When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (2 page)

Hungry to learn more systematically about animal emotions, I found that the book I wanted to read was yet to be written. So I started researching accounts of specific animals.

Among the first people I asked about the emotional lives of animals were researchers working with dolphins. Dolphins show such delight in performing, even in creating new performances of their own, that an elaborate emotional component seems obvious. I visited Marine World Africa USA, near Berkeley, California, to meet Diana Reiss, a leading dolphin researcher. She showed me "her" four dolphins in their large, clean tank, all clearly eyeing her, watching her movements, eager for her to come into the water and play with them. I wanted to think they were happy, that they liked being there. I asked her. Oh, yes, she said, they feed, they mate, they are physically healthy, they enjoy the games she invents as part of her research. I nodded in agreement. But is that enough to count as happiness? I remembered what George Adamson, the husband of Joy Adamson of 5onz Free fame, said in his autobiography: "A lion is not a lion if it is only free to eat, to sleep and to copulate. It deserves to be free to hunt and to choose its own prey; to look for and find its own mate; to fight for and hold its own territory; and to die w^here it was born—in the wild. It should have the same rights as we have."

Thinking that experts who work with and study animals might offer observations in person that they would be reluctant to put

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into a scientific article, I asked other renowned scholars of dolphin behavior about their experience with the emotions their dolphins expressed. They were unwilling to speculate or even to offer observations. One said, "I don't know what emotion means." Another referred the matter to his female graduate students, implying that the subject was somehow beneath his scientific (or male?) dignity.

What these scholars said was undermined by what they did. One hugged his prize dolphin in a clearly emotional moment, at least for the researcher. The other could hardly leave at night, so attached had he become to what he called his "subjects." The female graduate students had many stories to tell about mutual affection between researchers and dolphins, even some free-living dolphins. It is hard to believe that these scientists would express intense feelings toward creatures they genuinely felt were emotionally insensate and could not return them or respond to them in any way.

In any event, how can anyone know that an animal feels nothing if the question has never been investigated? To conclude without study that it has no feelings or cannot feel is to proceed on a prejudice, an unscientific bias, in the name of science. This is not the only area in which scientists cling to unscientific dogma. Consider how long psychoanalysts denied the reality of child sexual abuse. Sexual abuse of children occurred long before Freud became interested in it, but his conclusion, without evidence, that it largely did not happen kept it hidden until the women's movement exposed its true prevalence.

Looking for information about how trainers worked with the emotions of the animals they used in their shows, I approached the public relations director at Sea World in San Diego. He told me bluntly that he disapproved of the notion of animal emotions and would not permit Sea World to be associated with my research because it "smacked of anthropomorphism." I was therefore astonished to see the shows there in which the killer whale and the dolphins were trained to wave, shake hands, and splash water at the spectators. They had been trained to behave like people—more precisely, like people who had been bent and formed into amusing slaves in the service of commercial exploitation.

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Companitive psychology to this day discusses observable behavior and physical states of animals, and evolutionary explanations for their existence, hut shies away from the mental states that are inextricably involved in that behavior. VVTien such states are examined, the focus is on cognition, not emotion. The more recent discipline of ethology, the science of animal behavior, with its insistence on distinctions between species, also seeks functional and causal, rather than emotive, explanations for behavior. The causal explanations center on theories of "ultimate causation"—the animal pairs because this increases reproductive success—as distinguished from "proximate causation"—the animal pairs because it has fallen in love. Although the two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive—one of the best-known figures of ethology, Konrad Lorenz, spoke confidently of animals falling in love, becoming demoralized, or mourning—the field as a whole has continued to treat emotions as unworthy of scientific attention.

With the advent of laboratory studies of animals, especially in the 1960s, the distance maintained from the world of animal feelings became even greater. This distance supported scientists who do painful experiments on animals in believing that animals feel no pain or suffering, or at least that the pain animals feel is removed enough from the pain humans feel that one need not take it into account in devising experiments. The professional and financial interests in continuing animal experimentation help to explain at least some resistance to the notion that animals have a complex emotional life and are capable of experiencing not only pain but the higher emotions such as love, compassion, altruism, disappointment, and nostalgia. To acknowledge such a possibility implies certain moral obligations. If chimpanzees can experience loneliness and mental anguish, it is obviously wTong to use them for experiments in which they are isolated and anticipate daily pain. At the very least, this poses a matter for serious debate—a debate that has scarcely begun.

Some of the most innovative w^ork being done with animals today is directed at language use, self-awareness, and other cognitive abihties, so that the willful blindness of science to the world of animal emotions seems on the verge of crumbling. The enticing

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subjects of cognition and consciousness are both easier to test and more respectable than that of emotion. Intehigence is certainly fascinating, but an animal, like a human, need not be intelligent to have feelings. What data there is on animal emotions comes not from laboratory work but from field studies. Some of the most esteemed animal researchers of our day, from Jane Goodall to Frans de Waal, from time to time defy orthodoxy and from their position of eminence within their fields use words like love and suffering to describe animals. Yet these aspects of their work are virtually ignored, and it remains professionally risky for less well established scientists to use such terms.

But there are signs of significant change. Recently Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a scientist at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia, wrote in the preface to her book Ape Language:

It is possible, if one looks beyond the slightly differently shaped face, to read the emotions of apes as easily and as accurately as one reads the emotions and feelings of other human beings. There are few feelings that apes do not share with us, except perhaps self-hatred. They certainly experience and express exuberance, joy, guilt, remorse, disdain, disbelief, awe, sadness, wonder, tenderness, loyalty, anger, distrust, and love. Someday, perhaps, we will be able to demonstrate the existence of such emotions at a neurological level. Until then, only those who live and interact with apes as closely as they do with members of their own species will be able to understand the immense depth of the behavioral similarities between ape and man.

Knowing what we feel is one way to judge whether an animal feels something similar, but may not be the only, or even the best way. Are animals' similarities or differences from humans the only, or even the most important, issue? Surely we can train ourselves to an empathic imaginative sympathy for another species. Taught what to look for in facial features, gestures, postures, behavior, we could learn to be more open and more sensitive. We need to exercise our imaginative faculties, stretch them beyond where they

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have already taken us, and observe things we have never been able to see before. We need not be limited by ourselves as the reference point, by what has already been written, by the existing consensus among scientists. What do we have to lose in taking the imaginative leap to broaden our sympathies and our horizons? I decided to explore what had been written about animals in scientific studies to see whether they contained buried information about their emotions, even if they did not contain explicit discussions of such matters. As yet no prominent scientist has undertaken a sustained treatment of animal emotions. It is to be hoped, for the sake of animals as well as humans, that scientists will be persuaded to look more seriously at the feelings of the animals who share the world with us.

In this book I try to show that animals of all kinds lead complex emotional lives. Although many scientists have believed that the animals they observed had emotions, few have written about it. This is why my co-author and I have sifted a large body of scientific literature, looking for the unacknowledged evidence. I have drawn on a long list of expert witnesses, in particular scientists who have studied wild animals in the field. I have kept largely to work by recognized scientists, so that even skeptics will see that evidence comes from a wide range of careful studies of animals in different environments.

These field studies show what most laypeople have always believed: that animals love and suffer, cry and laugh; their hearts rise up in anticipation and fall in despair. They are lonely, in love, disappointed, or curious; they look back with nostalgia and anticipate future happiness. They/^e/.

No one who has lived with an animal would deny this. But many scientists do just that, which is why I have tried to address their worries in more detail than might be necessary for the ordinary person. "It's obvious," says the pet owner; "It's an enormous claim," says the scientist. This book attempts to bridge the gap between the knowledge of the person who has always observed animals without prejudice, and the scientific mind that does not want to venture into such emotional territory.

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Many scientists have avoided thinking about the feehngs of animals because they have been frightened—and reaUstically so— of being accused of anthropomorphism. That is why I have looked carefully at the issue of anthropomorphism. If it can be disposed of as a false criticism, then the study of animal emotions can proceed on a scientific basis, freed from a bogus fear.

I have also tried to look objectively at the arguments of evolutionary biology and ask, when do they help explain the real emotional lives that animals display and when are they used to dismiss that reahty?

As you read you may be surprised by the unexpected emotional behavior of some animals: an elephant who keeps a pet mouse; a chimpanzee awaiting the return of her dead baby; a bear lost in rapture as it watches the sunset; ice-skating buffalo; a parrot who means what he says; a dolphin inventing her own games—and through it all, scientists who refuse to acknowledge what will probably seem obvious to you.

In the conclusion I will discuss some of the moral choices that flow from an accurate understanding of animal emotions. We will have seen that animals feel anger, fear, love, joy, shame, compassion, and loneliness to a degree that you will not find outside the pages of fiction or fable. Perhaps this will affect not only the way you think about animals, but how you treat them. The clearer it became to me that animals have deep feelings, the more outraged I grew at the thought of any kind of animal experimentation. Can we justify these experiments when we know what animals feel as they undergo these tortures? Is it possible to go on eating animals when we know how they suffer? We are horrified when we read, even in fiction, of people who kill other people in order to sell parts of their bodies. But every day elephants are slaughtered for their tusks, rhinos for their horns, gorillas for their hands. My hope is that as it begins to dawn on people what feeling creatures these animals are, it will be increasingly difficult to justify these cruel acts.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Half Moon Bay, April 1995

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In Derense or Emotions

Somewhere in India, a blind river dolphin seeks her companion. Under the dark waters of the Ganges she will sleep next to him. She has never needed to see. These dolphins find everything they want and need by listening to echoes. Above them in the sky, two cranes from the east are flying back from China to their western breeding territory in Siberia. The cranes are a mile up in the sky, looking down with their golden eyes. What is in their hearts, or in the hearts of the dolphins? Wholly apart from us, their lives of turmoil and satisfaction are not beyond our imagination. When the dolphin rises out of the muddy waters, or the cranes stretch their necks in flight, we are filled with a sudden sense of familiarity, the recognition that we share an emotional heritage. They feel and we feel, no matter how difficult it is to know just what their feelings are.

After a promising start over 120 years ago, when Darwin explored the terrain in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, very few scientists have acknowledged, researched, or even speculated about animal emotions. So persistent are the forces that militate against even admitting the possibihty of emotions in

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the lives of animals that the topic seems disreputable, almost taboo. The scholarly literature on animals contains many observations, accounts, and anecdotes that suggest emotions the animals may be experiencing or expressing, or at least call for further research into this possibility. Yet little to none is forthcoming.

G. G. Rushby, a game warden doing "elephant control work" in Tanzania (then Tanganyika), saw three female elephants and a half-grown male in tall grass. Since his job was to keep the elephant population down, he shot the females—and slightly wounded the half-grown animal. To his dismay, he suddenly saw two elephant calves, who had been with the females but had been hidden in the grass. He moved toward them, shouting and waving his hat, hoping to drive them back to the larger herd, where other elephants would adopt them. The wounded elephant was dazed and helpless and did not know which way to turn. Instead of fleeing, the orphaned calves pressed themselves against him and supported him, and led him away from danger.