ASK THE ANIMALS AND THEY WILL TELL YOU:
A LOOK AT ANIMAL SENTIENCE, PART TWO
ANIMALS, EMOTIONS, AND AWARENESS
After
a year Louis Leakey arranged for me to go to Cambridge University to work
toward a PhD in ethology. There I was
criticized for my lack of scientific method, for naming the chimpanzees rather
than assigning each a number, for ‘giving’ them personalities, and for
maintaining they had emotions. For
these, I was told sternly, were attributes reserved for the human animal. I was even reprimanded for referring to a
male chimpanzee as ‘he’ and a female as ‘she’:
Didn’t I know that ‘it’ was the correct way to refer to an animal?
In Part One of this series on animal sentience, we saw
what most of us already know, but what science has been slow to acknowledge:
that animals – including even fish, crabs, and insects -- feel and are aware of
physical pain. We also saw that some of
the things humans do to animals, like branding and tail docking, are known to
cause real and lasting pain, but continue unabated. In this Part Two, we will look at animal
emotions.
Animal ethologist Marc Bekoff writes, “Humans and animals
share neural pathways when it comes to suffering,” and that includes the
emotional element of suffering.[2] The case against animal emotions is “bad
biology,” Bekoff continues, “Scientific research in evolutionary biology,
cognitive ethology, and social neuroscience supports the view that numerous and
diverse animals have rich and deep emotional lives. . . . Emotions, empathy,
and knowing right from wrong are keys to survival, without which animals – both
human and nonhuman – would perish.
That’s how important they are.”[3]
“Recognizing that animals have emotions is
important,” he says, “because animal feelings matter.
Animals are sentient beings who experience the ups and downs of daily life, and we must respect this when we interact with them.”[4] Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe adds, “it is remarkable that the existence of animal emotions has been so much in dispute when they express their feelings so markedly for anyone paying attention.”[5] Still, there are those who argue we cannot know what is going on inside an animal’s brain, so to conclude that they think or feel anything is anthropomorphizing. In response to these people, Mark Bekoff responds:
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| Happy, tail-wagging black lab |
Animals are sentient beings who experience the ups and downs of daily life, and we must respect this when we interact with them.”[4] Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe adds, “it is remarkable that the existence of animal emotions has been so much in dispute when they express their feelings so markedly for anyone paying attention.”[5] Still, there are those who argue we cannot know what is going on inside an animal’s brain, so to conclude that they think or feel anything is anthropomorphizing. In response to these people, Mark Bekoff responds:
one reason [we
know animals think and feel] is because of behavioral flexibility. . . .
For example, monkeys will choose not to engage in an experiment if they
think they’ll fail. Research has shown
that rats often take a moment to reflect on what they’ve learned when running a
maze . . . When animals need to make
decisions that involve . . . purposefully choosing among alternative actions,
many are quite able to do so – they’re aware of their surroundings and
intentionally make appropriate, purposeful, and flexible choices in a wide
variety of situations. ¶
Flexibility in behavior is one of the litmus tests for consciousness, for a
mind at work.[6]
In addition, Bekoff writes, “it is now largely accepted
as fact that animals share the primary emotions, those instinctual reactions to
the world we call fear, anger, surprise, sadness, disgust, and joy.”[7]
Both data and experience indicate that
animals also feel many so-called secondary emotions. So, for example, many animals display empathy
and compassion, feelings that would make no sense for animals unable to suffer
themselves. Bekoff and Balcombe provide
examples of these types of behavior:
§ A
wild elephant herd in Northern Kenya was observed to slow its pace so a
crippled member of the herd could keep up.
There was no self-interested reason for the herd to do this, as the
crippled member could not help the herd.[8]
§ An
elephant herd in eastern India burst through a village looking for a group
member who had fallen into a ditch and drowned.
The elephants searched for the fallen member, who had already been
buried by the village, for three days.[9]
§ In
Alaska two cubs were left on their own after their mother was killed by a
hunter. The male cub was injured, but
the female would not leave him. She even
brought him food.[10]
§ Mice
in experiments recognize pain in other mice and respond to it negatively, when
they know the mice being harmed. This
distinction demonstrates their response is not purely instinctual. [11]
§ Rhesus
monkeys and rats have been shown to voluntarily forgo food when eating will
cause another of their species to be harmed.[12]
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| Laboratory rat |
There are also numerous stories of wild animals helping humans, such as
dolphins protecting humans from sharks and even wild lions in Ethiopia rescuing
a young girl from a gang who had kidnapped her, guarding her until the police
arrived, then disappearing again into the forest.[13] These stories and many more like them are
significant because there is no “instinctual” explanation for them.
Animals display gratitude and grief, as well. For example, a female humpback whale
entangled in the ropes of crab traps off the coast of the Farallon Islands near
San Francisco did not immediately swim off when freed by divers, but approached
and nuzzled each diver. “An outpouring
of gratitude signals something profound,” explains Balcombe. “It shows that the
animal values his or her life. It
suggests feelings of relief from pain and fear and the fulfillment of a
fundamental desire for freedom.”[14] Animals also value their relationships with
others and grieve their loss. “Some scientists
even say that the demeanor of elephants suffering from the loss of friends and
the disruption of social bonds resembles post-traumatic stress disorder,” and
“[g]orillas are known to hold wakes for dead friends, something some zoos have
formalized in a ceremony when one of their gorillas passes away.”[15] Numerous other species, from baboons and
wolves, to chickens and pigs, to dogs and cats and birds, have likewise shown clear signs
of grief at the passing of another with whom they had a close bond.
 |
| Grieving bird. Photo from bioimmersion.com archives |
Thus, animals suffer not only physical pain, but
emotional pain as well. Moreover, they
may suffer when their natural behaviors are frustrated and when they are
deprived of intellectual stimulation.
Starlings who have had cages enriched with branches and water baths and
foraging opportunities for food were shown to be more optimistic, expecting
rewards in ambiguous situations, than birds who were housed in barren cages.
“It appears that these animals, like humans, can suffer from depressed morale. Furthermore, it shows that life for a bird
can go well or ill, and that an individual’s emotional state has duration over
time beyond the fleeting emotions of a given moment.”[16] Balcombe concludes that these studies and
others like them demonstrate that animals “aren’t merely alive, but that they
have lives.”[17]
Moreover, Balcombe argues, animals “are keenly attuned
to their surroundings, . . . they
possess intellect suited to their ecological station, and . . . they have a range of emotions. All of these capacities are relevant to
awareness.”[18] He argues that many animals show an awareness
of others and their perspectives, by for example, following the gaze of
another. They are able “to view a
situation from the perceptual perspective of another. Scientists explain this sort of awareness in
terms of a theory of mind. To have a theory of mind is to be aware that
another individual also has a mind.”[19]
He explains in detail the many ways a
variety of animals, from apes to chimps to dolphins, elephants, magpies, and
rats demonstrate in one way or another that they have some type of theory of
mind, through following the gaze of another, recognizing themselves in a
mirror, demonstrating an awareness that they know or do not know information
necessary to complete a task, changing their behavior to affect the behavior of
another, and other means.[20]
He concludes, “Study after study is
finding that animals are attuned to their living environments in subtle,
sophisticated ways. Animals are
experiencing much more than we have been giving them credit for since around
the time 2,300 years ago when Aristotle declared that animals lacked reason.”[21]
All of this tells us that the animals we warehouse in
factory farms, imprison in cages, stalk in the hunt, manipulate in
entertainment venues, and torment in labs are not just suffering physical pain,
they are suffering emotionally, as well.
They are unhappy, if not miserable.
They endure their time on this earth knowing nothing of God’s goodness
or the joy of creation because we have deprived them of it. We not only fail to show them image of God,
as God has asked us to do, we actively hide it from them and show them
something else altogether.
It is time to do better.
[1] From the Forward to
Bekoff, Mark. The Emotional Lives of
Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy – and Why
They Matter (Novato: New World Library, 2007), Forward, xii.
[2] Bekoff, p. 63
[3] Bekoff, p. xviii - xix
[4] Bekoff, p. xx.
[6] Bekoff, p. 31.
[7] Bekoff, p. 10.
[8] Bekoff, p. 3.
[9] Bekoff, p. 3.
[10] Bekoff, p. 11.
[11] Balcombe, p. 131, Bekoff
, p.11.
[12] Bekoff, p. 11; Balcombe,
p. 129-30.
[13] Bekoff, p. 16-19.
[14] Balcombe, p. 50.
[15] Bekoff, p. 63- 64.
[16] Balcombe, p. 51-52.
[17] Balcombe, p. 53.
[18] Balcombe, p. 62.
[19] Balcombe, p. 63, emphasis
original.
[20] Balcombe, pp. 63-77.
[21] Balcombe, p. 77.
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