagles.”
\n“They’re not?”
\n“No. Eagles lay eggs. Mammals have live birth.”
\n“Oh.”<\/p>\n
Now, she has a master’s degree and I barely graduated from high school. What’s wrong with this picture?<\/p>\n
The funny thing is, I’ve run across this before.<\/p>\n
I worked with a guy in the late 90’s who didn’t think of insects as animals – or even as alive. In his mind, it was as if they were some rare blend of animal, vegetable, and mineral, which had come together to form something else. Like walking dirt, maybe?<\/p>\n
He was quite distraught to be disabused of said notion and you could see in his eyes a desperate and hasty attempt to reorder the universe with this new information before all of reality slipped away from him like a greasy egg on a tilting plate.<\/p>\n
It was hard to watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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