Why we only appreciate animals when they're lying in the living room

Animals lose their strangeness when they are close to each other.
Suddenly we realize how valuable they are – because they become part of our intimacy.

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We apparently need closeness in order to feel empathy.
As long as the animal is outside, we call it a "population".
Once it's in the living room, we call it "family".

We say we love animals.
But actually, we love their tamed version – the one that doesn't bother us, doesn't smell, doesn't demand anything.
Only when the wild animal is lying on a sofa do we begin to talk about protection.
Perhaps because then we realize that it is just as fragile as we are.

The paradox of affection

We protect what we own.
We forget what freedom is.
And so it happens that a lion in a work of art evokes more sympathy than one in the savanna.

Our affection depends on distance.
The closer the animal, the greater the care.
But true love for nature should work in exactly the opposite way:
It begins where we have no benefit, no control, no security.

Between sofa and wilderness

Perhaps we need these surreal images – animals on sofas, lions in galleries, giraffes in concrete rooms – to rediscover what we have lost: the ability to see what lives outside our walls.

Brandhoek shows not the absurd, but the honest:
That we only feel compassion when the foreign becomes tangible.
And that perhaps this is precisely the key to protecting nature again –
not because it belongs to us,
but because she is looking at us.

What began as a thought became an attitude that remains.

Author: Brandhoek ᛫ February 2022 ᛫ Stellenbosch - South Africa

This work - Silent Dominant - comes from an earlier Brandhoek collection from 2022 and is no longer available.

It remains part of the Brandhoek archival archive – a symbol of the beginning of a new perspective.