Irrational Animal Behavior Is No Blueprint For Rational Man Some researchers studying animal “homosexual” behavior extrapolate from the realm of science into that of philosophy and morality. These scholars reason from the premise that if animals do it, it is according to their nature and thus is good for them. If it is natural and good for animals, they continue, it is also natural and morally good for man. However, the definition of man’s nature belongs not to the realm of zoology or biology, but philosophy, and the determination of what is morally good for man pertains to ethics.
Dr. Marlene Zuk, professor of biology at the University of California at Riverside, for example, states:
Sexuality is a lot broader term than people want to think. You have this idea that the animal kingdom is strict, old-fashioned Roman Catholic, that they have sex to procreate. … Sexual expression means more than making babies. Why are we surprised? People are animals.[16] Simon LeVay entertains the hope that the understanding of animal “homosexuality” will help change societal mores and religious beliefs about homosexuality. He states: It seems possible that the study of sexual behavior in animals, especially in non-human primates, will contribute to the liberalization of religious attitudes toward homosexual activity and other forms of nonprocreative sex. Specifically, these studies challenge one particular sense of the dogma that homosexual behavior is “against nature”: the notion that it is unique to those creatures who, by tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge, have alone become morally culpable.[17] Other researchers feel compelled to point out the impropriety of transposing animal behavior to man. Although very favorable to the homosexual interpretation of animal behavior, Paul L. Vasey, of the University of Lethbridge in Canada, nevertheless cautions: For some people, what animals do is a yardstick of what is and isn’t natural. They make a leap from saying if it’s natural, it’s morally and ethically desirable. Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom. To jump from that to say it is desirable makes no sense. We shouldn’t be using animals to craft moral and social policies for the kinds of human societies we want to live in. Animals don’t take care of the elderly. I don’t particularly think that should be a platform for closing down nursing homes.[18] The animal kingdom is no place for man to seek a blueprint for human morality. That blueprint, as bioethicist Bruto Maria Bruti notes, must be sought in man himself: It is a frequent error for people to contrast human and animal behaviors, as if the two were homogenous. … The laws ruling human behavior are of a different nature and they should be sought where God inscribed them, namely, in human nature.[19] The fact that man has a body and sensitive life in common with animals does not mean he is strictly an animal. Nor does it mean that he is a half-animal. Man’s rationality pervades the wholeness of his nature so that his sensations, instincts and impulses are not purely animal but have that seal of rationality which characterizes them as human. Thus, man is characterized not by what he has in common with animals, but by what differentiates him from them. This differentiation is fundamental, not accidental. Man is a rational animal. Man’s rationality is what makes human nature unique and fundamentally distinct from animal nature.[20]
To consider man strictly as an animal is to deny his rationality and, therefore, his free will. Likewise, to consider animals as if they were human is to attribute to them a non-existent rationality.
Let’s approach it this way. Every animal is independent from their parent shortly after birth. Humans on the other hand cannot survive without their parents to civilize them and impart morality. And it takes time.