The Power of the Herd (20 page)

In one impressive instance, a naturalist named Syevertsoff documented nearly a dozen white-tailed eagles acting as a survey team. Spread across the sky at a considerable distance apart, they were together scanning an estimated twenty-five square miles. For a good half hour, individuals held their respective posts, tracing wide circles in silence, until one finally let out a piercing shriek.
Its cry was soon answered by another eagle approaching,
“followed by a third, a fourth
, and so on, till nine or ten eagles came together and soon disappeared.” Later that afternoon, Syevertsoff arrived at the place where he had seen the group descend into the gently rolling grasslands hours earlier. There he discovered the gregarious birds gathered around the corpse of a horse. Some of the eagles, probably the older ones, who had eaten first, were perched on surrounding haystacks keeping watch while the youngsters dined in safety, surrounded by bands of crows.

A lone horse encircled by eagles, not wolves, was an unusual sight — the poor creature may very well have died from injury, old age, or illness. Adult herd animals, after all, are dangerous prey. As Kropotkin emphasized, the collective defense strategies of horses are highly intimidating to even the most ambitious predators:
“In the Russian Steppes, [wolves]
never attack the horses otherwise than in packs; and yet they have to sustain bitter fights, during which the horses sometimes assume offensive warfare….If the wolves do not retreat promptly, they run the risk of being surrounded by the horses and killed by their hooves.”

Mutual aid, he insisted, was a significant factor on both sides of that classic drama, but the sheer numbers of nonpredatory species was an even greater revelation to the Russian prince. Surveying a wide variety of mammals,
“the first thing which strikes us is
the overwhelming numerical predominance of social species over those few carnivores which do not associate,” he wrote, later adding that on the “great plateau of Central Asia we find herds of wild horses, wild donkeys, wild camels, and wild sheep. All these mammals live in societies and nations sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands of individuals, although now, after three centuries of gunpowder civilization, we find but the
debris
of the immense aggregations of old. How trifling, in comparison with them, are the numbers of the carnivores! And how false, therefore, is the view of those who speak of the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims! One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a succession of war massacres.”

Kropotkin's optimistic perspective on natural selection ultimately caused him a great deal of trouble, leading him straight to jail, as it turns out (though he eventually escaped). For a czarist-era nobleman to find so many incidents in nature of mutual aid and nonpredatory behavior was one thing. To become a
vocal anarchist as a result of these observations was quite another. While some of his discoveries won him worldwide respect as a geographer, he subsequently took on a decidedly subversive mission, disguising himself as a peasant activist and lecturer named Borodin to spread nature-inspired visions of social reform, encouraging peaceful collectives of free, empowered people living in decentralized systems. His pseudonym was a blatant homage to Aleksandr Borodin, an early-nineteenth-century Russian composer who wrote the orchestral piece “In the Steppes of Central Asia,” a lush tone poem with hints of oriental and eastern European folk melodies (an early version of “world music”) that is still popular today.

Kropotkin's ideas, like Borodin's richly hued compositions, were enigmatic and stirring, promising something essential yet indescribable that might lure the unsuspecting listener off the beaten track. As Geoff Olson revealed in the 2005
Common Ground
article “Kropotkin vs. Darwin: Cooperation as an Evolutionary Force,” Kropotkin's nature-inspired philosophy not only rejected monarchy, it also challenged those later social experiments we've come to see as polar opposites:
“the top-down models of communism's central planning and capitalism's
free-market monopolies.” To make matters worse, this wealthy prince had the nerve to challenge a fast-growing, international pseudoscientific-political philosophy that used Darwinism to justify the “natural laws” of war and predatory business practices, a movement that successfully lobbied to pass legislation in the United States
obligating
modern corporations to
profit
at the expense of any and all other social concerns. According to Olson:

A particular essay by “Darwin's bulldog,”
Thomas Huxley, caught [Kropotkin's] attention during this time. “Life was a continuous free fight,” wrote Huxley, “and beyond the limited and temporary relaxation of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.” Huxley tempered these remarks to say that it is the duty of human culture to resist the brute violence of the animal world, but the Russian émigré was inflamed by Huxley's belief that the natural world is defined solely by struggle.
Kropotkin believed this to be an extrapolation backwards from human militarism and misery to the natural world.

Huxley's comments inspired Kropotkin to write a series of rebuttals in
Nineteenth Century
magazine, which he eventually gathered together in his book
Mutual Aid:
A
Factor of Evolution.
Yet with his anarchist leanings offending royalty, fascists, communists, and free-market capitalists alike, Kropotkin found his work dismissed if not actively suppressed. His ideas would have felt especially threatening to the new industrialized elite, who embraced social Darwinism:
a debased interpretation of “survival of the fittest” concepts in which the rich become richer as a dictate of natural selection — with the powerful fully justified in exploiting the weak.

The entire multicultural history of the twentieth century provides evidence that widespread suffering and
retrogression
abound when opportunists delete mutual aid from the evolutionary program.
“It's undeniable,” Olson concludes
, “that a one-size-fits-all reductionism, pushing the competitive aspect of the living world, helped pave the way for the monstrosities of eugenics and Aryanism. Even Darwin's better interpreters, like Huxley, unwittingly helped this legacy by playing up gladiatorial imagery in their description of life.” In light of the Enron fiasco alone, Kropotkin's words ring true, now more than ever:

[If we] ask Nature: “Who are the fittest:
those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization…. We may safely say that mutual aide is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.

Life in supportive, nurturing societies, Kropotkin insisted,

enables the feeblest of insects
, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from the most terrible birds and beasts of prey; it permits longevity; it enables the species to rear its progeny with the least waste of energy and to maintain its numbers albeit a very slow birthrate; it enables the gregarious animals to migrate in search of new abodes. Therefore, while fully admitting that force, swiftness, protective colors, cunningness, and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under certain circumstances, we maintain that under
any
circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.

The great thing about science is that, despite a glitch in the system that sometimes prevents valuable new perspectives from gaining acceptance, or even getting published in the first place, evidence eventually builds up and breaks through the personal and cultural biases of the international scientific
community. Often this happens only after a rigid hierarchy dies off and a new generation takes over, but from a cathedral-thinking point of view, the process remains sound (though perhaps needlessly, sometimes dangerously, slow and ponderous).

Such is the case with twenty-first-century research that effectively challenges the “gladiator view” of nature, enhancing Kropotkin's mutual aid theory with an even more adventurous hypothesis. Compelling new evidence suggests that between ten and thirty thousand years ago, a new innovation — the human-animal bond — spurred a quantum leap in our own evolution through brain-altering biochemical responses and mutual behavior modification, leading to a shocking yet unmistakable conclusion: the species with whom our ancestors formed mutually beneficial relationships
gentled
and domesticated
us
as much as we domesticated them. What's more, the fields of animal-assisted therapy and equine-facilitated learning demonstrate that horses, dogs, and other companion animals are still upping the ante, empowering and training us in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

On a planet so intimately mapped through satellite surveillance, the last frontier may be hidden in our own barns and backyards. Our peaceful nickering and tail-wagging friends have been waiting, for centuries, for us to realize they're not just here to help us protect territory, trek through the wilderness, and master nature; they're
innately equipped
to assist us in tapping those higher levels of awareness, compassion, and leadership essential to fulfilling our role as
responsible
stewards of the earth, its myriad cultures, and its vast array of sentient, uniquely gifted life-forms.

T
he human-animal bond is shrouded in mystery.
We will never know who coaxed the first wolf to take a morsel of food by hand, who cuddled the first ancestral feline, or who rode the first horse. Not only did we form mutually beneficial partnerships with other species thousands of years before the invention of writing, historians and scientists didn't spend much time speculating how domestication occurred until the twentieth century. And the world's creation stories don't fare much better. It's as if, from the moment we first became conscious, the animals were already there, so intimately interwoven with human life that their presence was universally taken for granted, like rain, like the seasons, like breathing.

In Genesis, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air were named by Adam, who was created last, but there's no mention of how, why, or when the first man was inspired to form relationships with certain animals. There's that unfortunate episode with a crafty talking snake and the subsequent expulsion from paradise. The next thing we know, Adam's sons are reaping harvests, herding livestock, and fighting over which approach is better, a sedentary agricultural lifestyle or a nomadic pastoral one. The subsequent murder of one brother by the other depicts man's violent rebellion against God's
preference
and draws attention to humanity's forgetfulness of the real issue involved, one that, to this very day, promotes widespread human suffering.

Whether or not you consider yourself religious, and whether or not your orientation is Judeo-Christian, it is well worth analyzing the meaning behind this tempestuous tale. And it really doesn't matter if you interpret the Bible as
literal, metaphorical, or a combination of both in this case. There's significant historical, psychological, and cultural information packed into the Cain and Abel conflict, which we would all benefit from remembering — that is, bringing to full, integrated consciousness. I originally touched on this subject in my first book,
The Tao of Equus,
in 2001, but recent theories on the human-animal bond suggest this ancient story may coincide with some compelling, newly emerging scientific research as well.

The Bible contains the collective wisdom, innovations, and historical dilemmas of a highly successful, seminomadic culture confronting the increasing influence of landowning, wealth-amassing, slaveholding civilizations throughout the Middle East. Much of what seems paradoxical in the sayings and writings of Moses and Jesus — and the countless others who contributed to this multifaceted volume — makes perfect sense in the context of a nonsedentary philosophy. It all started when God accepted Abel's pastoral offering over Cain's presentation of the fruits of his agricultural labors. The creator of the universe wasn't promoting meat over vegetables or satisfying some supernaturally demented thirst for blood. He was endorsing the shepherd's lifestyle, one that requires caring for and moving with the animals. But why would wandering around the countryside protecting sheep from wolves win out over peacefully tending to grains, grapes, dates, and flowers?

Here's where the idea of a divine intelligence comes in, the logic of which we are only now, in the twenty-first century, capable of deciphering through modern science and a good five thousand years of brutal trial and error.

For those who aren't familiar with this story, let's go straight to the source, in this case the New International Version of Genesis,
chapter 4
, which opens with Eve giving birth to Cain and, later, his brother Abel:

Now Abel kept flocks
, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering — fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.