The Animal Manifesto (10 page)

In a study of “muskrat love,” researchers separated nine male voles from their partners to see how they coped with this
stress. They then killed the voles and discovered elevated levels of a chemical called cortico-tropin-releasing factor (CRF) that is known to play a role in depression. An article about the study in the
Los Angeles Times
began: “Scientists have confirmed what poets have long known: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

By that logic, does death make the heart grow fonder still? And what does it say about humans that they devised an experiment in which they killed animals to prove those animals can love? If animals wrote a manifesto, surely one of their demands would be that humans trust their instincts concerning them first. Then, if the humans have any lingering doubts, that they satisfy those doubts in ways that, in hindsight, don’t accept cruelty as the price for knowledge.

The more we learn about animals’ cognitive abilities, the more these capabilities compel us to rethink how we treat them. Our fellow animals not only think, but they feel — deeply. Animals live and move through the world with likes and dislikes and preferences just like we do. This is not being anthropomorphic. We’re not inserting something human into them that they don’t have. It doesn’t matter whether their thoughts and emotions are exactly the same as our thoughts and emotions. Both their feelings and ours are essential for a meaningful life. We know that there are individual differences among humans, so that what I think and feel, the pain I experience, might not be the same as someone else, but this obviously
doesn’t
mean that either of us doesn’t think, feel, and experience pain.

Critics who complain about anthropomorphism fail to notice their own anthropomorphism. The same zoo officials who accuse activists of being anthropomorphic when they call a captive elephant unhappy turn around and freely describe the same elephant as perfectly happy. Renowned philosopher Mary Midgley points out in
Animals and Why They Matter,
what’s truly anthropomorphic is to assume that animals don’t think or feel. Terry Tempest Williams calls this the “ultimate act of solipsism.” It’s important that we get over the issue of anthropomorphism and move on — there’s important work to be done.

It’s also important to remember that solid biological theory and a rapidly growing database of scientific research supports the claim that animals have their own sorts of pain and emotions and that what they feel matters to them. (See this book’s bibliography and notes section for ample citations, scientific papers, and research, as well as my books
The Emotional Lives of Animals
and
Animals Matter.)
Anna Sewell notes in
Black Beauty,
“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” Of course, while animals cannot tell us what they feel in words, they do clearly let us know what they’re feeling using a wide variety of behaviors, sounds, and scents.

For the few remaining skeptics, it is unacceptable to only study animals in cages or in unnatural groups in which they can’t display their natural repertoire of behavior — and their ability to change their behavior when there are variations in their social and physical environments. As we’ve seen, when we study animals in captivity, we can reach completely incorrect and limited conclusions.

Science is catching up with what many lay observers already know from living with animals every day. This growing
understanding can help us see and relate to animals as fellow subjective beings rather than as objects. I like what Australian Bradley Trevor Greive writes in his book
Priceless: The Vanishing Beauty of a Fragile Planet:
“For endangered species we are both their greatest enemy and their only hope. These wonderful creatures will not argue their case. They will not put up a fight. They will not beg for reprieve. They will not say goodbye. They will not cry out. They will just vanish. And after they are gone, there will be silence. And there will be stillness. And there will be empty places. And nothing you can say will change this. Nothing you can do will bring them back. With so many lives hanging in the balance, the paths we choose today will decide the fate of the world. So it’s up to us. It’s up to you and me to decide who lives and who dies.” I read these words as part of a “blessing of the animals” service at the Minding Animals conference in Newcastle, Australia, in July 2009, and the audience was stilled by their simplicity and compassionate call to action, a major message of this book.

I’m sure that the next decade is going to be a boon in terms of what we learn about animal emotions and beastly passions. Indeed, it’s what animals feel and share that draws us to them. When we don’t have these connections, we become alienated from life and other beings, and this is what allows us to abuse others. Empathy and compassion, then, lead us to the next item in this manifesto.

“The satisfaction that washes over us as we watch our pets sleep is the ancient reminder that when all is well in their world, all is well in ours.”

— Meg Daley Olmert,
Made For Each Other

IN THEIR MANIFESTO
animals would surely seek to highlight the many areas in which all species are similar rather than focus on differences. Surely, a dolphin, a raven, and a human don’t look the same, move the same, or perhaps even think the same, but these differences are minor compared to what these animals share: for instance, many of the same senses and organs, the ability to think and feel, and essential roles to play in maintaining the health of the world’s ecosystems, large and small. In area after area, humans are in fact discovering that there isn’t a great divide between other animals and us.

Further, animals would argue that different doesn’t mean better or worse. Each animal has evolved for his or her own needs; an animal does whatever is necessary to be a cardcarrying member of his or her species. Yes, some animals are
better at using tools than others, and some don’t need them; some animals have more highly developed senses than others, and some run faster or swim deeper. But this doesn’t make them higher or lower, better or worse, on the evolutionary scale; it just means different. Should mice consider themselves better than people because they have a more highly developed sense of smell? Should bats pat themselves on the back as more intelligent than us because they use ultrasound and we can’t?

Humans have a long history, particularly among themselves, of establishing hierarchies that place their own clan or race or species at the top. Yet invariably, these hierarchies rest on definitions that mistakenly equate surface differences with intrinsic ones and that undervalue similarities or discount them altogether. Philosopher Lynne Sharpe points this out in her book
Creatures Like Us,
when she says that the way we regard and value the similarities and differences among animals typically depends on how we define ourselves. She writes, “Those who define ‘us’ by our ability to introspect give a distorted view of what is important to and about human beings and ignore the fact that many creatures are like us in more significant ways in that we all share the vulnerability, the pains, the fears, and the joys that are the life of social animals.”

Given this, an animal manifesto would demand that every species, and every individual within every species, deserves respect and compassion. No animal, humans included, is less deserving of empathy and kindness simply for being different. In addition, their manifesto would insist that animals are capable of acting compassionately. Still today, animals suffer under the unfair, baseless notion that they are inherently competitive and cruel to one another; that nature is “red in tooth and claw.” On
the contrary, lots of scientific research and anecdotal evidence is emerging that shows that animals — rather than being inherently cruel — instead have a natural inclination to work cooperatively and to respond with compassion and empathy. Faced with the pain of others, animals act in ways that display empathy, caring, a moral intelligence, and even a sense of justice.

Expanding our compassion footprint is first and foremost about acting with compassion at all times when we see others in pain or being harmed. In a way, this truly begins when we accept that animals, humans included, are born to be good.

I constantly receive stories about animals helping other animals, animals helping people, and people helping animals — and, of course, of people helping other people. The most intriguing stories are the ones that demonstrate cross-species empathy. That walruses would help fellow walruses is significant, but then again, we might assume that members of the same species would be inclined to help one another; that at least benefits one’s own species. However, what would drive one species to help an entirely different species, one they have no particular need for or relationship with? Indeed, one they might even compete with or, in different circumstances, prey upon? Here are a few news stories that show that compassion comes naturally to many species, and that humans are not the only animals who will help other species and even risk their own lives to save someone else.

“Scientists are gathering evidence that[walruses are] the most cognitively and socially sophisticated of all pinnipeds. . . . Evidence suggests that the bonds between walruses are exceptionally strong: the animals share food, come to one another’s aid when under attack and nurse one another’s young, a particularly noteworthy behavior given the cost in energy of synthesizing a pinniped’s calorically rich, fatty milk.”

“By all accounts the baby kangaroo should have not survived the road accident that claimed its mother . . . but then along came Rex the wonder dog. The pointer discovered the baby roo, known as a joey, alive in the mother’s pouch and took it back to his owner. . . .

“The four-month-old joey’s mother was killed by a car. . . in Torquay, Victoria, Australia. Amazingly, the 10-year-old dog — a cross between a German shorthaired and wirehaired pointer — had been so tender with the joey that it was both calm and unmarked.

“‘The joey was snuggling up to him, jumping up to him and Rex was sniffing and licking him — it was quite cute,’[the owner] said.

“The joey. . . is now being cared for at Jirrahlinga Wildlife Sanctuary. . . . Director Tehree Gordon said she was amazed by the trusting bond between the two animals. . . . ‘That Rex was so careful and knew to bring the baby to his owners, and that
the joey was so relaxed and didn’t see Rex as a predator, is quite remarkable.’”

“A pygmy killer whale that beached itself on Maui this month had been escorted for three weeks by a pod of pygmy killer whales, giving marine biologists a rare peek into how the cetaceans cared for one of their own before its death.

“Four or five pygmy killer whales had surrounded their 300-pound, seven-to eight-foot, male podmate and appeared to be flipping on their sides and backs to support the struggling mammal, scientists said.

“When it grew weaker and came closer to McGregor’s Beach, the pygmy killer whales broke off one by one over the next several days and headed back out to the open ocean, where they live year-round in deep Hawaiian waters. . . . It was the first time that marine biologists had documented such ‘pre-stranding, milling behavior’ in pygmy killer whales around Hawai’i.

“ ‘We don’t know so much about pygmy killer whales,’[one scientist] said. ‘So it was very interesting for us to see this very highly evolved social behavior surrounding the care of this one individual by the other whales.’”

“It looks like a moment of terror — a diver finds her leg clamped in the jaws of a beluga whale. In fact, it was a stunning example of an animal coming to the rescue of a human life.

“Yang Yun, 26, was taking part in a free diving contest without breathing equipment among the whales in a tank of water more than 20ft deep and chilled to Arctic temperatures. She says that when she tried to return to the surface, she found her legs crippled by cramp from the freezing cold. At that point Mila the beluga took a hand, or rather a flipper.

“ ‘We suddenly saw the girl being pushed to the top of the pool with her leg in Mila’s mouth,’ said an official at Polar Land in Harbin, northeast China. ‘She’s a sensitive animal who works closely with humans and I think this girl owes Mila her life.’”

“In a case which gives the lie to the saying about ‘fighting like cats and dogs,’ the terrier cross named Leo had to be revived with oxygen and heart massage after his ordeal. Fire broke out overnight at the house in Australia’s southern city of Melbourne,[and] fire fighters who revived Leo said he refused to leave the building and was found by them alongside the litter of kittens, despite thick smoke.”

“The wandering 65-pound Pit Bull mix,. . . which authorities think is lost and not a stray, successfully thwarted a robbery attack on a mother and her 2-year-old son, who were held at knifepoint Monday afternoon. The Florida woman. . . was leaving a playground with her toddler son in Port Charlotte when a man approached her in the parking lot with a knife and told her not to make any noise or sudden movements.