I was flossing my teeth the other night when I had this thought: “I have four canines!” That’s how it fell out of my brain, exclamation mark and all (just not in quotes). And I thought, “Four canines … an animal … a dog … a monkey … that’s what I am.” Of course, I already knew that that’s what I am. I had just never seen it in the mirror before.

But I probably should have. The likeness is unmistakable, the genetics clear. It’s really mostly semantics that separate us—how we define we—how far we choose to go, or not go, with our inclusiveness. Anthropologists tell us that feelings of inclusion go in the opposite direction. The “we” begins small, with nuclear family. Then comes extended family, tribe, and village. It may extend to workplace, school, or congregation; then on to looser regional or ideological affiliations with individuals we don’t know personally—region, religion, political party, then nationality, ethnicity, or race. Occasionally, during pandemics or interplanetary conflicts of the purely science-fictional kind, we may even manage to find the “we” in our species. But that’s as far as we are willing to be “we.”

What prevents us from opening our personal boundaries a bit further? Must we stop at species, like a bunch of biologists? Why can’t we see the “we” in all the other like-acting, like-feeling, warm-blooded creatures struggling alongside us on this one small world? The answer, of course, is that our physical Homo sapiens-ness blinds us to any “sameness” beyond the level of species. They just don’t look like us … to us. They ain’t kin!

Similarly, we can easily identify human individuals in our own ethnic and age groups but tend to think other groups just “all look alike.” I recall once looking for my grandfather in a crowded restaurant in Florida and seeing him pretty much everywhere. People who share similar features that are conspicuously different from our own tend to look alike … as do woodchucks … and as do human beings to a woodchuck (one has to suppose).

But then there are these four canines, that monkey face in the mirror—the angry gorilla, the smiling dog, the fox, seal, raccoon, the Three Bears and all their forebears, as down and around you climb on the tree of life. Pushing past the canines, I recall seeing a sea turtle skull that looked disquietingly human. Then there’s the physique of a frog, pinned like a crucified martyr and ready for dissection but looking even more disquietingly like a well-muscled scuba diver, albeit a tiny one, who may have been hitting the pasta a bit heavily. Is the branch on which the pet chickens, clever crows, hawks, doves, and affable ducks are all perched really so far away? Answer fast; the ducks don’t take too well to perching!

So with a little bit of dental hygiene and these four canines, I find myself swinging all over the tree of life, which is not surprising because when I jut out my jaw and purse my lips to keep the drool from running down my chin, I look to be about one ooh-ooh-ahh-ahh away from my tree-swinging chimpanzee cousins. And strangely these thoughts fill me with a vague sense of rage—at humankind’s blindness and unkindness and at our blindness to our unkindness (poetic though that thought may be).

If only we could see that “that which unites us is far greater than that which divides us,” perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to make decisions in favor of our own small self-interests at the expense of others’ lives or entire habitats (but as everyone knows, habitats are for humanity). It makes me want to hurl insults or punches at the ruthless and the uncaring of my species—those who cannot see, or simply don’t care about, how close we all are on this one tree of life.

To recontextualize a lyric by the late Kirsty MacColl: “From the sharks in the penthouse, to the rats in the basement—it’s not that far.”

I once read a letter-to-the-editor that I have never been able to shake, penned by some good Christian woman who took umbrage at the suggestion by scientists (and their ilk) that she evolved from monkeys! She pointed out that this was false on its face, which is to say on her face, because all she or anyone else had to do was look in a mirror and clearly see that she did not look anything like a chimp.

But now when I look in the mirror, if I am in a thoughtful mood, I find it hard to not see the chimp. The two nostrils, funky crinkled-cartilage ears, impressively pliable lips offering access to those big omnivorous teeth, and two glassy eyes that are, in my less-than-objective opinion, remarkably beautiful and yet seemingly straight out of a sci-fi tale. I really couldn’t look much more like a chimp without being one.

“You have four canines, lady!” I shout in my mind at the memory of that letter-writer and to any other mindless sheep (forgive me, any actual sheep who may be reading this) who are similarly self-blinded, ignorant, and/or arrogant. “Your thoughtlessness and negligence,” continues my internal diatribe, “is killing your relatives—creatures who love others and mourn their deaths and nurture their young, who enjoy an act of kindness or warm summer breeze, who struggle to survive amid and against the forces of nature, and who, under the right circumstances, could have been your friends.”

That’s what I’d like to tell her, but for all the good it would do I might as well just purse my lips and yell ooh-ooh-ahh-ahh.^* I actually do a pretty convincing ooh-ooh-ahh-ahh, and with no small irony, it would probably stand a better chance of getting the point across.

And what exactly is that point? It’s that once you have seen the animal in yourself, it is hard not to recognize the “yourself” in other animals and, in so doing, to empathize with them a little better. They are kin! Of course, anyone willing to call himself or herself a secular humanist, out loud, is likely to already be in this choir. But, by the same token, we who count ourselves among the more empathetic and enlightened members of our species should be among those most open to inclusiveness—to a recognition of those individuals whose worth, needs, and rights lie just beyond the “human”—in humanist.