ANIMALS ARE CONSCIOUS BEINGS TOO
Dr Irene M. Pepperberg with Alex, the African grey parrot. ‘Scientifically speaking, the single greatest lesson Alex taught me, taught all of us, is that animal minds are a great deal more like human minds than the vast majority of behavioural scientists believed—or, more importantly, were even prepared to concede, might be remotely possible.’
ANIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMMUNICATION are such new fields of formal study that there are only small groups of researchers undertaking research in the area. The researchers have tended to focus on species of more social mammals such as whales, wolves, primates and elephants, where a lot of communication goes on the whole time. And the results of the studies have been extraordinary.
To start with a very familiar species, in The Genius of Dogs: How dogs are smarter than you think, canine cognition researchers Professor Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods show that there is a lot more to barking than most humans realise. Dogs subtly alter their barking to have different meanings in different contexts. While most people can tell the difference between playful barking and aggressive barking, peoples’ ability to discriminate between different dogs that are barking, and what their growls or barks signify, is found to be extremely limited. Hare and Woods conclude: ‘we know very little about the vocal behavior of dogs’.1 This is an extraordinary finding, given that our lives have been so closely entwined with theirs for the past 15,000 years!
More accurate than saying that animals don’t have language could be the admission that we have never properly studied how they communicate. Today’s zoologists will confirm that elephants have a repertoire of over 100 gestures to signal to each other on a wide range of matters. They always greet each other, and the way they do so denotes the quality of their relationship, with the most important relationships generating the greatest excitement.
Elephants use not only non-verbal gestures but also low frequency sounds, inaudible to humans, which travel over several kilometres, to keep in touch with each other. If a group of elephants is attacked by poachers, other groups some distance away immediately know about it and behave in a traumatised way.
One of the most haunting stories related by Carl Safina in his outstanding book Beyond Words: What animals think and feel, is that of the researcher who played a recording of an elephant who had died, through a speaker in the bush. The family of the dead elephant was distraught, calling out for their sister and mother, searching in vain for her. Her daughter called out for her for days afterwards. ‘The researchers,’ says Safina, ‘never again did such a thing.’2
Just like us, elephants can communicate verbally to some extent. They even recognise one another’s voices.
Above and beyond the visible, non-verbal signing, and the audible and inaudible vocalisation, however, elephants seem to use another level of communication, the same one that enables dogs—and cats, horses, birds and no doubt others—to perceive that their owners are on their way home.
An example is the orphaned elephants rescued by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, who are nurtured through their early years before being taken to the Tsavo National Park to join others like them, released into the bush years earlier.
The transition from protected sanctuary to their natural habitat is huge. But after decades of having repeated this process, Daphne Sheldrick has observed how other former orphans, now grown up and living in the wild, emerge from the bush to greet the newcomers and make them feel welcome. ‘Daphne Sheldrick insists that the elephants in Tsavo know when a new group of orphans is headed there in trucks on the road from Nairobi. She claims that free-living grown-ups come from the bush, ready to meet young new orphans when they arrive. She calls it “telepathy.’’ I filed her claim in my mind’s “unlikely stories’’ bin. But that bin gets cluttered; there are many “unlikely” stories about elephants.’3
PRIMATE SIGNERS WHO UNDERSTAND ENGLISH
Moving closer to our own species, primates are known to use vocalisations, with different species of monkey using specific sounds—words—to denote specific animals and their status, from ‘snake’ and ‘baboon’ to ‘unfamiliar human’ and ‘dominant monkey’. Some use a form of syntax to denote how far away a particular threat may be. Vervet monkeys have been known to cry out ‘leopard!’ if their troop is being overwhelmed by another, sending their attackers into the trees through the use of deliberate miscommunication. A tactic not unknown in corporate boardrooms today.
Of all the primates to be studied at close quarters, Koko the gorilla is one of the most famous. Born in San Francisco Zoo in 1971 before coming into the care of Francine ‘Penny’ Patterson, who was undertaking a PhD in Psychology at Stanford University, Koko is a female Western Lowland gorilla who has learned a large number of hand signs from a modified version of American Sign Language, and understands about 2000 words in English. Patterson has written many reports, including several books, explaining Koko’s use of language. Predictably, these findings have been rebutted by sceptics in the scientific community, claiming that Koko doesn’t understand the signs she is using, that any meaning attributed to her signing is projected by humans and that any correct answers she gives are in the manner of Clever Hans, a horse at the turn of the last century who could supposedly count, tell the time and so on, when in reality he was only responding to the leaked, non-verbal cues of his owner.
But there is a wealth of evidence to the contrary. Koko has displayed humour in her communications and has also made deliberately deceptive statements when it suited her agenda. She has also invented phrases—having not been taught the word ‘ring’ she came up, on her own, with ‘finger bracelet’.
Washoe, the chimpanzee, originally captured by the United States Air Force for use on the space program, but who was, instead, brought up by Allen and Beatrix Gardner in Washoe County, Nevada, was the first primate to learn American Sign Language. She not only demonstrated her capacity to do so, but also an awareness of herself and others that could be humbling. When novice signers came to work with her, she would slow down her rate of signing to accommodate them.
There are many reports and resources about Washoe available online. The account that really touched me was her interest in the pregnancy of a research assistant. Touching her belly, she signed ‘baby’. When the assistant had a miscarriage, she decided she had to tell Washoe what had happened, as Washoe had lost her own babies in the past. She signed, ‘My baby died.’ At this, Washoe met her eyes directly and signed ‘cry’, touching her cheek just below her eye. Later that day, she didn’t want the research assistant to leave work, signing, ‘Please person hug’—thereby demonstrating not only her understanding and empathy, but also extending a heartfelt compassion.4
TALKING AND TELEPATHY: AFRICAN GREY PARROTS
Animals can even speak English! Alex, an African grey parrot, is the only bird to have received an obituary in both The New York Times and The Economist, because he learned scores of words and showed he understood what they meant.5 Alex could identify over 50 objects, distinguish a variety of colours and shapes, and demonstrate an understanding of concepts like bigger and smaller, over and under again. (You can watch this fascinating process yourself on YouTube: Alex—One of the smartest parrots ever.)
Just as was the case with Koko the gorilla, no sooner were reports published than a wave of scientific scepticism followed. Alex didn’t understand what he said, said some. Just because he said words didn’t mean he could use syntax, said others. Clever Hans was once again invoked, even though Alex was able to answer similar questions when asked by a variety of researchers.
Dr Irene M. Pepperberg, the MIT and Harvard trained scientist who led the initiative to explore language and intelligence with Alex, describes how for 30 years she felt she had been banging her head against a wall—no matter what evidence she was able to produce to demonstrate that Alex could cognise and communicate in English, the evidence was dismissed by scientists who had already decided that animals can’t think, whatever the facts of the matter.
In her book, Alex and Me, Pepperberg writes:
Scientifically speaking, the single greatest lesson Alex taught me, taught all of us, is that animal minds are a great deal more like human minds than the vast majority of behavioural scientists believed—or, more importantly, were even prepared to concede might be remotely possible … Alex taught us how little we know about animal minds and how much more there is to discover. This insight has profound implications, philosophically, sociologically, and practically. It affects our view of the species Homo sapiens and its place in nature.6
Pepperberg’s pioneering work has been followed up by others with African grey parrots, who are widely acknowledged to be among the quickest learners in the parrot world. Growing up in Africa, I knew several people who kept them as pets and I used to love my interactions with them. I would have been thrilled to offer a home to an African grey myself but my parents wouldn’t allow it, because the parrots’ life expectancy is an average 40 to 60 years. There was never any doubt in my mind that I was interacting with a sharp, intriguing and often somewhat mischievous intelligence that went well beyond whatever pidgin interaction we might be having.
As a boy who hand-reared a number of cockatiels, I also never doubted the capacity of parrots to feel a wide range of emotions. The way that many parrots, like some other birds, mate for life, gives rise to one of the most poignant of these. A friend told me that one of the most heart-rending sights he ever encountered in the bird world was a pet parrot who had an open wound on her featherless chest. The parrot’s owner told my friend how the parrot had recently lost her mate. In the days and weeks since, she had pulled every feather out of her chest and even pecked into her own skin, such was her grief.
An especially intriguing illustration of parrots’ intelligence, telepathy and ability to learn English is provided by Aimée Morgana, a New York based artist who had an African grey parrot called N’kisi. What makes parrots especially interesting to study, from a telepathic perspective, is that they are literally able to give voice to their reactions about what people are planning, thinking and feeling. In Morgana’s case, such was the closeness of her relationship with her parrot that N’kisi used to regularly comment on things, such as who she was about to call when she picked up the phone, or images she might be looking at on a TV screen that he couldn’t see—‘Don’t fall down’, when a man was scarily perched on a girder high on a skyscraper. Most remarkably, N’kisi, who shared Morgana’s bedroom, would even comment on what she was dreaming. ‘You gotta push the button,’ he said, waking her up once, when she was dreaming about working with an audio tape deck.
After reading Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home,7 Morgana contacted Sheldrake, who proposed a study to see if N’kisi’s telepathic skills could be objectively established. Sheldrake designed a trial, during which Morgana looked at many different photographs of objects N’kisi knew about, in a randomised, controlled experiment, while N’kisi, on a different floor of the building, was simultaneously filmed. Out of 71 items, he correctly identified 23—a result that is way above chance and highly significant statistically.8 Rupert Sheldrake reports more on this and many other studies in his intriguing book, The Sense of Being Stared At: and other aspects of the extended mind, and you can find a video of the experiment on my blog at: davidmichie.com/do-animals-use-telepathy-to-communicate-intriguing-video-evidence/.
ALTRUISM AND COMPASSION: DEFINING QUALITIES OF A SPIRITUAL LIFE
Some animals can communicate with other than their own species. The handful of primates and parrots who can recognise and respond appropriately to English words probably represents a handful more than the humans who can recognise and vocalise appropriately in West Lowland gorilla or African grey parrot.
Beyond this, telepathy is a recurring if not routine element in animal communication for which there is no human counterpart. While many of us may have experienced telepathic messages, or at least know others who have, it is not an ongoing part of our repertoire. We communicate verbally and non-verbally, but if we ever had the ability to communicate in more subtle ways, it seems to have become obscured beneath the waves of thought and agitation in our minds.
It is my own view that intuition and telepathy are subtle, natural phenomena, but that the minds of most people have become so noisy, for so many generations, that as a species we have largely forgotten this capability.
If we are willing to be open, we discover that not only language but also empathy and compassion are demonstrated by a wide range of creatures. Far from animals lacking the kinds of qualities we might identify as necessary for a spiritual life, what we are discovering is that it is we, humans, who have been lacking. Despite sharing our planet for so long with so many other sentient beings, it is only in the last twenty or so years that we have made any properly considered attempts to understand how they communicate, think and feel.
In the last chapter we looked at several examples of dogs and cats who have shown very high levels of awareness, understanding, compassion, planning and intelligence—like the dog who smashed a window to alert passers-by to his sick owner; the golden retriever who woke his people to warn them about a fire; the Russian blue who arrived from nowhere to comfort her owner in the most extraordinary way. These are only a few of the very many examples people have shared with me. Many more are documented in books such as Jennifer Skiff ’s delightful The Divinity of Dogs. Recently I was told a story from Tasmania involving a dog who lived with Mum, Dad and the kids in a regular household. Every morning the father would leave home and walk down to the harbour to catch a ferry into work. One morning, about twenty minutes after he’d left for the day, the dog suddenly became very distressed, barking and scratching frantically at the back door. The mother let him out, but that wasn’t enough—the dog ran to the gate and barked urgently for her to follow. So unusual was the dog’s behaviour, and so compelling, that she followed it to the gate and outside, into the street, taking the same route as her husband did every morning. Shortly before reaching the ferry terminal, they discovered her husband lying on the ground. He had just suffered a massive heart attack. The wife was able to summon help quickly and the man’s life was saved. How might one describe the behaviour of the dog, if not that of effective and compassionate action based on powerful extra-sensory perception?
Such attributes are by no means limited to dogs and cats. Readers have shared many other wonderful stories with me. Marjolijne de Groot, from Belgium, told me about her horse, Vasco:
When my father passed away, for days long I felt numb, in a sort of shell. Somebody told me I had to go and ride, that it would do me good. Now my horse is this typical ‘seeing ghosts’ when we ride in the forest, so you always have to be very alert because anything will make him jump around. But not that week! I only noticed it afterwards. I saddled him, went into the forest every day, he was walking me, not the other way around. He was as nice and calm as never before. No jumping around, no fear of leaves, reflections in the water … he was just simply superb and caring. When I started to feel better and came out of that mourning, he returned to his old self. That is when I noticed what he had done for me for a week: he had been taking care of me, he felt I was not ok and he decided that he had to protect me.
Another tale of compassion involves Lulu, the pot-bellied pig, who saved the life of her owner, Jo Anne Altsman, when Jo Anne suffered a heart attack while on holiday in Pennsylvania. Seeing her owner unconscious and in desperate need of help, Lulu managed to get out of the house and through the gate, and ran into the street where she lay down in the middle of the road. She was ignored by several vehicles before a man finally got out of his car to check she wasn’t hurt. Lulu led the man back to the house and her unconscious owner. The man dialled 911 to summon help and Jo Anne lived to tell the tale.9
One quality, only recently investigated by researchers, but which some animals have been shown to possess, is a sense of fairness. Frans de Waal, who has spent much of his career studying primates, and has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, explains: ‘A few years ago, we demonstrated that primates will happily perform a task for cucumber slices until they see others getting grapes, which taste so much better. The cucumber eaters become agitated, throw down their veggies, and go on strike. A perfectly fine food has become unpalatable as a result of seeing a companion get something better.’10
The same experiment has been repeated with other species, including dogs, who will similarly ‘go on strike’ if another dog is rewarded for a trick it was performing without expectation of reward. Fairness and equivalency are among the cognitive capabilities thought to be well beyond the scope of beings without the language to achieve intellectual development. New studies prove otherwise.
While many pet lovers have experienced the empathy and compassion shown by their furry and feathery friends, even outside the context of such relationships these qualities can be repeatedly observed.
Jane Goodall, renowned primatologist and ethologist, notes how even though chimpanzees and bonobos can’t swim, they have made ‘heroic efforts’ to save companions from drowning. An eight-year-old American boy who fell into the ape pit at Brookfield Zoo, and was knocked unconscious, was gently lifted by Binti Jua, a female gorilla, who took him to the door of her enclosure and handed him over to her keepers.11
Not so long ago, a video was doing the rounds on social media, showing a monkey in India rescuing another monkey who had fallen unconscious onto the rails at a train station, after being electrocuted. While crowds of commuters stood on the platforms recording the whole thing on their mobile phones, the monkey dragged his mate off the rails, tried to shake him awake, and dunked him in a water channel, not stopping in his efforts until the other monkey came back to consciousness.12
The idea that empathy is the preserve of primates has been overturned by research at the University of Chicago, where neuroscientist Peggy Mason showed that rats would work to free other rats who were trapped in a container, even when there was no reward. Says Mason: ‘Helping is our evolutionary inheritance. Our study suggests that we don’t have to cognitively decide to help an individual in distress; rather, we just have to let our animal selves express themselves.’13
What a refreshingly bold assertion from a researcher—that altruism, far from being a cherished virtue exclusive to humans, is actually a virtue shared by all sentient beings!
Even fish should form a part of our circle of compassion. Recent research by Dr Caitlin Newport of the University of Oxford shows that fish are able to recognise human faces.14 The cognitive complexity of fish comes as a surprise to many people—not only do fish think and feel, they also cooperate, can choose to reconcile, and demonstrate other unexpected mental capabilities.15 Dr Victoria Braithwaite, renowned fish biologist, wrote a book Do Fish Feel Pain?, in which she concluded: ‘I have argued that there is as much evidence that fish feel pain and suffer as there is for birds and mammals—and more than there is for human neonates and preterm babies.’16
THE CAMBRIDGE DECLARATION
In recent years, the work of pioneering animal cognitive scientists and others has done much to open our minds to animal sentience. A new generation of scientists, unfettered by the dogma of behaviourism, is able to recognise the absurdity of applying contrived human yardsticks, and is more eager to study animals on their own terms.
The implications of quantum science have also begun to impact on our thinking about consciousness and communication. There is a growing recognition that not only is matter not the only thing that exists, but there is hardly any of it! Things aren’t as solid as was once believed. Matter may also be expressed as energy—and that notion opens up a whole new dimension of possibilities that may help explain what, until recently, has been inexplicable: the illusion of subject and object; the impact of the observer on the observed; and the phenomenon of non-locality. These concepts blow open the narrow assumptions of materialism and suggest the much more exciting possibilities of energetic fields in which concepts like telepathy, far from seeming unscientific, are an assumed fact. In the words of Albert Einstein:
A human being … experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.17
Alternatively, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama puts it: ‘True happiness comes not from a limited concern for one’s own wellbeing, or that of those one feels close to, but from developing love and compassion for all sentient beings.’18
One of the most encouraging developments for an official recognition of animal sentience came about in July 2012 with the proclamation of The Cambridge Declaration. Some of the world’s most eminent scientists, with Stephen Hawking as guest of honour, affirmed that humans are not the only beings to experience consciousness. The key part of the declaration reads as follows:
We declare the following: ‘The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.’19
It may have taken a long time to get there, but Western scientists and Eastern masters of consciousness are now making their way to the same page: all animals, human and non-human, are conscious. We all possess minds. Acceptance of this fact provides the basis for the main subject of this book: how best to apply the consciousness possessed by our pets, as well as ourselves, for the most mutually beneficial outcome?
CLOSE TO NATURE: HUMAN SOCIETIES WHERE TELEPATHY IS COMMONPLACE
Could it be the case that, instead of telepathy being some kind of weird, paranormal phenomenon accepted only by the gullible, it is, rather, a quite natural phenomenon which is no longer accessible to us because our minds are simply too damned busy?
When we look at pre-literate human societies, we discover the same co-existence of telepathic communication with quieter minds that seems to abide in animals. In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post, the Afrikaans philosopher, psychologist and a colleague of Jung’s, tells the story of how, in 1955, he was commissioned by the BBC to make a documentary about living with the Bushmen, or San people, as they are now known. Accompanying a group on a hunt, during which they killed an eland—a large antelope—he asked a Bushman called Dabe how he thought his people would react to the successful kill. Dabe told him that his people already knew. Uncertain how to take this, Van der Post asked him what he meant. Dabe, who had once accompanied a white man into the city and seen a telegraph wire being operated, tapped his chest and said, ‘We bushmen have a wire here that brings us news.’ Sure enough, as they approached camp, they could hear the gathered villagers singing ‘The Eland Song’.20
A Professor of Anthropology and Anglican clergyman, Adolphus Elkin, spent a great deal of time meticulously observing Aboriginal people in the remote Kimberley ranges of Western Australia, before many of them had had much contact with the outside world. He collected a large number of reports on psychic phenomena, including telepathy over very long distances, healing, seeing spirits and out of body experiences. Elkin attributed these qualities to the quiet and solitude of the bush, openness to experience and a sense of timelessness.21
To find evidence that a quieter and more mindful life, living close to nature, gives rise to psychic phenomena, we don’t necessarily need to go back in time. I was talking to a friend about this subject, and he told me about something he experienced last year when pony trekking in Mongolia. Part of a group of sixteen, including several rugged Europeans, they were discussing how it was time to find a place to settle late one afternoon, when one of the Mongolians remembered a farm he’d visited in the past where they might find some shelter. The group headed in that direction, eventually coming to a few wooden buildings in the middle of nowhere.
My friend joined the leader of the trek who walked towards the buildings to ask the farmer’s permission to stay. What he found, after an elderly woman showed them into the modest family dwelling, astonished him: there was an abundance of freshly made dumplings on the table and a large pot of stew on the fire. Not only were the trekkers welcome to stay the night, the woman had prepared them dinner.
How had she known?
The woman smiled with a shrug when asked the question. On waking up that morning, she said, she had ‘seen’ a group of sixteen people coming over the mountain that afternoon, including several ‘big foreign men’. So she had made them a meal.
No need for emails, Wi-Fi or Airbnb!