Although scientists – and humans generally – have long been reluctant to admit it, animals have their own form of intelligence, social structure, awareness and emotional lives. The articles I collected below illustrate this:
“Watching Whales Watching Us”, NYT, 12/7. On interaction between humans and grey whales in a particular region. Also notes that human-made noise (and other) pollution of the oceans is destructive to the creatures there (we can’t seem to visit any environment without messing it up).
“But thank goodness we’ve gone through a kind of cognitive revolution when it comes to studying the intelligence and emotion of other species. In fact, I’d say now that it is my obligation as a scientist not to discount that possibility. We do have compelling evidence of the experience of grief in cetaceans; and of joy, anger, frustration and distress and self-awareness and tool use; and of protecting not just their young but also their companions from humans and other predators. So these are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possibility. And even if it’s not that exactly, I believe it’s something. That there’s something very potent occurring here from a behavioral and a biological perspective. I mean, I’d put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined. I find the reality of it far more enthralling than all our past whale mythology.”
[…]
A distinctive aspect of the new cognitive revolution that Toni Frohoff spoke to me about is that scientific facts, of all things, are now freeing scientists like herself to be more expansive storytellers. The accusation of anthropomorphism – of projecting our thoughts and feelings on other animals; of trying to guess at what a whale’s day might be like, or a chimp’s or an elephant’s – has been obviated by the increasing evidence that such creatures have parallel days of their own, ones as distinctly intricate and woundable and, ultimately, unknowable as ours. “I don’t anthropomorphize,” Frohoff told me. “I leave it to other people to do that. What I do is study gray whales using the same rigorous methodologies that have long been used to study the behaviors of other species and interspecies interaction. Those who would reject out of hand the idea that whales are intelligent enough to consciously interact with us haven’t spent enough time around whales.”
“An Elephant Crackup?”, NYT, 8/10/2006 (also at the Elephant Sanctuary site). Widespread culling of elephants, and competition for food and land with humans, disrupts family groups (elephants are intensely social like us) and traumatizes young elephants who are orphaned. Young male elephants in particular display aggressive behavior – like young male humans.
But in “Elephant Breakdown,” a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.
It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly-developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.
[…]
Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults.
“Taking Animals Seriously”, 19/6/2005. Of the cognitive similarities between animals and autistic people; this features Temple Grandin, who is well-known for her work with understanding animals.
Meanwhile, the better she understands animals, the clearer it is that they are not so very different from us. After all, a deficiency in a part of her own forebrain has made her far more similar to animals in her thinking process – yet she remains indisputably human. The differences between us are far smaller than most people think.
This assertion makes some people – even people who call themselves scientists – very uncomfortable, and some lash out at those who make the claim. It’s very important to them to believe that there is a vast, unbridgeable gulf between humans and animals. But to keep the gulf in place, they have to ignore vast amounts of important and useful evidence – evidence that will help us understand ourselves and animals.
Also notably:
I was also pleased to read about the role of older males in curbing aggression in adolescent animals. We aren’t the only species that gives rise to vicious gangs of adolescent males, when older males aren’t present to socialize them and keep them in line.
Boys do need fathers – or, at least, father-figures – in their lives for their proper socialization and psychological well-being, as politically-incorrect as it seems to be to say so, these days.
“Spirit of the Shrinking West”, National Geographic, February 2009. On the controversial culling of wild mustangs. Horses also have their own complex social groups, and the random culling practised disrupts these.
“The more we know about the emotional and social lives of horses, the more we realize that they draw on a powerful collective wisdom,” said Ginger Kathrens, as she pointed her camera at a band of mustangs on a ridge just beyond us. “They live in highly structured, hard-won family groups. If you arbitrarily pull horses out of that group, the consequences can be devastating for the remaining family members.”
[…]
It was a raw spring day, and we settled down with our backs to the wind and watched. A pale stallion named Cloud was keeping half an eye on his mares as they grazed the range on top of this rocky ridge and half an eye on us. Kathrens said that a stallion will fight – sometimes to the death – for the right to own mares, which he must then continue to defend from interloping bachelors until old age makes it impossible for him to carry on. As Kathrens described Cloud’s relationship to his own mares and then to his father, his mother, his brothers, and half brothers, she wove a storyteller’s tale of intrigue and interfamily squabbling, of unlikely alliances and terrible, sudden wars. There was even a case of what might be called love – a solitary and now elderly couple that broke the rules of wild horse society to be together. When the stallion that had won the mare let her out of his sight the night she was foaling, she escaped and sneaked back to her stallion of choice. “In some cases,” Kathrens said, “I’ve seen a stallion lose his mares in a BLM gather, and for that stallion, who has fought life-threatening battles for those mares, his life is over. He’ll end up on his own, and I don’t think it’s too strong to say that some stallions succumb to a form of depression.”
Humans would be greatly outraged and traumatized if aliens appeared and began culling us at random, yet we practise such slaughter on other animals without hesitation.
Regarding hunting: I actually don’t have any objections to sustainable sustenance hunting; humans evolved as omnivores, and hunting is part of the natural cycle. I do object to sport hunting, a wasteful and morally objectionable activity that merely satisfies male egos.
I feel that all animal sports – horseracing and so on – cannot be justified in any sense, and should be abolished for humane reasons. Unfortunately a lot of people’s careers depend on these activities, so phasing them out would be difficult.
If humans were to disappear from the Earth tomorrow, the natural world would continue on without missing us (though our polluting artifacts, such as plastic, would linger in the environment for centuries). Domestic animals, though, would have a hard time of it as they are bred to be unhealthily dependent upon us, and some are so inbred and malformed that they can barely function without our assistance, so these would eventually die out. I wonder if humans should even be permitted to keep pets at all, as so many people mistreat or neglect them. My view is that animals in general should simply be left alone, so they can live their own lives without interference (and a reduction in the huge human population would go some way to achieve that).
