When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (6 page)

IN DEFENSE OF EMOTIONS

do; in which no one is ever ashamed to do anything or feels guilty if they do—this would be an unnatural, unrealistic, paltry description. It would be neither believable nor accurate. It would be called inhuman. To describe the lives of animals without including their emotions may be just as inaccurate, just as superficial and distorted, and may strip them of their wholeness just as profoundly. To understand animals, it is essential to understand what they feel.

Unreeling Brutes

Humans have historically been much concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts. We speak; we reason; we imagine; we anticipate; we worship, we laugh. They do not. The historical insistence on an unbridgeable gap between humans and other animals suggests that it serves some need or function. Why do we humans so frequently define ourselves by distinction from animals? Why should the distinction between man and beast matter?

Attempts to make this distinction fall largely into two categories. First, many cite human failings as unique, chief among which is fighting among ourselves. In these cases, the writer is usually trying to inspire his readers with moral resolutions. In the first century a.d,, Pliny the Elder, in his Natural Histojy, admonishes: "Lions do not fight with one another; serpents do not attack serpents, nor do the wild monsters of the deep rage against their like. But most of the calamities of man are caused by his fellow men." When, in 1532, Ludovico Ariosto in Orlando Fiirioso says, "Man is the only animal who injures his mate," this, too, is meant as an admonition. James Froude in his Oceana of 1886 claimed, "Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one for whom the

UNFEELING BRUTES

torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself." And even Wilham James, in this century, wrote that "Man . . . is simply the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on his own species." In these examples, animals are not so much being observed as men are being exhorted to cease killing (usually) other men. They are intended to shame men into recognizing that they behave worse than animals.

The other—by far larger—category of man-beast contrasts cites human advantages: our intelligence, our culture, our sense of humor, our knowledge of death. In the nineteenth century William Hazlitt maintained, "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." And in our century, the philosopher William Ernest Hocking claimed, "Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality." Uniqueness is claimed for the human sense of humor, the ability to understand virtue, the ability to make and use tools. Again the authors seem more interested in making a didactic point for humans than in observing or understanding animals.

Human-animal comparisons have historically served as a rich source of moral instruction for humanistic philosophers, particularly during periods when the natural world was sentimentalized and viewed as a model. The most poetic was Buffon, the great nineteenth century French naturalist, who began his essay "On the Nature of Animals" by saying that animals cannot think or remember, but have feelings "to an even greater degree than humans do." Buffon believed there to be an advantage to an animal's purely feeling life. Humans, he wrote, lead lives of quiet desperation, and "most men die of sorrow." In contrast, "Animals do not search for pleasures where none can be found; guided by their feelings alone, they never make a mistake in their choice; their desires are always proportional to their capacity to enjoy; they feel as much as they enjoy and enjoy only as much as they feel. Man, on the other hand, wanting to invent pleasures, does nothing but spoil nature; wanting to force feelings, he only abuses his being, and digs a hole in his

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heart which nothing is capable of later filling." He ends by speaking of "the infinite distance that the Supreme Being has put between animals and [Man]."

Contemporary renditions of this contrast have been scarcely more grounded in animal reality and have not shed much more light on animals—or humans. Recently N. K. Humphrey wrote that "human beings have evolved to be the most highly social crea-tnjres the world has ever seen. Their social relationships have a depth, a complexity, and a biological importance to them, which no other animals' relationships come near." Considering how little is known about "other animals' relationships," this seems unwarranted.

How little we know, and how much we pretend to know, is illustrated by the fact that, until very recendy, it was a canon of animal behavior that, of females, only the human experienced orgasm. As recendy as 1979, anthropologist Donald Symons pronounced that the "female orgasm is a characteristic essentially restricted to our own species." When the question was actually investigated in the stump-tailed macaque, using the same physiological criteria used for humans, it was found that the female macaques did appear to experience orgasm. Primatologist Frans de Waal observes the same of the female bonobo (pygmy chimpanzee), from behavioral evidence. Like many questions specifically involving the human female, the truth is that not many scientists had ever considered the question systematically, let alone done the necessary field observation studies to find an answer. Perhaps it pleased most male scientists to imagine that while animal females sought sex only during an estrus cycle, and hence had sex only for reproduction, human females, due to their unique orgasmic capacity, wanted sex all the time.

Our Nome Feelings

People have always exalted certain "higher" feelings that are claimed to single us out among animals. Only humans, it is said, feel noble emotions such as compassion, true love, altruism, pity,

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UNFEEUNG BRUTES

mercy, reverence, honor, and modesty. On the other hand, people have often attributed so-called negative or "low" emotions to animals: cruelty, pride, greed, rage, vanity, and hatred. At play here appears to be a seemingly unbearable injury to our sense of uniqueness, to our entitlement to the special nobility of our emotional life. Thus not only whether animals can feel, but what they feel, is used to strengthen the species barrier. What lies behind this "us/ them" mentality—the urge to define ourselves by proving we are not only different, but utterly different, including emotionally? Why should this distinction between man and beast be so important to humans?

A look at the distinctions humans draw among ourselves may provide a partial answer. Dominant human groups have long defined themselves as superior by distinguishing themselves from groups they are subordinating. Thus whites define blacks in part by differing melanin content of the skin; men are distinguished from women by primary and secondary sex characteristics. These empirical distinctions are then used to make it appear that it is the distinctions themselves, not their social consequences, that are responsible for the social dominance of one group over the other. Thus the distinction between man and beast has served to keep man on top. People define themselves as distinct from animals, or similar when convenient or entertaining, in order to keep themselves dominant over them. Human beings presumably benefit from treating animals the way they do—hurting them, jailing them, exploiting their labor, eating their bodies, gaping at them, and even owning them as signs of social status. Any human being who has a choice does not want to be treated like this.

A blatant example of many of these prejudices, with a suggestion of some of their social consequences, can be found in the article on "Animals" in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, written in 1908:

Civilization, or perhaps rather education, has brought with it a sense of the great gulf that exists between man and the lower animals. ... In the lower stages of culture, whether they be found in races which are, as a whole, below the European

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level, or in the uncultured portion of civilized communities, the distinction betw^een men and animals is not adequately, if at all, recognized. . . . The savage . . . attributes to the animal a vastly more complex set of thoughts and feelings, and a much greater range of knowledge and power, than it actually possesses. ... It is therefore small wonder that his attitude towards the animal creation is one of reverence rather than superiority.

Only a lower man, one close to animals, would value them. Human rationalizations of this gap are analyzed in A View to a Death in the Momi?ig, an elegant book on hunting by Matt Cartmill:

In policing the animal-human boundary, scientists have shown considerable ingenuity in redefining supposedly unique human traits to keep them from being claimed for other animals. Consider our supposedly big brains. Human beings are supposed to be smarter than other animals, and therefore we ought to have larger brains. But in fact, elephants, whales, and dolphins have bigger brains than ours; and small rodents and monkeys have relatively bigger brains (their brains make up a larger percentage of body weight than ours do). Scientists who study these things have accordingly labored to redefine brain size, dividing brain weight by basal metabolic rate or some other exponential function of body weight to furnish a standard by which these animals' brains can thus be deemed smaller than ours. The unique bigness of the human brain thus turns out to be a matter of definition.

This is not the only example of the manipulation of science toward the goal of dominance. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould cogently described the conscious or unconscious manipulation of data on brain size to prove that the scientist's racial group was inherently smarter than other groups. (A similar example of an attempt to force science into the service of racial discrimination may be found in Murray and Herrnstein's recent The Bell

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Curve. This ugly piece of advocacy is depressing evidence that measurable intelligence is no guarantee of intelligent ideas.)

Tne Insensate Otn

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Animals' presumed lack of feeling has provided a major excuse for treating them badly. This has been so extreme that animals were long regarded as unable to feel pain, physical or emotional. But when an animal is hurt in a way that would hurt a person, it generally reacts much as a person would. It cries out, it gets away, then examines or favors the affected part, and withdraws and rests. Veterinarians do not doubt that wounded animals feel pain, and use analgesics and anesthetics in their practice. The only criterion that an animal fails to meet for feeling physical pain as humans understand it is the abihty to express it in words. Yet the fish on the hook is said not to be thrashing in pain (or fear) but in a reflex action. A lobster in boiling water or puppies whose tails are being docked are said to feel nothing. A recent German book on animal consciousness argues to the contrary: "The fact that we so immediately understand these signals is just a further sign that we share with other animals the grand construction of our pain apparatus." When the subject is actually researched, the findings are in line with common sense: the apparent pain of the fish twisting on the hook is real.

It has always been comforting to the dominant group to assume that those in subservient positions do not suffer or feel pain as keenly, or at all, so they can be abused or exploited without guilt and with impunity. The history of prejudice is notable for assertions that lower classes and other races are relatively insensitive. Similarly, until the 1980s, it was routine for surgery on human infants to be performed with paralytic agents but without anesthesia, in the long-held befief that babies are incapable of feeling pain. It was believed, without evidence, that their nervous systems were immature. The notion that babies do not feel pain is directly counter to their screams and can only be classified as scientific myth. Yet it has been a tenet of human medicine, only recently acknowledged to be false in the wake of studies showing that in-

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fants who do not get pain medication take longer to recover from surgery.

A similar bigotry has extended to the presence of emotions in the poor, the foreign, those raised in impoverished or unenlightened cultures, and in children, who supposedly have not yet learned to feel in fully human ways. It is often asserted that when an infant smiles, for example, it is a physical response to gas in the intestines. The baby is said not to be smiling in response to other people, or out of happiness, but in response to digestive events. Despite the fact that adults do not smile as a result of discomfort in the stomach, this notion is widely repeated—though often not believed by the infant's parents. Studies showing that infant smiles are not correlated with burps, regurgitation, and flatulence have made little impact on this idea. Many people are gratified to think of infants as having diminished or no feelings.

If it is so easy to deny the emotional lives of other people, how much easier it is to deny the emotional lives of animals.

Antnropomorpnisin

The greatest obstacle in science to investigating the emotions of other animals has been an inordinate desire to avoid anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism means the ascription of human characteristics—thought, feeling, consciousness, and motivation— to the nonhuman. When people claim that the elements are conspiring to ruin their picnic or that a tree is their friend, they are anthropomorphizing. Few believe that the weather is plotting against them, but anthropomorphic ideas about animals are held more widely. Outside scientific circles, it is common to speak of the thoughts and feelings of pets and of wild and captive animals. Yet many scientists regard even the notion that animals feel pain as the grossest sort of anthropomorphic error.

Cats and dogs are prime targets of anthropomorphism, both wrongly and rightly. Ascribing unlikely thoughts and feelings to pets is common: "She understands every word you say." "He sings his little heart out to show how grateful he is." Some people deck