One of the most well-known stories about perspective taking concerns an animal: the story about the six blind men and the elephant.
1 The story has various incarnations, but the gist is that each blind man makes contact with a different part of an elephant and decrees that the entire elephant is understandable on the basis of the part he touches. One point of the story is that we should not make judgments based on limited information; another is that human knowledge is perspectival—we approach things from our own limited perspectives. Importantly, the blind men in the parable do not communicate with each other or the elephant. Indeed, the elephant seems a passive object of their individualized conjecture. An objective of the current volume is to bring together many humans to touch one critical part of the elephant (and many other animals)—its own point of view. Thus our focus is the minds of animals, that is, their ways of apprehending themselves, others, and the world. We also propose to exemplify the variety of methods humans might use to try to do this.
The authors in the current volume strive to explore, analyze, query, and generally poke at the perspectives of animals. Some approach from a scientific or social-scientific perspective, others from an orientation derived from the humanities: literature, art, philosophy, history, or personal experience. We present all methods as equally valid and invite readers to consider how the approaches might relate to each other. Whereas some readers may want to create an ultimate view of an animal by combining the rich set of diverse accounts offered herein, we suspect that perspectives are always to some degree independent, much as viewing the elephant from the back results in a different bit of knowing than viewing the elephant from the front. While we can combine perceptions to create knowledge of the whole elephant, we can never literally see the elephant clearly from all sides at once. In some cases we can only with difficulty hold one way of framing the subject while entertaining another. Still the attempt can be fun
and informative.
Part 1: Living with Animals
Living with animals provides experiences with and knowledge of animals that are less likely to arise in other contexts where our relationship with animals may be less salient to us. Not only do we look at animals we live with, and they at us, but we each touch and smell and otherwise sense each other and also develop expectations about each other. Living and interacting with animals toward whom we feel affection heightens awareness of their fears, passions, needs, and interest in social involvement. We experience these animals as intentional agents with minds of their own; we collect anecdotes that point to the animals’ capacities for companionability. Some of us come from long and rich experience with a single species. Davis has devoted her life to providing a sanctuary for chickens, those much maligned creatures viewed by most humans as so mentally vacuous that they are entitled to exploit them on a staggering scale. In Davis’s presentation, one is clearly aware of her belief in a fundamental nature of chickens that calls the ethics of current human practices into question: their capacity for reciprocal relations. Davis lives with chickens as mutual agents who initiate contact and response. Less interested in precise calculations in an economy of exchange, Davis rather insists on a general idea of give and take as the definition of meaningful relationships.
Acutely attentive to the influence of representations of pets on our experiences of them, Schlosser is also interested in human-animal reciprocity. She describes how selected artists involve pets in the processes of making art in order to understand better their subjectivity and agency. Narrowing the field of exploration to artworks that examine touch-contact, Schlosser shows how these works offer complex understandings of the meaning of touch as a medium of exchange between animal and human participants as well as between them and the viewers of artworks. She locates her own work within this paradigm. Thus, while Davis explores reciprocity laterally, through one human life extended through time with one species, communicating her views through descriptions of episodes of mutuality, Schlosser proceeds vertically. She focuses on one kind of event within the domestic partnership and explores its rich variations as captured by a group of artists all intent on referencing its meanings. For both Davis and Schlosser, however, the domestic arrangement provides a space for interactions that will lead to insights about animal minds less likely to occur in other contexts.
As Braz’s essay demonstrates, however, it is not necessary that animals be domesticated for humans to develop a rich appreciation of their lived experiences. People living with wild animals can also become attuned to nonhuman nuances even before they achieve a sensitizing affection. As Braz illustrates in his history of Grey Owl’s writings about beavers, Grey Owl came to know beavers while he was a trapper. But, once attentive to them, he believed he saw regularities in their behavior that he took to be meaningful. He began to see them as communicating with him via something comparable to human language. Through this process, beavers transformed Grey Owl into an advocate on their behalf. As with the accounts of Davis and Schlosser, the Grey Owl story suggests that human engagement with animals allows people to discover an expressiveness on the part of animals, one that they can recognize and understand.
Part 2: Anthropomorphisms
The essays in this section trace the sources, manners, and effects of anthropomorphism, each focusing on a different context. Nineteenth-century British writers purposely sought to distinguish animal intelligence from human intelligence by employing the idea of sagacity. Boddice examines how authors used the concept, comparing the ways that dogs, foxes, and rats were represented as sagacious. All three had that mixture of intelligence, pluck, and savvy attention required for sagacity; but foxes and rats were seen to use sagacity to thwart humans and thus to deserve no pity.
Discussing primates, the essays of Waller and Desmond also address anthropomorphic representation. Waller presents the scientific study of primate psychology as derived more from popular cultural ideas about primates as humanlike than from scientific ideas about animal psychology emerging from studies of evolution and ecology. In Waller’s analysis, cultural forms influence scientific representations, which influence what scientists look for in primates. In essence, the study of primate psychology is at the mercy of popular expectations. Desmond also sees ideas about primates in popular culture and science as mutually influential. Specifically, she sees scientific and popular discourses about primate art issuing from a shared desire to see the paintings as an animal protoaesthetic underlying the human capacity for expressive practice. She posits that such desire may be linked to the value of primate art within a transnational art market.
All the essays in
part 2 attempt to identify a source and manner of anthropomorphism that has not been fully explored elsewhere. And each makes clear that if anthropomorphism means representing animals as “us,” then the “us” can be as divergent as the animals themselves.
Part 3: Embodiments and Interembodiments
Authors in this section are divided in their attention to whole body and part body implications of embodiment. Argent, Warkentin, Smith, and Mitchell each focus on embodiment as traditionally conceived: the whole body is minded, inseparable from mental properties and a source for social understandings derived through encounters. All four present some kind of matching between bodies of individuals of the same or different species as a basis for psychological understanding between them. By contrast, Hart and Hart and Dillard-Wright assess the importance of individual systems within the body: respectively, the brain and the heart. Rohman explicitly acknowledges the minded and perceiving body in her view of poetry as “rooted in bodily experience” and art as functioning to “produce sensations.”
The first four authors provide a response of sorts to claims of unknowability concerning nonhuman internal states and experiences. Argent presents horse-horse, human-horse, and human-human interactions as guided by nonverbal communication, directing particular attention to synchronous movement that develops between two species (as well as between horses) as evidence of attunement to others, a form of empathic intelligence apparently more pronounced in horses than in humans. Consistent with Argent’s ethological directive of attending to interactive bodily activity as a source for understanding animal mind, Warkentin reads such activity using models provided by ecological psychology, cultural anthropology, and phenomenology. Applying these models to her observations of human-whale interactions in aquariums (whales inside, humans outside), she attempts to tease out the ways that interspecies bodily gestures in this context promote animal-human intersubjectivity or, conversely, lead to “toxic intercorporeity.” Smith takes as her subject dog-human communication as conveyed by Cesar Millan’s idea of energy in his books and television show
The Dog Whisperer. She hypothesizes that Millan communicates with dogs and they with him by means of the feeling of movement each experiences when watching movement enacted by the other.
Mitchell examines the question of how we come to expect that others have inner experiences, and what we can know about these experiences, by presenting Strawson’s response to Wittgenstein’s argument for the unknowability of others’ experiences. Strawson believed that our knowledge of other minds derives from our ability to match our internal experience to perceptions that are intersubjectively available. Following Strawson’s argument, Mitchell posits that inner experiences are like perceptions, that our knowledge that others have inner experiences derives from our capacity for kinesthetic-visual matching, and that our understanding of others’ inner experiences as directly experienced by them is always inherently incomplete whether we speak the same language or no language at all.
All the authors in this section assume that bodily organization clearly determines the expression of the mental. A dolphin cannot express joy in a wild canter as a horse does, and an ape cannot know an object through sound as does an echolocating bat. Hart and Hart posit that the structure and organization of the brain’s neurons in elephants directly explain these animals’ psychological skills and limitations. Dillard-Wright views the respiratory and circulatory subsystems (but particularly the latter, which includes the heart) as salient components of “thought,” viewed liberally. Once again, as with other authors in this volume, meaning is derived from interaction, but now the interacting agencies are the heart and the mind, representing a physiological pas de deux.
Bodily pleasure is the indirect focus of Rohman’s essay. Rohman, following Grosz, presents art as emerging from an experience of intense feeling, whether derived from perceptual stimulation or innate bodily energy. This excess or intensity of feeling leads to art in the form of revelry, joy, play. This idea of art makes it inherent in animal life. It is a decentering of art as essentially human and even of art as intentionally created. In Rohman’s view, animal play is an exuberant exhibition of pleasure arising from the expenditure of excess bodily energy; and this suggests that, for animals, existence itself leads to art. In other words, the life spark leads to play’s intense energy, which is expended in some form that should be called art. Rohman theorizes a protoaesthetic that Desmond examines more skeptically as a basis for the commodification of primate art.
Part 4: Animal Versus Human Consciousness
The authors in this section focus on limitations of animal mind and reevaluate its implications. Steiner posits that most nonhuman animals are, unlike humans, without abstract thought and rationality. Carefully defining “conceptual abstraction” and “predicative intentionality” as linguistically based, he argues that nonhuman animals do not have the same cognitive apparatus that humans do. In particular, they lack the mental capacities needed to form representational content separate from any particular perceptual experience. However, he believes that any human superiority derived from the lack of abstract thought in animals is irrelevant to ethical concerns about treatment of animals. Morin focuses on particular forms of abstract thought—self-reflection and self-rumination—he believes are absent in nonhuman animals and argues against the idea that these self-focused forms of thought are present in beings that lack inner speech.
Focusing on studies of caching behavior in scrub jays, Droege argues that, although the jays have sophisticated mental abilities, including the ability to reason, they are not conscious. Droege notes that the jays are able to discriminate when an event occurred, what happened during the event, and where the event was located; however the jays are not able to mentally reexperience a past event. Without this capacity, they lack a sense of time, which Droege maintains is the sine qua non of consciousness.
Part 5: Tailoring Representations to Audiences
Even if, as in the previous section, animals are said to lack abstract thought, language, self-reflection, or a sense of time, almost no one believes that they are nonmental entities (as Droege’s essay attests). Authors in this penultimate section each attend to a particular method for presenting some quality of animal mind to some audience. Forms of presentation include experimental design, visual displays, and narrative. All the authors suggest that the form of presentation cannot be separated from the characterization of animal mind.
Lurz’s essay addresses a central problem in comparative psychology—discerning whether or not apes have a theory of mind, that is, whether they interpret the activities of others as based on mental states. Lurz recounts that most of the research on apes’ behaviors is uninterpretable: One cannot tell whether they have a theory of behavior and its consequences or a theory of mind. He proposes an experimental protocol that actually allows researchers to differentiate between these two mindsets, as it requires apes to recognize that what another sees from one vantage point differs from what it sees from another—evidence of having a theory of mind.
Ullrich discusses the methods artists use to understand and convey animal experience to human viewers. These methods include artistic observation and imitation, but Ullrich’s primary focus is on identification and empathy as a goal of artistic production. She discusses artists who attempt to recreate artistically for the viewer a context for animal experience and to present it in such a way as the animal itself might encounter it. This includes eliciting in the viewer the feelings of a particular situation that an animal might have in that context. She views these attempts to understand animals’ points of view as valiant but inadequate: valiant because they acknowledge animals as experiencing beings and try to capture their world anti-anthropomorphically, inadequate because of their restriction to vision and visual-based forms, animals being governed by other perceptual modes as well. She pushes for a heterophenomenological approach that may or may not be achievable by visual artists. In contrast to Ullrich, Lowe is less sanguine about the value of attempting to create identification with animals through visual representation. His essay focuses on the ways “images and spectacles” are used to influence public opinion about the treatment of animals. Showing how theories of “the spectacular” apply to strategies of the animal protection movement, Lowe evaluates whether the deployment of visual images usefully shapes the public’s moral imagination.
Sickler, Fraser, and Reiss describe a two-year public research development project at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Aquarium. They began the project by gathering narratives derived from lay people’s ideas about dolphin cognition. They then studied the diverse preexisting beliefs people had about dolphins in order to create methods to provide information about the animals that was understandable within these beliefs. In this way, the authors report, they allowed their audience to co-construct a narrative of dolphins.
The story of the elephant is intended to raise doubts about how well we can know anything. Applied to the topic of animals’ minds, it suggests that human concerns and purposes drive—indeed invade, permeate, corrupt—each and every attempt to understand and represent animals’ mental lives. In the parable of the elephant, no method can escape the limitations of the perceiver: his agendas, her mistaking of the part for the whole. Each viewer is isolated from the others; all viewers remain alienated from the entity they attempt to know. Indeed, many of the essays herein address the problem of creating a human perspective on animal perspective. But one might reimagine this story. One might insist that knowing even one small part of the elephant is no mean feat, particularly when one is exploring it along with the usefulness of a particular methodology. Also, one might actually revise the story so that the blind men talk to each other. The result might be a composite understanding, wherein each examiner contributes knowledge of his part to a collaborative whole. While one may not be able to see all sides at once, he can walk around the subject, visiting the parts, being influenced by what he has already encountered as he approaches from a new angle. One might even imagine a result that is not a patchwork of single views, but a kind of depth composite—each blind man constructing a whole elephant from an idea of one part with the result of a layered view, somewhat like drawings on transparencies arranged in a stack. No one view is perfectly aligned with any other, but from the stack will come interesting, complex, provocative contours with indistinct but richly intriguing perimeters that are as instructive in their own ways as lines of sharp clarity.
An even more radical understanding of how the individual perspectives on animal minds herein might relate to each other is to think of each essay as an intervention into the human collective cultural consciousness (and unconsciousness) about animals. In this reading each author brings to life an elephant, creates her own elephant that could not have existed otherwise. In this account there is no one objective elephant, nor ever can be, one that is understood to stand free and clear of perspective. There is only a panorama of elephants. This is not to say that each is only a fiction of its author. Rather, it is to hypothesize that each elephant is really about a relationship between the author and the animal; each author chooses a particular way of seeing the elephant, a way of interacting with it that produces a very particular interdependence. It is to look at each essay as a document about the possibilities of one animal-human connection—be it personal, intellectual, emotional, or some combination of these. Giving up the idea that there is one objective elephant we must struggle to know, we might expect that each essay gives a snapshot in time of an always shifting and multivalent relationship that continually brings new elephants into being.
In any case, whether the reader wishes to relate the essays objectively or subjectively, relate to them individually, or see them as pointing to some whole, we very much intend that the book will be enjoyable as well as instructive to the degree that the reader entertains interconnections between its essays. We have intentionally grouped essays with very different disciplinary methodologies and controlling themes. We have worked to bring not only multiple academic fields into the discussion but the views of other kinds of specialists. The parts are organized by a sometimes unusual common thread between essays that will suggest one way of reading them as a subgroup. But the parts are also intended to create a bit of dissonance. We want readers to think about how one essay ought to be paired with another in a different part and whether the essays in each group really have a shared comprehensive idea of animal minds. We intend the gaps to be productive of new apprehensions and of meaning making.
Note