Illustration by Darren Hopes

It seemed simple, how I found myself at the Watering Hole lounge in Sebring, Florida, beside the cage of a 14-foot alligator. Driving, I'd noticed a sign touting his size, pulled over, and entered a bar. The reptile did not flinch at my arrival; with my face inches from his, not a spark ignited the shiny black surface of his eyeballs. I resisted an urge to stick my finger through the cage mesh -- and began to wonder if I wasn't under the sway of forces more powerful than roadside advertising. Unreasonably, I wanted his recognition.

Why do we yearn to connect with animals? More immediately, why did I imagine that this cooped-up alligator seemed glum, in the way other humans believe, say, that their Chihuahuas enjoy wearing tiny sneakers to the mall? Tragedies abound that testify to the impossibility of fully taming and befriending members of another species. Travis, the chimpanzee that tore off a Connecticut woman's face last year, for instance, could also adeptly sip from a wineglass. Yet we persist in our efforts to understand and be understood outside our genus, Homo. Why?

In 1977 the novelist John Berger wrote an essay called "Why Look at Animals?" in which he suggested one answer: despite our differences, finding existential similarities to other animals makes humankind feel less cosmically alone. But pet ownership and animal attractions don't offer a communion with nature, he argued. Rather, they are evidence of society's complete withdrawal from nature -- relics of a bygone era when humans defined themselves in relationship to the other sentient beings with which they lived side by side. We can't truly "encounter" animals in captivity, Berger wrote, because they are merely reflections of ourselves.

That may be. But it isn't always so clear where our thinking ends and an animal's begins. Take my alligator. Though I knew his massive body housed a brain less hefty than a poker chip, I couldn't help but wonder what was going through his mind. Most likely, absolutely nothing: alligator thoughts are probably "like a dial tone," a zoologist once told the New Yorker. And yet, while unintelligent by our standards, crocodilians possess homing instincts that can return them to a pond of origin over a span of both months and miles. In captivity, alligators congregate at an appointed hour for regular meals. Despite a natural wariness of humans, they become bold if habitually fed, shy if frequently hunted. One Miami resident who kept an alligator named Gwendolyn in a backyard pool for years even swore his pet knew her name, came when called, and enjoyed the music of George Michael.

Behavioral scientists agree that familiarity with another necessarily breeds interpretation, by both parties. Empathy is the basis of all communication, but practiced between species it can also lead to disappointment. Once, when an alligator that had become a fixture in a neighborhood lake in Florida ate a little girl, a resident told the local paper, "I never thought these things would hurt you, but I don't know what they've got in their minds now." In his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" the philosopher Thomas Nagel explains the problem: our imagination, constructed with human references, can't approach the experience of another being. A person endeavoring to envision what it is like for an alligator to be an alligator is picturing instead what it would be like for her to float in a lake with only her eyes above the surface, catch fish in her mouth, and weigh 500 pounds.

I did that for a while at the Watering Hole. I imagined how hopeless and bored I would feel living alone in a cage barely longer than my body. I couldn't help it: getting up to leave, I whispered, "Hey, I'm really sorry." Somehow, it was easier to accept that the alligator might feel bad than that he might have no-zero-feelings at all. Now I wonder if what I'd really wished him to have was an identity immune to my projections -- if it was a desire to provoke his independence, not relate to him, that tugged my hand toward his head. The alligator's ancestors had arisen in the Triassic; in him lived unfathomable stretches of time on earth. That humans had utterly subdued him, that I could look at him and see only myself, was, in a way, like the end of the world.