When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (5 page)

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have proved not only faulty but pernicious; care should be taken to avoid the same mistake in explaining animal behavior.

Belying the closely held belief that emotions are the exclusively human products of our unparalleled mental powers, the physical pathways of human emotion are among the most primitive. The part of the brain called the limbic system, which is thought to mediate emotion, is one of the most phylogenetically ancient parts of the human brain, so much so that it is sometimes called "the reptile brain." From a purely physical standpoint, it would be a biological miracle if humans were the only animals to feel. Can it then be shown, say, that a cat loves her kittens or that kittens love their mother? If measurements showed hormone levels surging in the cat's bloodstream when she sees her kittens, and electrical activity spiking in certain parts of the cat's brain, would that be accepted as proof? Many scientists would still say no; we can never know if a cat loves. Yet most observers already believe that the cat loves the kittens, simply on the basis of her behavior. Scientists prefer not to say so.

Could it be that the statement "The ape is clearly sad" is not so different from "John is clearly sad"? The clearly signals an interpretation; it refers to clues that are socially agreed upon to indicate sadness. John is staring at the ground for hours and sighing. So is the ape. John may refuse to eat. So might the ape. John refuses to speak; when asked how he feels, he stares past the speaker. We do not, for that reason, say that he cannot feel sorrow or he would say so. We can be wrong about the ape. We can also be wrong about John. John might, in fact, be feeling something entirely different— apathy, perhaps, or existential despair. We may have misunderstood his actions, his facial expressions, and his vocalizations. Clearly is a statement about the kind of evidence we think we have, but our evidence may not be as good for people, nor as poor for other animals, as we have assumed.

IN DEFENSE OF EMOTIONS Trie Slippery Clues or Lan^ua^e

Humans do have the advantage of language, one of the biggest differences between humans and other animals. Animals cannot speak of their feelings in a way humans can reliably understand, although the language barrier between humans and animals is not absolute. But language is not entirely trustworthy as a yardstick of feeling between humans. Verbal assertion of a feeling does not prove the emotion exists, nor does the inability to verbalize an emotion prove it does not. Some profoundly retarded humans cannot speak their feelings; this does not mean they do not have them. Mute humans feel. Intellectually sophisticated people can lie about their feelings or conceal them. Intellectual capacity may distinguish people from other animals, even if only in degree, but even among humans, intelligence and emotion are not closely correlated.

Language is a part of culture, and cultures aroimd the world seem to make many of the same distinctions between emotions and to refer to similar experiences. But can we feel an emotion for which our culture provides no word or no examples? No doubt there are emotions promoted in one culture and not another, but this does not mean they are not experienced in all of them. It may be difficult to define or express them, given the language to which one is born; it may even be difficult to think about them, and especially to convey them to another person. Yet the feelings themselves may have a certain autonomy such that they may nonetheless be felt. Similarly, animals may have emotional experiences it would be hard to express or put into words, even if they had the capacity to use words, but they would not for that reason cease to be real feehngs. The language barrier notwithstanding, humans may well share with animals the vast majority of feehngs of which they are capable.

The prejudice has long existed that only humans think and feel because only humans can communicate thoughts and feelings in words, whether written or spoken. Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, believed animals to be "thoughtless brutes," automata^ machines:

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There are [no men] so depraved and stupid, without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same . . . the reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts.

An unknown contemporary of Descartes put this position starkly:

The [Cartesian] scientists administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed the poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the circulation of the blood, which was a great subject of controversy.

Voltaire responded that, on the contrary, vivisection showed that the dog has the same organes de sentiment that a human has. "Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines," he wrote. "Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?" Elsewhere, in Le philosophe igfiorant, he criticizes Descartes by saying that he "dared to say that animals are pure machines who looked for food when they had no appetite, who had the organs for feeling only to never have the slightest feeling, who screamed without pain, who showed their pleasure without joy, who possessed a brain only to have in it not even the slightest idea, and who were in this way a perpetual contradiction of nature." As early as 1738, Voltaire talked about the humane feelings of the great English physicist Isaac Newton and how, like the philosopher John Locke, he was convinced that animals had the same sentiments man did. Voltaire writes: "He [Newton] believed that it was a very terrible contradic-

IN DEFENSE OF EMOTIONS

tion to believe that animals could feel, and yet cause them to suffer."

It is true that most animals have no speech that humans yet understand. But is the absence of speech, after all, as important an indication of feelings as some philosophers have imagined it to be? Several chimpanzees and other great apes have American Sign Language (ASL) vocabularies of more than a hundred words. They communicate not only with humans but with members of their own species. Would it not be parsimonious to suppose that they had previously communicated some of these same thoughts to other apes via means other than human sign language? Why would they wait for scientists before doing something they were already capable of doing? The fact that apes do not have human vocal cords does not mean that they must remain uncommunicative. Following a first flush of excitement, the overwhelming response of the scientific community to signing apes has been to ignore or disbelieve them, both as individuals and as a species. Given that statements made by apes about food and toys are attacked, one can only imagine the reaction to statements about their feelings. Rooted prejudice claims that animal feelings cannot be known because animals cannot speak; when they do speak in a human tongue, the claim is that what they are saying cannot possibly mean what humans mean.

Even when animals speak our language, humans do not always take them at their word. For sixteen years Alex, an African grey parrot, has been trained by psychologist Irene Pepperberg, who researches the bird's cognitive abilities. Alex is one of the few parrots in the world who has been demonstrated to understand the meaning of the words he speaks. He knows the names of fifty objects, seven colors, and five shapes. He can enumerate up to six objects and say which of two objects is smaller. Alex has also picked up many "functional" phrases. He has learned "I'm gonna go now," something he hears people say in Pepperberg's laboratory. Pepperberg describes how, when Alex is scolded, "We say, 'No! Bad boy!' We walk out. And he knows what to say contextually, applicably. He brings us back in by saying, 'Come here! I'm sorry!' " Alex learned to say he was sorry by hearing humans say it.

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He knows when to say it. Does he feel regret? "He bites, he says, 'I'm sorry' and he bites again," says Pepperberg, somewhat irritably. "There's no contrition!" Just like many people.

Here is an animal who appears to be verbally reporting an emotional state—regret—but we don't believe him. If he were really sorry (as we understand the term) for biting, would he immediately bite again? Perhaps he would. Whatever is going on inside Alex, he is motivated enough to learn human words for human feelings—possibly to make humans into more satisfactory parrot companions. Alex may not feel contrition about hurting someone. Pepperberg may have no word for what Alex wants from her either; she may never have felt what Alex feels. Humans are surprisingly deficient in vocabulary for positive social emotions, and unduly successful at naming negative individualistic ones. Could there not be gradations of social proximity and affection at the top of the forest canopy for which humans are functionally emotional illiterates? Maybe we have something to learn.

Communication Without Lan^ua^e

Nonverbal communication among humans has sparked increasing interest among academics and therapists in the last few years. Many complex mental states are conveyed more conveniently by gestures than by sentences, while others appear to escape verbal language entirely. Attempts to convey subtle or elusive feelings leave everybody with a sense of the inadequacy of speech. Poetry, after all, is an attempt to convey feelings, moods, states, and even thoughts that are hard to grasp and that seem to defy language in prose. And some feelings do in fact elude language, even poetry, altogether. The fine arts and silence pick up where words leave off.

There is little doubt that humans communicate thoughts and feelings without words; indeed, there is growing evidence that a great part of communication with others takes place outside verbal speech. Just as humans communicate through body language, gestures, and expressive acts, formalized through mime and dance,

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consideration should be given to the nonverbal statements about feelings that animals make.

Animals communicate information through posture, vocalizations, gestures, and actions, both to other animals and to humans who are attentive. Although study of these patterns is improving, even specialists can be rather poor at interpreting this information; this is especially true for those unfamiliar with the species. The animals themselves are much better at understanding these signals, even across species. Indeed, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas speculates that animals are much better at reading human body signals than humans are at reading animal signals of any kind. "Our kind may be able to bully other species not because we are good at communication but because we aren't." De Waal complains that apes are so good at reading human body language as to leave people who work with them feeling transparent.

After fifteen years of studying red foxes, raising them and living with them, David Macdonald understands their body language. He can tell at a glance a happy fox, an excited fox, a nervous fox. He freely writes of them as playful, furious, besotted, fearful, confident, contented, flirtatious, or humiliated. His Rimning with the Fox illustrates fox body language so that those less familiar with foxes can figure it out. Yet because the emotions of animals are not scientifically respectable, when Macdonald discusses whether foxes enjoy killing, he retreats, with the caveat, "assuming they are subject to emotions recognizable to humans . . ." He calls this question "philosophically unanswerable." But to most lay people it is no more philosophically unanswerable than the question of whether other humans have emotions, including sadism.

In Konrad Lorenz's The Year of the Greylag Goose, the caption to one photograph of a gander reads: "After Ado [another gander] had appropriated Selma [his former mate], Gurnemanz went to pieces, as can be seen in this picture." To a person only casually familiar with geese, this cannot be seen at all. It might as easily be a happy goose or a furious goose. A goose does not have a mobile face, so there is littie by way of facial expression. Lorenz, from long experience, knows a goose's body language and can read it. Gurnemanz's posture and neck position tell of his submission and

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demoralization. Elsewhere Lorenz describes goose postures, gestures, and sounds as victorious, uncertain, tense, glad, sad, alert, relaxed, or threatening.

The point is that a goose or other animal may be a quivering mass of emotion. Its feelings may be "written all over its face," and it may only take practice to read that writing. We are restricted only by ignorance, lack of interest, desire for exploitation (like wanting to eat them), or by anthropocentric prejudices that preclude us, as if by divine fiat, from recognizing commonality where it might exist. How can we be gods if animals are Hke us?

Exploring tne ForDidden SuDJect

The standards for defining the existence of emotions in animals begin with those in common use for humans. One should demand no more proof that an animal feels an emotion than would be demanded of a human—and, like humans, the animal should be permitted to speak its own emotional language, which it is up to the beholder to understand.

Human emotions, too, escape exact scientific scrutiny. There is, in fact, no universally accepted scientific proof of human feelings. What one person feels is never entirely available to another. Not only is it uncertain our feelings are communicable; whether or not anyone understands the landscape of anyone else's inner life is ultimately unknowable. We think we know that people are sad, or lonely, or joyous, but it is hard to know the particularity of the accompanying mood. We may not be locked away in private universes of feeling, but another person's inner life, to the extent that it is individual, remains ultimately mysterious.

A history of human affairs in which fear, anger, love, pride, and guilt played no part would be strangely inadequate. Biographies without grief, sadness, and nostalgia would appear unreal. An ordinary person's fife in which no one loves, is loved, or wants to be loved; in which no one fears anything; in which no one becomes angry or makes anyone else angry; in which the depths of despair remain unfathomed; in which no one feels pride in anything they