When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (8 page)

phism works because animals have evolved to act as if they thought and felt: "it is natural selection and not the animal that ensures that what it does mostly 'makes sense,' as we are wont to say."

Even though Kennedy disavows the "assumptions that they have feelings and intentions," he acknowledges that empathy can be useful for generating questions and making predictions. Thus one might predict that a cheetah, fearful for her cubs, may run close to a lion to lure it away. Under Kennedy's formulation, if the cheetah does so, it does not mean she fears for the lives of her cubs. It only means that she has evolved to act as if she fears for their lives. To speculate that leaving more offspring is the ultimate cause of her behavior is permitted. Not permitted is to speculate that fear for their lives is its proximate cause, far less about how she may feel seeing the lion grabbing them. Why is it so impossible to know what animals feel, no matter how much or what kind of evidence there is? How is knowing about their feelings different, in truth, from the assumptions made routinely about the feelings of other people?

The Solipsistic Deiense

Short of being another person, there is no way to know with certainty what another person feels, although few people, even philosophers, carry their solipsism (the belief that the self can know nothing but the self) this far. In learning others' feelings, people are not always led by words alone, but watch behavior—gestures, the face, the eyes—patterns and consistency over time. Conclusions are based on this, and ground everyday life decisions. We love certain people, hate others, trust some, fear others, and act on this basis. Belief in the emotions of others is indispensable to life in human society. N. K. Humphrey writes, "For all I know no man other than myself has ever experienced a feeling corresponding to my feeling of hunger; the fact remains that the concept of hunger, derived from my own experience, helps me to understand other men's eating behavior." On human claims not to know animals' pain, Midgley has said of the extreme solipsistic position: "If a

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torturer excused her activities by claiming ignorance of pain on the grounds that nobody knows anything about the subjective sensation of others, she would not convince any human audience. An audience of scientists need not aim at providing an exception to this rule." She locates the basis of human assumptions of natural superiority underlying the position of the solipsist when she quotes an astonishing passage from Ethics, by the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza:

It is plain that the law against the slaughtering of animals is founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason. The rational quest of what is useful to us further teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with our fellow-men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is different from our own; we have the same rights in respect to them as they have in respect to us. Nay, as everyone's right is defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights over beasts than beasts have over men. Still I do not deny that beasts feel; what I deny is that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours, and their emotions are naturally different from human emotions.

Spinoza refrains from discussing how he knows that animal emotions are different from human ones, or from explaining how this justifies the human exploitation, plunder, and murder of them. He simply says we have more power than they do. Might makes right. Jose Ortega y Gasset's defense of hunting comes to the same conclusion, insisting that the victim is always asking for it:

[Hunting] is a relationship that certain animals impose on man, to the point where not trying to hunt them demands the intervention of our dehberate will. . . . Before any particular hunter pursues them they feel themselves to be possible prey, and they model their whole existence in terms of this condition. Thus they automatically convert any normal man who comes upon them into a hunter. The only adequate response to a

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being that lives obsessed with avoiding capture is to try to catch it. [Ortega y Gasset's italics]

Such delusional anthropomorphism, based in turn on a human model that itself is delusional, reveals deep and hidden assumptions and interests. Ortega y Gasset's buried premise—that hunted beings seek their own demise—closely resembles rationales about rape. A common excuse of rapists is that women ask for rape, thus seeking and causing their own violation, most especially when actively trying to avoid it. A similar exoneration of hunters is sought here by justifying the capture of animals by calling animal flight from capture an "obsession"—meaning they most desire what they most strenuously flee.

Simpler forms of anthropomorphism can also interfere with observation and distort understanding. Carolus Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who developed the classification system of living things, wrote of the frog: "These foul and loathsome animals are . . . abhorrent because of their cold bodies, pale color, cartilaginous skeletons, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation and terrible venom." The words are all emotive, referring to emotions Linnaeus felt when he saw a frog. They are pure projection. Calculating is not a scientific term to describe a frog's eye. This passage is art— it describes little in the physical world, but powerfully conveys the scientist's subjective state.

Assigning Human Genaer Roles to Animals

Another problem with anthropomorphism has been that human views of gender—often as wrong as human views of animals— have been attributed to animals. People sometimes expect a male animal to lead the herd or be dominant or more aggressive even in species where the reality is different. A recent nature program on television featured a family of cheetahs in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. The male cub was called Tabu and the female Tamu— Swahili for Trouble and Sweetness. One expects different things

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from a Sweetness than a Trouble. Surely the sentence "Trouble is prowHng around my tent" is more threatening than "Sweetness is prowling around my tent." Sociobiology has tended to encourage prejudices men have about women by insisting that they are "natural," by which is meant they can be found among members of the animal kingdom. As already noted, one can prove almost anything by careful choice of species. It does not seem accidental that human society has for so long been compared to baboon society, despite the facts that baboons are far more sexually dimorphic than humans and that baboons do not form mated pairs. The idea seems to be to impose greater gender inequality on human females by enforcing a supposedly natural template.

A serious problem with careless human-animal comparisons is the inadequacy of our present knowledge of animals' lives, especially of crucial matters like the role of culture in animal learning in the wild. Elephants, for example, learn from their elders which humans to fear based on the history of the herd with humans. Mike Tomkies describes watching an eaglet in the wild being taught to fly so as to hunt and kill by repeated demonstrations on the part of its parent, who was clearly showing the youngster what to do rather than engaging itself in search of prey. Evidently the eaglet is not born knowing this. It is transmitted by learning, that is, by culture. It is natural, but it is also learned; that it has to be learned does not make it unnatural. To use the word natural to describe how the eaglet kills simply means that an animal was observed doing it. The distinction between innate and natural, on the one hand, and cultural and learned, on the other, loses much of its force in light of more recent observations on what animals teach each other.

Antnropocentrism

The real problem underlying many of the criticisms of anthropomorphism is actually anthropocentrism. Placing humans at the center of all interpretation, observation, and concern, and dominant men at the center of that, has led to some of the worst

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errors in science, whether in astronomy, psychology, or animal behavior. Anthropocentrism treats animals as inferior forms of people and denies what they really are. It reflects a passionate wish to differentiate ourselves from animals, to make animals other, presumably in order to maintain humans at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy and the food chain. The notion that animals are wholly other from humans, despite our common ancestry, is more irrational than the notion that they are like us.

But even if they were not like us at all, that is no reason to avoid studying them for their own sakes. The point has been made by J. E. R. Staddon that "psychology as a basic science should be about intelligent and adaptive behavior, wherever it is to be found, so that animals can be studied in their own right, for what they can teach us about the nature and evolution of intelligence, and not as surrogate people or tools for the solution of human problems." The knowledge obtained from such study, whether or not it contributes to the solution of human problems, is still knowledge.

Animals as Saints and Heroes

Idealizing animals is another kind of anthropocentrism, although not nearly as frequent as their denigration and demoniza-tion. The belief that animals have all the virtues to which humans aspire and none of our faults is anthropocentric, because at its core is an obsession with the repulsive and wicked ways of humans, which animals are used to highlight. In this sentimental formulation the natural world is a place without war, murder, rape, and addiction, and animals never he, cheat, or steal. This view is embarrassed by reality. Deception has been observed in animals from elephants to arctic foxes. Ants take slaves. Chimpanzees may attack other bands of chimpanzees, unprovoked and with deadly intent. Groups of dwarf mongooses battle other groups for territory. The case of the chimpanzee murderers Pom and Passion, who killed and ate the infants of other chimpanzees in their group, has been well documented by Jane Goodall's research team. Orangutans have been seen to rape other orangutans. Male lions, when they

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join a pride, often kill young cubs who were fathered by other lions. Young hyenas, foxes, and owls have been seen to kill and eat their siblings.

All is not as humans wish it to be among our evolutionary cousins. One has to sympathize with Jane Goodall's reaction to some chimpanzees' treatment of one old animal, his legs wholly paralyzed by polio, who was lonely, shunned, and sometimes attacked by those who were still healthy. In the hope of inducing companions who were grooming each other to groom him as well, he dragged himself up into a tree:

With a loud grunt of pleasure he reached a hand towards them in greeting—but even before he made contact they both swung quickly away and, without a backward glance, started grooming on the far side of the tree. For a full two minutes, old Gregor sat motionless, staring after them. And then he laboriously lowered himself to the ground. As I watched him sitting there alone, my vision blurred, and when I looked up at the groomers in the tree I came nearer to hating a chimpanzee than I have ever done before or since.

It is hard to romanticize anything this ugly.

It has been a long time since anyone called the lion the king of beasts (except in a Walt Disney film), but dolphins have recently been romanticized as smarter, kinder, nobler, more pacific, and better at living in groups than people. This ignores the well-documented fact that dolphins can be quite aggressive. Recently it has been discovered that some dolphins occasionally rape. At the same time, animal cruelty does not approximate the human standard. It is unlikely that dolphin rape rivals the human figures. One respected random sample study in 1977 found that almost half of all the women in one U.S. city had been victims of rape or attempted rape at least once in their lives. Child abuse may occur rarely in the wild, but nothing compares with over one in every three girls being sexually abused as children, as shown in a major American study conducted in 1983 by the same researcher,

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It" humans can misunderstand animals by assuming they are more hke us than they are, can animals also wrongly project their feelings onto us? Do animals commit what might be called zoo-morphism, ascribing their attributes to humans? A cat who brings a human offerings of dead rodents, lizards, and birds day after day, no matter how often these objects are greeted with loathing, commits zoomorphism. This is the equivalent of offering candy to a cat, as children sometimes do. In The Hidden Life of Dogs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes: "When a dog with a bone menaces a human observer, the dog actually assumes that the person wants the slimy, dirt-laden object, and is applying dog values, or cy-nomorphizing." Were a dog to give a history of the human race, some valuable attributes may be denied us, just as our history of any animal civilization would doubtless miss many of its signal achievements.

Fear, Hope, andtne Terrors or Dreams

Animal behaviorists are unlikely to acknowledge that terror can return in the dreams of animals. And yet from a Kenyan "elephant orphanage" comes a report of baby African elephants who have seen their families killed by poachers, and witnessed the tusks being cut off the bodies. These young animals wake up screaming in tfie night. WTiat else but the nightmare memories of a deep trauma could occasion these night terrors?

Wildlife biologist Lynn Rogers has spent decades studying black bears, following them through forests and swamps. As a graduate student he learned about black bears from his professor, Albert Erikson. One day they were trying to take a blood sample from an anesthetized wild bear, when it suddenly woke. The bear lunged at Erikson. To Rogers's surprise, Erikson lunged back. The bear turned to Rogers. Erikson said, "Lunge!" Rogers obediently lunged at the bear, who turned and ran away. Rogers says, "I was learning things that would help me interpret bears' actions in terms of their own fear rather than mine."