When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (34 page)

This mother lion was acting like a hon, not like a person. But in understanding what lions do, what she felt is part of the picture. Maybe she felt closer to her dead offspring when it was part of her body once again. Maybe she hates waste, or cleans up all messes her cubs make, as part of her love. Maybe this is a lion funeral rite. Or maybe it is something only a lion can feel.

Elephants display a behavior called "mating pandemonium." When a female elephant in estrus mates, she utters a loud call, in

HUES FLEPHAMS HEIT

registers too low tor the human ear. When they hear the eall, her rehitives come racing to the scene, trumpeting loudly, appearing agitated or excited, and pandemonium ensues. Other male elephants may also be attracted. Unrelated groups ignore the call or leave the area. As observer Joyce Poole has remarked, "Biologically, you could say that mating pandemonium serves to attract still more males to the . . . female, increasing the chances that a still more dominant bull will come and drive off the one guarding her and end up being the one to actually fertilize her. I happen to think mating pandemonium is more than that, but whether it has to do with social territories, some type of emotional support for the female in heat, or something else altogether, I couldn't say." What are the emotions of the female's relatives, the ones creating the pandemonium? The answer is unclear. They might be feeling a mix of many emotions, known and unknown.

After thirty years of working with chimpanzees, Roger Fouts doubts that they have emotions that humans do not also have. Indeed, if new and unknown emotions were to be discovered, they would most likely be found in animals less like us than the great apes. One spring evening, George Schaller watched a female wild giant panda in China, Zhen-Zhen, eat and then—although she saw him watching her—lean back on some bamboo, uttering "bleating honks," and fall asleep. Her seeming indifference surprised Schaller:

On meeting a gorilla or a tiger, I can sense the relationship that binds us by the emotions they express, for curiosity, friendliness, annoyance, apprehension, anger, fear are all revealed by face and body. In contrast, Zhen and I are together, yet hopelessly separated by an immense space. Her feelings remain impenetrable, her behavior inscrutable. Intellectual insights enrich emotional experiences. But with Zhen I am in danger of coming away empty-handed from a mountain of treasure.

This is not to say that pandas are unknowable. Schaller be-Heves that he could learn to understand. "To comprehend her, I

THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE, JUSTICE, AND THE INEXPRESSIBLE

would need to transform myself into a panda, unconscious of myself, concentrating on her actions and spirit for many years, until finally I might gain fresh insights." He fears pandas may not last long enough as a species for humans to come to understand them.

Unconscious Emotions

Even if animals have emotions, some argue, they do not feel them as human beings do, because they cannot be aware of them, bring them into consciousness and express them to themselves. Perhaps an elephant can be sad, the argument goes, but if it cannot say, even to itself, "I am sad," then it cannot be sad in the same way that a person is—who can describe sadness, predict sadness, lose an argument with sadness. If this is true, then it is language that has given humans their tremendous attachment and vulnera-bihty to their feelings. It is rash, at this point in knowledge, to be at all certain that an emotion that cannot be expressed in language, far less in language we can recognize, cannot be felt as keenly.

Humans believe they suffer from emotions they are not consciously aware of and that are unarticulated. This does not mean that these emotions have no significance or cannot really be felt. It could equally well be argued that language sets emotion at a distance, that the very act of saying "I am sad," with all the connotations that the words have, pushes the feeling away a little, perhaps making it less searing and less personal. Herbert Terrace describes what might be an actual example of language pushing feeling away in an animal:

Certain usages of Nim's signs were quite unexpected. At least two of them Q)ite and angry) appeared to function as substitutes for the physical expression of those actions and emotions. Nim learned the signs hite and angry from a picture book showing Zero Mostel biting a hand and exhibiting an angry face. During September 1976, Amy began what she thought would be a normal transfer to Laura. For some reason, Nim didn't want to leave Amy and tried to drive Laura

WHEN ELEPH.4NTS WEEP

away. When Laura persisted in trying to pick him up, Nim acted as if he was about to bite. His mouth was pulled back over his bare teeth, and he approached Laura with his hair raised. Instead of biting, however, he repeatedly made the hite sign near her face with a fierce expression on his face. After making this sign, he appeared to relax and showed no further interest in attacking Laura. A few minutes later he transferred to Laura without any sign of aggression. On other occasions, Nim was observed to sign both hite and angry as a warning.

To the extent that language pushes feelings away, the world of emotion, a world from which humans sometimes feel estranged, may be one some animals live in more fully.

Emotional Intensity

Whether some animals feel emotions less or more intensely than humans may depend on which emotion is involved. Animals doubtless feel pity for one another, sometimes even passing beyond the species barrier, but it seems unlikely, though not impossible, that they experience it as elaborately or as intensely as humans do. For example, it is doubtful that the dolphins care as much about humans slaughtering one another as some humans care about the slaughter of dolphins by other humans. But this may only be because they do not have the same access to information that humans do. Perhaps they know and have rules of noninterference in human matters. Perhaps they truly are indifferent, or take a longer view.

There are some emotions, on the other hand, that humans may experience less intensely than some animals. Many people have had the feeling, for example, that some animals seem more capable of joy. One of the explanations for the popularity of watching and listening to birds is the pleasure of hearing birdsongs, which seem to them joyful. As Julian Huxley, describing the courtship of herons winding their long necks together, wrote: "Of this I can only say that it seemed to bring such a pitch of emotion that I could have wished to be a heron that I might experience it."

THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE, JUSTICE, AND THE INEXPRESSIBLE

The intensity of emotion in other animals has been a perennial source of human envy. Joseph Wood Krutch writes: "It is difficult to see how one can deny that the dog, apparendy beside himself at the prospect of a walk with his master, is experiencing a joy the intensity of which it is beyond our power to imagine much less to share. In the same way his dejection can at least appear to be no less bottomless. Perhaps the kind of thought of which we are capable dims both at the same time that it makes us less victims of either. Was any man, one wonders, ever as dejected as a lost dog? Perhaps certain of the animals can be both more joyful and more utterly desolate than any man ever was."

To examine questions like these it is vital to treat animals as members of their own species. Treating them as either machines or people denigrates them. Acknowledgment of their emotional lives is the first step; understanding that their emotional lives are their own and not ours is the second. At the same time, if humans have no peers as cognitive beings and creatures of elaborate cultures, as emotional beings we are anything but alone. Is there a reason why we should try to comprehend the world of animal emotions, which exists on some intangible plane between the measurable worlds of oxytocin levels in a cat's bloodstream and the cat's purring? Why not refrain from hypothesizing the cat's happiness? The answer is that emotions are in a real sense where we live, what we care about. Human life cannot be understood without emotions. To leave questions of animal emotion as forever unapproachable and imponderable is arbitrary intellectual helplessness.

Across tne Species Barrier

In January of 1989 hikers in the Michigan woods found a black bear with two cubs, recendy out of hibernation, curled under a tree. They began taking photographs, and when the bear seemed insufficiendy lively for their artistic purposes they shouted and prodded her with sticks. She ran away, leaving behind her twelve-week-old cubs.

Rangers tracked the mother and decided she was not coming

HUES ELEPHASTS HEEP

back. Wildlife biologist Lynn Rogers, in Minnesota's Superior National Forest, agreed to try to get the cubs adopted. Carrying Gerry, the female cub, Rogers and a photographer snowshoed into the woods and located Terri, a wild bear with two cubs, who was habituated to human presence. Rogers produced the squalling cub. "I tossed it to her and immediately she wanted it," he recalls. The cub ran from the strange bear, back to the humans. To the photographer's horror, she climbed his leg like a tree. As he stood frozen, Terri walked over, took the cub in her mouth, peeled her off his leg, and carried her back to the den.

The adoption of Gerry's brother by another bear was also successful. Terri was a good mother, and Gerry rambled the north woods, learning to forage—breaking into ant hills, traveling forty miles to a hazelnut stand, grazing on aquatic vegetation—and sleeping under a pine. She grew up to use part of Terri's territory and to have cubs of her own.

During a period when Rogers was at odds with government agencies, officials accused Gerry of attacking humans. She was captured, with one cub. Caged, Gerry moaned constantly. "She just was crying all the time," Rogers says. "Then when we caught the other cubs and put them in the cage with her, she was fine from that moment." Officials planned to ship Gerry to a game farm, where she would be used to breed cubs for sale, and where her toes would be clipped off for safety reasons. Appalled, Rogers managed to arrange for her to go to a small zoo, where she lives in a several-acre enclosure. When her cubs were old enough, they were released in a North Carolina forest.

"That bear was so trustworthy, even with cubs," Rogers mourns. "I could scoop her up in my arms . . . and she'd just relax and look arovmd." As for Terri, she ranged into unprotected forest and was shot by a hunter. In this story the sources of tragedy have nothing to do with bears and everything to do with mistakes that only humans make. The emotional lives of these bears are not inaccessible to us. To deny the terror of the abandoned bear cub; the welcoming affection of the adoptive mother, Terri; Gerry's despair when two of her cubs were missing, is to defy credibility.

Curiosity about the feelings of animals, which science so often

224 —

THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE, JUSTICE, AND THE INEXPRESSIBLE

tries to train out of its students, may actually be reciprocated by animals. When observing wild lions, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas discovered that the hons were returning human scrutiny. During the day the scientists watched the Hons sleep. At night, tracks revealed that four Hons came to the fence and peered at the sleeping scientists. As the people examined the scats of the lions, the lions dug up the human latrine and inspected its contents, sometimes adding their own. Wild chimpanzees who have overcome their fear of humans show considerable curiosity about human behavior, though none seems to have gone so far as to make a career out of it.

In the end, when we wonder whether to ascribe an emotion to an animal, the question to ask is not, "Can we prove that another being feels this or any emotions?" but rather, "Is there any reason to suppose that this species of animal does not feel this emotion?" If not, then we can ask whether the individual animal feels that particular emotion in this particular instance. If we see an elephant standing uith another, dying elephant, the appropriate response is not to say that we have no way to measure sorrow and must therefore never speak of sadness in elephants. Instead we can observe the behavior of the elephant—its calls, body language, and actions —and ask whether it does seem to evidence unhappiness. The animal's personal story is relevant to this inquiry—^were these animals strangers? Acquainted? Family? Even if animals do not (as far as we know) tell stories, they surely live them every bit as much as humans do.

Scientific humility suggests that complete understanding of other animals may be impossible. But we will come far closer if we do not begin by insisting that we already know more than we do about what characteristics they do not have. To learn about other animals, they must be taken on their own terms, and these terms include their feelings.

Conclusion:

Snaring tne ^^rld

witn Feelind Creatures

Jeffrey Moussaieff^ Masson

VVTiat are the implications of finding that animals lead emotional lives? Must we change our relationships with them? Have we obligations to them? Is testing products for humans on animals defensible? Is experimentation on animals ethical? Can we confine them for our edification? Kill them to cover, sustain, and adorn ourselves? Should we cease eating animals who have complex social lives, are capable of passionate relations with one another and desperately love their children?

Humans often behave as if something like us were more worthy of respect than something not like us. Racism can partiy be described, if not explained, in this way. Men treat other men better than they treat women, based in part on their view that women are not like them. Many of these so-called differences are disguises for whatever a dominant power can impose.

The basic idea seems to be that if something does not feel pain in the way a human being feels pain, it is permissible to hurt it. Even though this is not necessarily true, the illusion of differences is maintained out of fear that seeing similarity will create an obligation to accord respect and perhaps even equality. This appears to

226

CONCLUSION

be the case especially when it comes to suffering, pain, sorrow, sadness. We do not want to cause these things in others because we know what it feels like to experience them ourselves. No one defends suffering as such. But animal experimentation? The arguments revolve around utility, pitting the greater good against the lesser suffering. Implicit, usually, is the greater importance of those who stand to gain (for example, the scientists employed by cosmetic or pharmaceutical companies to do experiments on rabbits) compared with the lesser importance of those who are sacrificed to their benefit.