| This paper attempts to analyse the nature, features and cognitive mechanism of animal metaphor based on the Theory of Stereotypical Relations, and discuss the inner link between culture, stereotypical relations and animal metaphor.As an important term in cognitive linguistics, the notion of Stereotypical Relations(SR) refers to the inherent relations or psychological connections between things or entities through constant and conventional contacts. It can be further abstracted as two kinds of relations between things and entities in cognition:[±Proximity] and [±Similarity]. Once the relations are fossilified and stored in people's minds as a kind of general knowledge, it will become a perspective, a stereotype, a schema, a framework or a model in comprehending things consciously or unconsciously and act as the cognitive means and media by which social groups perceive and conceptualize the world.The recognizing of SRs is an essential way for human beings to experience and cognize the real world. Once the SRs are internalized as conceptual structure and stored as a long term memory, it will act as a trigger to activate some relevant elements in our minds to help us to understand an utterance through the mappings from one mental space to another based on the SRs among the elements in the structure, and thus enable us to better perceive and understand the whole world.Metaphor, as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon, is a cognitive process in which human beings experience and cognize one thing through the other. It is a pervasive, essential way of thinking, a cognitive tool for human being, and the prime means for the construction of conceptual system. The most obvious and fundamental nature of metaphor is also the mapping between two conceptual domains based on the similarities, or a SR conventionalized between the source domain and the target domain based on some similarities. In a certain context, the mention of the source will indicate the target, and target will get its corresponding meaning through the mappings between them. This shares the same cognitive basis and working mechanism with SRs, in which the mention of A will subconsciously indicated B which is proximate or similar with each other. Therefore, animal metaphor shares the same cognitive basis with SRs and can be analyzed with the Theory of Sterotypical Relations.Animal metaphor, as a kind of metaphor, refers to a cognitive process in which some aspects of human beings are understood or experienced through the aspects of animals. It is the concrete embodiment in language for the conceptual metaphor "human is animal" and the cross-domain mapping from the animal (source domain) to the human (target domain) based on the similarities shared by them in appearance, manners, behaviours, characters and so on. On one hand, because of the objectivity of the world, the embodiment of human beings, and the universality of conceptualization and categorization, there exist some similar metaphorical expressions on animals both in English and Chinese, but on the other hand, because the human thinking is based on embodiment of the objective and cultural world and the human thinking and reasoning are mainly metaphorical and imaginative which will vary with the personal experience and culture difference, and we are different in the natural environments, the histories, the traditions, the beliefs, the ways of thinking, religious beliefs, and so on, it is natural that the conventionalization of SRs through embodiment will vary from culture to culture, thus it is also natural for us to select different animals as source domain or different traits of the same animal to make mappings onto human beings, which is the root for the difference of animal metaphor in English and Chinese.
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