When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (33 page)

THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE, JUSTICE, AND THE INEXPRESSIBLE Religion ana tne Soul

People have immortal souls and animals do not, according to much of Western religion. Animal lovers resist this, citing animals' virtues and affirming that they must have souls; heaven would be a paltry place if there were no dogs in it. The question of who has a soul and who doesn't is far more problematic than the parallel question of emotions. Science is of no help. Yet the theological view may point to a difference between the emotional lives of humans and those of other animals. Animals do not seem to need to believe in higher powers. Animals have not been observed to have religious practices, while people do.

Some traditional tribes in Madagascar say that when sifaka lemurs lie on high branches in the morning, facing the sun, with their eyes closed, they are worshiping the sun. Some say that the sifakas are incarnations of their own sun-w orshiping ancestors. Pri-matologist Alison Jolly commented, "It is difficult to watch a sunning lemur without being anthropomorphic, but to Western eyes it seems less like religious fervor than like our indolent cult of Sunday at the beach." There is no reason to suppose that sifakas themselves are lemuromorphic, that they invest the sun with creature qualities (though we cannot prove that they do not) and worship those qualities. The explanation that they enjoy the warmth seems sufficient to explain their behavior, but the traditional explanation of the Malagasy people has the advantage of poetry.

Like art, religion is not an emotionless affair of pure intellect. Awe, faith, righteousness, abasement, worship, seeking salvation— all have emotional components. Some theorists describe awe as a form of shame. Are the religious emotions ones that animals simply do not feel? Or are they emotions that exist in other parts of life that in humans may be focused on the religious impulse? Animal emotions may shed some light. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas compares the behavior of a person humbly kneeling to pray and a dog showing its belly—demonstrating submission—to a person. Her husband's dog, she notes, ritually shows his belly first thing in the morning, like a morning devotion. In the end, Thomas concludes that the parallel is not exact, that dogs probably do not think of

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humans as gods, yet, "as we need Ciod more than he needs us, dogs need us more than we need them, and they know it." Further study of such dynamics could shed considerable comparative light on human religious rites.

Morality and a Sense or Justice

The sense of justice has been called uniquely human. Has it an emotional component? The human sense of justice is accompanied by many emotions: anger and outrage at injustice, desire for revenge, and compassion. The stories of crow parliaments that hold trials and pass judgment on their members are fantasy, but less organized manifestations of what may be a sense of justice exist in many stories of righteously indignant chimps, for example. Nim Chimpsky learned when to expect praise and when to expect censure, and accepted these artificial standards. If he broke a toy, punishment did not surprise him, and he accepted it. But if one of his teachers punished him for something the others ignored, or if one failed to praise him for something the others rewarded, Nim became sulky.

Perhaps Nim was merely upset because his world lacked pre-dictabihty, because his settled expectations were violated. But this is a big part of legal justice among humans. The chimpanzees in the Arnhem colony seem to react to a sense of unjust treatment of others. In one instance the chimpanzee Puist "kidnapped" a one-year-old infant from his mother, and carried him up a tree, where he screamed with fright. After the mother recovered her child she attacked Puist, although Puist was larger and more dominant. The male Yeroen rushed up to them and stopped the fight by seizing Puist and flinging her away. This was unusual, because Yeroen and Puist were allies, and on all other occasions Yeroen had intervened on Puist's side. Frans de Waal concludes that Yeroen agreed with the mother chimp that she had cause for complaint.

In another incident, Puist appeared to be aggrieved on her own behalf, backing up Luit in a dispute with a large male. The male made a threatening display at Puist, who stretched out her

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hand in appeal to Luit. Luit did not respond, and Puist instantly rushed at him, barking and even hitting him, apparently because he had violated the tradition of supporting one's supporters. This kind of solidarity is part of many human notions of fairness.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas gives an instance that may illustrate a sense of justice or perhaps a sense of propriety that underlies rectitude. Her husky, Maria, one day discovered that by rushing around a cage full of mice and parakeets, lunging at the occupants, she could send them into a hysterical frenzy. The pug Bingo ran in, slammed his body into the much bigger Maria, and when she lunged at the cage again, uttered a loud bark and slammed against her once more. Maria left the room. Thomas was surprised because Bingo was smitten with Maria and usually did not oppose her in any way. Whether Bingo was motivated by compassion for the mice and parakeets, by vicarious ownership of the mice and parakeets, or by disapproval of Maria's obstreperousness, it seems undeniable that he wanted to stop her aggression and make her behave better toward the other animals.

Observers of wild coatimundis in Arizona suggest that they have a system of entitlement expressed through a variety of cub squeals. When cuffed by an older animal for lagging behind the troop, a cub would crouch submissively and utter the "don't beat me" squeal, which seemed to indicate no resistance. On several occasions, when a subadult animal committed the unusual act of trying to take food from a cub and cuffed it, the cub would utter a different squeal—and an adult female would come and drive the subadult away, apparently enforcing a tradition of tolerance toward cubs. This may be merely different cub feelings being expressed in different situations of threat, but it is telling that there is a difference. Enforcing and cushioning hierarchy also plays a part in human justice systems.

Tne Narrative Urge

The desire to tell stories is another characteristic of humanity. People like to relate events, gossip, analyze. Humans talk to ani-

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mals and to ourselves. Does language itself create the narrative urge, or would human beings have this need even w^ithout human language?

Animals who have been taught sign language have been said to display little wish to narrate. Herbert Terrace, who arranged for the chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky to be taught sign, said that most of Nim's utterances were imitations or fragments of things his teachers had just signed, and argued that the same is true of other signing apes. He also argued that a large part of ape signing consists of requests for food, toys, and affectionate gestures like tickling and hugging. This, and the scarcity of spontaneous verbal communication, would seem to indicate little narrative urge. On rare occasions, Nim would sign unasked the names of things he saw. Often he spontaneously signed the names of things he recognized in pictures when leafing through books and magazines. Perhaps these are rudiments of a narrative urge, awaiting encouragement and opportunity.

Nim's language lessons (as in most such experiments) were structured to offer him the chance to earn food and other rewards, so it is not surprising that he made many such requests. It is also worth noting that Nim's early teachers were not fluent signers. Most of them could only improvise a few sentences on any given topic—they could not tell Nim a story, relate the events of their day, or pass on interesting gossip. Nim began learning sign at five months, but he did not get a fluent teacher (and then not for long) until he was three and a half years old. This is not unusual. Signing apes have been raised and taught largely by humans who use rather rudimentary sign language. None have been raised in an environment of fluent sign. Suppose a child were raised by people who spoke halting, recently learned pidgin. Suppose also that the child had no playmates or classmates with whom to speak. Such a child might fall linguistically behind children whose parents freely and hterately spoke to each other and to others, as well as to the children. A child who never witnessed a story being told might not tell stories, but this would not demonstrate the limits of human storytelling ability.

Terrace mentions that when Nim met fluent signers, he was

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transfixed. He would stare spellbound for up to fifteen minutes (a long time for a young chimpanzee) as they conversed. In contrast, spoken language interested him for only a few seconds. Terrace notes that when, at three and a half, Nim finally got a teacher fluent in sign—apparently his fifty-fourth teacher—he was already passing into adolescence. Terrace thinks Nim's signing might have progressed more quickly had he had more exposure to fluent signers at an early age. Washoe, the first chimpanzee to be taught sign language, adopted a son, LouHs, who has learned sign language not from human tutoring but fi-om Washoe and the other chimps in her colony. Yet Washoe herself did not learn sign from fluent signers. It is possible that apes have not yet been adequately challenged to acquire sign fluency. If so, there has not yet been a full test of their possible desire to narrate.

Signing chimpanzees other than Nim have been seen to sign to a considerable extent in the rudiments of a narrative mode. They sign to each other even when no humans are around (as revealed in remote videotaping) and, like humans, "talk" to themselves. Washoe has been filmed perched in a tree, hiding fi-om her human companions, and signing "quiet" to herself. They may describe their own activity to themselves, signing "me up" and then running up a wall. They have even been seen to use imaginative speech when playing alone. Moja, who knows the word "purse" perfectly well, once put a purse on her foot and walked around signing "That's a shoe." Thus begins the rudiments of metaphor.

There is a sense in which bees are entirely narrative, letting other hive members know where the best flowers are and how to get there. The most revolutionary discovery of Karl von Frisch concerned the symbolic communication employed by honeybees: a bee who has found flowers performs a dance when she returns to the hive, which tells other bees how far away the food is and in which direction. Donald Griffin notes, "In the scientific cfimate of opinion prevailing forty years ago it was shocking and incredible to be told that a mere insect could communicate to its companions the direction, distance and desirabihty of something far away." But this is exactly what they did.

Chimpanzees Sherman and Austin were taught to communi-

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CiUe 1)\ lighting symbols on a board. Researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh notes that they can use these symbols to make spontaneous comments about their impending actions and about events going on around them, but that they do so relatively seldom. "Their behavior suggests that it is difficult for them to understand that others do not have access to the same information that they do. In the various paradigms used to encourage communication between them, it was always necessary for them to experience the roles of speaker and listener a number of times before their behavior, as speaker, suggested that they knew that they had information which the listener did not have," Rumbaugh writes. While Sherman and Austin learned about the possible ignorance of the listener in individual situations, and do not seem to have generalized their observations, it is not impossible that they might do so. They were taught to share food with one another in a most un-chimpanzeelike manner and came to enjoy this greatly, although it was apparently not easy for them to learn. Perhaps they could learn narration in a similar way.

It is possible that great apes will never show more language ability than they have so far, that they have reached their linguistic limits. It may well be that the urge to confide, to boast, to retell, and to mythologize will remain a human trait, but too little is known to be confident of this. If, instead of devising laboratory conditions under which apes can learn to communicate with humans in our language or some variant of it, humans were to go quietly into the forest and listen to what is already being communicated, more would be learned. Some of the most vocal animals are very little understood. Some species of whale are clamorous, incessantly uttering a wide variety of squeaks, grunts, trills, bellows, chirps, groans, yaps, and whistles as well as echolocatory clicks and pings. Perhaps these mean only "Here I am. Where are you?" An alternative view is given by Jim NoUman, who commented on the finding of whale scientist Dr. Roger Payne that humpback whales may repeat their entire song from one year to the next, "with slight but clearly discernible differences. Here was a very clear instance of an oral tradition. It implies that humpbacks possess at least the

THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE, JUSTICE, AND THE INEXPRESSIBLE

rudiments of learned culture." Perhaps they are telling the history of the species.

The search for emotions that humans feel and other animals do not is an old one. To reverse this and look for emotions that animals have and we do not violates the usual assumption that humans are the perfected endpoint of evolution and the luckiest recipients of nature's gifts. But it is impossible not to acknowledge the many things some animals have that we do not. Some we are proud of not having: tails, fur, horns. Some we shrug off: a keen sense of smell. Others we envy: wings.

Exclusively Animal Emotions

Some animals have senses humans do not possess, capacities only recently discovered. Other animal senses may remain to be discovered. By extension, could there be feelings animals have that humans do not, and if so, how would we know? It will take scientific humility and philosophical creativity to provide even the beginning of an answer.

A mother lion observed by George Schaller had left her three small cubs under a fallen tree. While she was away, two lions from another pride killed the cubs. One male ate part of one of the cubs. The second carried a cub away, holding it as he would a food item, not as a cub. He stopped from time to time to Hck it and later nestled it between his paws. Ten hours later, he still had not eaten it. When the mother returned and found what had happened, she sniffed the last dead cub, licked it, and then sat down and ate it, except for the head and front paws.