Why we only appreciate animals when they are in the living room

In close proximity, animals lose their strangeness.
Suddenly we realize how valuable they are – because they become part of our intimacy.

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We apparently need closeness to feel empathy.
As long as the animal is outside, we call it “stock.”
As soon as it's in the living room, we call it "family."

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

The paradox of affection

We protect what we own.
We forget what is free.
And so it happens that a lion in a work of art arouses more compassion than one in the savannah.

Our affection depends on distance.
The closer the animal, the greater the care.
But true love for nature should work exactly the other way around:
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 regain our grasp of what we have lost: the ability to see what lives outside our walls.

Brandhoek does not show 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 looks 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 a previous Brandhoek collection in 2022 and is no longer available.

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