IT WAS A HOT, mid-August day at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. As they do each day, visitors by the thousands, young and old, passed through the turnstiles for a close-up look at wild animals, many of them rare and most from faraway corners of the earth. For many visitors, this was the closest they’d come to seeing these creatures, outside of Animal Planet. And on this summer day in 1996, many visitors would leave with a story to tell.
Like even the best-managed zoos, Brookfield cannot possibly re-create the fullness of an animal’s life in the wild. Today’s curators may pay more attention to the behavioral and psychological needs of the animals than in other times, but the settings are still nothing like their native habitats, where the lives of countless creatures are all bound up together. In captivity, the animals are normally housed separately by species—the hippos here, the polar bears there, and the jaguars somewhere else. Even if the zoo architects plant some familiar vegetation, each animal’s quarters bear little resemblance to plains, forests, or wetlands that the creature would know in the wild.
With the zookeepers providing food and water, the animals have little need of their foraging, hunting, or evasive abilities. There’s not a lot of problem solving going on for the animals—just eating, a lot of lying around, and occasionally some playing. On rare occasions, we’ll see something different and exciting—a lion or tiger makes a ten-foot leap within the enclosure; baboons chase, play, and climb; or the hippos spar. Usually, though, patrons get just a hint of the full range of behaviors these creatures normally display in the wild. What the visitor does take away, even in this manufactured setting, is an appreciation of the physical majesty and beauty of the animals, and that’s what keeps the crowds coming back.
On this day, too, it all began with a flash of action. A woman and her three-year-old son had come to the zoo for all of the obvious reasons. But the mother’s plan went awry when her son suddenly scampered ahead and out of view. She made a mad dash to find him, but it was too late. Somehow the boy had climbed over the railing of the gorilla exhibit and tumbled to the bottom of the pit—a fall of eighteen feet. According to visitors who saw it, he landed with a thud, striking his head.
Witnesses gasped, not only at the boy’s fall but at where he had landed. A crowd soon gathered, with those nearest the railing peering down to see the motionless child, facedown and splayed out. Some of the spectators must have felt an urge to climb over the fence and save the little boy. But for anyone who tried, getting into the pit would be the least of the dangers. Once down there, they would be confronting seven adult lowland gorillas, who had the run of the exhibit. They are the biggest and strongest of the world’s great apes and many times more powerful than a grown man. (The largest males of the species exceed four hundred pounds.) If the long fall hadn’t killed the boy, then surely the gorillas would do it themselves.
It didn’t take long for the gorillas to notice. They moved in on the boy, a little startled themselves and clearly curious. As onlookers screamed, zoo staff ran to the scene and emergency personnel were on the way.
A mother gorilla, Binti Jua, with a baby on her back, was the first to reach the boy. She seemed to have a purpose in mind. As the males came close, she stopped them with a straight-arm gesture that clearly translated to “Back off!” Then, to the astonishment of everyone watching, she gently picked up the child and cradled him.
With her own baby still clinging to her, Binti Jua carried the boy over to the sliding door that zookeepers use to access the exhibit. She set him down right beside it and stepped away, so that keepers could get to him. They snatched him out and rescuers immediately began working on him before the boy was rushed to the nearest emergency room.
The boy would survive and recover, and images of the drama would be broadcast all over the world. What the footage showed was an understanding, caring animal coming to the aid of a vulnerable child. At that moment, we glimpsed a side of our fellow creatures that we often overlook and are sometimes told is not there at all.
Thinking and Feeling: Shared Capacities
IN DECEMBER 2005, IN the waters off the Farallon Islands, near San Francisco, boaters spotted a female humpback whale so entangled in the ropes of crab traps that she was unable to free herself. They radioed authorities, and a team of divers quickly answered the call. She was at the surface and thus able to breathe, but she wouldn’t last long without assistance.
A century ago, when men in boats set their sights on a whale, they typically had harpoons in hand. These divers also carried sharp weapons, but for a different purpose. Their large, heavy knives were meant to cut through rope, not flesh. To do so, however, they’d have to bump right up against a frightened and frustrated fifty-ton animal, and there was no telling how she would react. With the rope also caught in the whale’s mouth, the rescuers had to get eye to eye with her to accomplish their mission. As they cut the rope piece by piece, she remained calm and quiet, not thrashing her tail or using her mass to harm the divers or even to signal that she feared them. She seemed to know they were there to help, the divers said, and she put her trust in them.
“When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me,” said one of the divers. Once she had been set free, she did not swim away, but went up to the divers, one by one, and nuzzled them.
In West Africa, there was an animal rescue of a different and less dramatic kind. German field researchers studying forest chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast have discovered that unrelated adult chimpanzees, both males and females, adopt and provide care for orphaned chimps. One male chimp they observed shared his nest with the baby every night, carried him on his back for long travels, and shared Coula nuts he expertly opened. In all, the researchers witnessed eighteen adoptions of orphaned chimps. With no benefit to themselves or their group, and indeed despite the sacrifice required to help the needy juveniles, these adoptions have every appearance of charity.
Had such observations of chimp adoptions been recorded fifty years earlier, they would very likely have stirred controversy and perhaps not even been published. The authors would have been accused of attaching human attributes to chimps. Adoptions of the orphans might have been explained away as an evolutionary strategy of some kind, rather than an act of kindness or sympathy. The scientists would have been accused of straying from their lane and ascribing consciousness to animals—and the whole study dismissed as another case of “anthropomorphism.”
Indeed, just such charges were made in 1960, when Jane Good all first began sharing her findings about chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Her fellow scientists quickly brushed off her findings about the lives and emotions of chimps as a woman’s sentimentality. Goodall wasn’t even formally trained, they noted. What could she possibly know about primates?
In her dispatches from the field, which would later gain an enormous popular following in National Geographic magazine and on television, Jane Goodall named the chimpanzees and treated them as individuals. There was David Greybeard, a striking adult male who first accepted Goodall into the group, and his friend Goliath, the daring alpha male. She produced rich accounts of the chimps’ activities and displays of intelligence and emotion, describing their individual personalities. Over time, Goodall was even accepted as if a member of the troop, living among them for twenty-two months. To the strict mid-twentieth-century behaviorists, observations of this kind were heresy. Humans, as dogma held, were the only animals capable of deliberate action, conscious thought, and emotion. No animal other than man was to be considered a who, with personality and awareness, but merely an it to be studied much as one might observe a food-gathering, reproductive machine.
Louis Leakey, the legendary Kenyan paleontologist, had seen too much of animals in the wild to accept such orthodox thinking. It was Leakey who urged Goodall to go into the field and document chimpanzee society, just as he did in later years with Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas in their study of the other great apes. Equipped only with a pen and paper, the twenty-six-year-old Goodall began recording the hidden lives of chimps: their games, family squabbles, power struggles, interpersonal violence, and affection.
One day she watched as David Greybeard used a stick to catch food from a termite mound, and soon after she noticed Goliath stripping leaves off a stalk to fashion it into tool for catching termites. The implication was tremendous: toolmaking, long considered a defining attribute of humans, was shared by other animals. When Goodall shared her observation with Leakey, he replied, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as human.”
Today Goodall’s discovery seems less startling, and Leakey’s conclusions overstated. We now have learned that all sorts of animals—from New Caledonian crows to bottlenose dolphins—can make and use rudimentary tools. And we also know that animals can do much more—that dogs can feel empathy, elephants can suffer emotional trauma, and birds can reason and solve problems.
But at the time, Goodall’s methods, vocabulary, and findings were unheard of. Decades of academic papers, layered over centuries of philosophical dogma, had sealed our species off from all others, somehow completely separate from them. We occupied our own special citadel, claiming tool use, cognition, any capacity for language, and all the elements of reason as ours alone.
It would take a long time, starting with Goodall’s reports, for the reality that animals think and feel to sink in. So many people didn’t see it, or simply denied what they saw. All along though, it was right there—playing out in the behavior of our own dogs and cats, in elephant and chimpanzee societies, and in the lives of so many other creatures. In their humble ways, animals do think and feel—and this should awaken our empathy and command our respect.
DENYING OR DIMINISHING THE intelligence of others has always been a strategy to justify oppression, cruelty, or indifference, or at the very least to divert moral responsibility. We’ve seen it used for centuries to downgrade the moral worth of animals, but it’s also been invoked to justify plenty of human wrongs—whether perpetuating slavery, denying rights to women or minorities, or locking away the mentally ill.
In The Mismeasure of Man, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould looked back at the so-called science of “biological determinists,” who argued, perhaps in part unconsciously, that certain races, notably blacks, had a lower intelligence quotient than whites. Through craniometry, or the measuring of the size of the brain, and certain psychological testing methods, proponents argued that there was a biological basis for the supposed inferiority of blacks. With cool reason, step by step, Gould stripped away the pretense of objective science and demonstrated that their data were cooked and their conclusions preordained. His work stands as a reminder that scientists sometimes labor under prejudices of their own. They may simply shore up the reigning falsehoods of the day, instead of knocking them down as we expect good science to do.
Of course, Gould had exposed a form of pseudoscience that was employed to invent racial differences. It’s not quite so easy to argue that similar methods have been used to deny the intelligence of nonhuman animals, since there are so many actual differences of brain size and intelligence between humans and other species. That humans possess special cognitive abilities, powers of thought and creativity that long ago set us apart, is among the most obvious facts in nature.
The question is not whether animals possess a level of intelligence equal to ours, but instead whether they possess some meaningful level of intelligence and awareness. Do they think and feel and suffer in ways that command our moral attention? Uniquely in the world, human beings are the creature of conscience, and that very capacity allows us to perceive the worth of other beings and to care about how they’re treated. Perhaps alone among animals, we know what is right and fair, and it falls to us to give animals their due. The nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s-rights advocate Sojourner Truth, in speaking up for dispossessed people of her time, said it well: “If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yourn holds a quart, wouldn’t ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?”
René Descartes, a stern man in his measuring of cups and pints, had confidently declared that animals were “mere automatons”—objects incapable of feeling conscious sensations, and hence incapable of suffering. Language, Descartes argued, is essential to thought, and since animals couldn’t speak, therefore they couldn’t think. Emboldened by this belief, vivisectionists in the succeeding decades cut open live dogs without anesthetic to provide anatomical lessons, and they dismissed the dogs’ cries as mere stimulus response. The absence of reason, or even sentience, meant that the dogs’ tormentors had no moral obligations to other creatures and could do with them as they wished—which they did, to the point of staging vivisections in public for the enjoyment of crowds.
Whatever the theories used to justify such practices, there have always been those who knew better. Voltaire, writing in the eighteenth century, went to the heart of the matter by challenging the assumption that animals don’t feel: “Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel?” He reasoned that since animals share anatomies strikingly similar to our own, it was highly likely that they feel pain like we do too. In time, these biological similarities would only become more evident, and they seemed undeniable to the man who would become the most famous scientist of the age.
In 1859, in On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called into question much more than man’s unique place in Creation. He argued that the differences between humans and animals were differences of degree, and that animals had complex emotional lives. Summarizing his studies of animals in the wild, he wrote that mammals “experience (to greater or lesser degrees) anxiety, grief, dejection, despair, joy, love, ‘tender feelings,’ devotion, ill-temper, sulkiness, determination, hatred, anger, disdain, contempt, disgust, guilt, pride, helplessness, patience, surprise, astonishment, fear, horror, shame, shyness, and modesty.”
In 1872, Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which documented how people and animals share similar facial expressions and body language to express the same state of mind. He observed how monkeys laugh and dance when happy and dogs stand taller when angry, much as people do. He pointed out that animal emotions make evolutionary sense too; without fear, a gazelle wouldn’t know when to run, and without aggression, a dog wouldn’t feel the same urgency in defending his territory. It was equally obvious that animals took pleasure in the basics of life such as eating and mating.
Still, the denials of intelligence and rationality by Descartes (and earlier but similar denials going back to Aristotle) shaped ages of thinking on the subject. Although the human-animal bond predates all known philosophy, the dominant view among scientists in the fields of psychology and animal behavior was that animals operate by instinct, somehow mimicking consciousness or intelligence without truly possessing them.
By the middle of the twentieth century, most scientists rejected the Cartesian notion that animals could not feel pain, but they still dismissed the idea of animal cognition. They embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution, but rejected or ignored altogether his findings on animal intelligence and emotions. The leading voices of the new school of behaviorism, including American psychologist John B. Watson, decreed that scientists should reserve comment for the external behavior of animals and avoid assumptions as to internal states such as thought and feeling—if animals had any feelings at all. This was consistent with what animal behaviorist Lloyd Morgan called his law of parsimony: if a behavior can be attributed to a lower cause (that is, a direct stimulatory response), it should not be attributed to a higher one, and least of all to intelligence. In 1913, Watson wrote,
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.
The most prominent behaviorist of the era, B. F. Skinner, did not discount the possibility that animals can reason, but theorized that it would be too difficult to know. We should just observe behavior, he argued, and describe it in a scientific manner free of “anthropomorphism.”
In our own day, the author Jeffrey Masson sees the imprint of the Skinnerian model of behaviorism in the work of scientists throughout the twentieth century. Masson wrote:
From the belief that anthropomorphism is a desperate error, a sin or a disease, flow further research taboos, including rules that dictate use of language. A monkey cannot be angry; it exhibits aggression. A crane does not feel affection; it displays courtship or parental behavior. A cheetah is not frightened by a lion; it shows flight behavior.
These are subtle descriptive distinctions, but loaded with implications for the way we view animals. The animals did not think, but simply demonstrated certain programmed behaviors. They operated by instinct, devoid of emotion or consciousness.
The scientists’ belief in evolution did not solve this faulty perception. They had little difficulty adapting evolutionary theory to fit their worldview, placing animals in some sort of behaviorist straitjacket. In their view, natural selection programmed animals to gather food, reproduce, promote the survival of their offspring, and, in the end, to pass on their genes. Animals were locked in an unyielding and competitive struggle for survival. All of their energy was devoted to achieving reproductive success, and all of their behavior could be understood according to this single, blind, all-explaining force.
In this view, animals in the wild, or in your own house, never play just for the fun of it; if play occurs, it’s always about honing predatory skills or other training for survival. Animals never feel concern or alarm for us or for another creature; any act of assistance to humans or to other animals must have had a survival benefit for the social group or the herd. And reproduction is, well, about reproduction only; whether the animals exhibit monogamy, polygamy, or polygyny, it is, in a word, workmanlike—mechanical copulation to make sure the genes were passed on to succeeding generations.
Descartes viewed animals as machines, and though behaviorists rejected his formulations, they held the view that animals were machines of a different sort—biological machines, shaped by natural selection, and operating through instinct alone.
We know as human beings that there is more to life than reproduction. That instinct to reproduce is certainly a strong biological impulse. But not all of our behavior is a run-up to sexual reproduction or the raising of offspring. We like to do all kinds of things that have no particular reproductive purpose or advantage, like playing, laughing, or just lying around. There may be some evolutionary explanation for such behaviors, or maybe it’s just that we like to do these things. They’re enjoyable, and no grand scientific theories are needed to explain why.
And that’s one of the flaws in the reductionist thinking of the behaviorists, whether it’s applied to human action or to all the things that animals do. Animals also like to have fun and enjoy life. When a dog sticks his head out of the car window, he’s having a great time. When cats are swatting at each other, they are playful. And as baby calves scamper and chase each other, it is part of the fun in their lives. Animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe, who has challenged the views of his more conventional peers, says that too many scientists treat nature like a “constant, joyless struggle,” bereft of happiness, or even an idle moment.
There are theories and even entire books that try to explain all of canine behavior as an elaborate evolutionary strategy to get food and shelter from us, as if dogs were just clever parasites on the earth’s dominant species. What we see as love and loyalty in dogs, the behaviorists insist is all just an evolutionary game playing out in our homes—and boy, have they put one over on us.
Darwin’s observations about animal emotions and thought got the science of animal behavior off to a great start. But because many of the same animal scientists who accepted his doctrine of evolution also ignored his views on animal minds, it would fall to later researchers to reawaken the field of study. In the 1950s, the famed zoologist Konrad Lorenz provided a counterweight to the dominant school of behaviorism, arguing that animals were conscious and emotional. But it took the growth of the new field of cognitive ethology in the 1970s to begin to dismantle in a more comprehensive way the falsehoods left by Skinner and others.
In 1976, Harvard zoologist Donald Griffin provided a jolt to the discipline with The Question of Animal Awareness, in which he argued that animals had conscious minds much like humans. Griffin was an innovative scientist; as an undergraduate in the 1930s, he had strung guitar strings across his dorm room and noticed that bats still navigated effortlessly through them in the dark—a finding that led to the discovery of echolocation.
For most of his career Griffin had belonged to the orthodox behaviorist school, and he rightly earned the respect of his peers as a rigorous scientist. But starting in the 1970s, he pioneered new techniques to study animals in their natural habitats, demonstrating that animals do not operate merely by instinct. “Nature,” Griffin wrote, “might find it more efficient to endow life-forms with a bit of awareness rather than attempting to hardwire every animal for every conceivable eventuality.” Griffin argued that intelligence itself began as an adaptive characteristic. Animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff told me that when Griffin first began discussing animal intelligence at conferences, the idea was so rattling that people thought he had lost his mind.
Thanks in large part to Griffin, the discipline has seen great change for the better in the last three decades. Gone are the days when talking about the emotional lives of animals will get you laughed out of an academic conference. Cognitive ethology is now a reputable and growing field, and every year more studies are published on animal intelligence and emotions. Marc Bekoff notes that in 2000, when he sought essays from respected scientists on animal emotions, more than fifty signed up. The resulting book was called The Smile of a Dolphin, with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, and it signaled a long-awaited shift away from the mechanistic and miserly views of the behaviorists.
ON THE NIGHT OF September 6, 2007, Alex, a thirty-one-year-old African grey parrot, wished his trainer, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, good-night as usual.
“You be good, I love you,” said Alex.
“I love you too,” Dr. Pepperberg replied.
“You’ll be in tomorrow?”
“Yes, I’ll be in tomorrow.”
The next morning, Dr. Pepperberg arrived to find Alex dead. In the ensuing weeks, Alex would receive more public attention than perhaps any bird in history. Television shows from Good Morning America to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno ran segments on his death, while the New York Times published three articles on his life and feats of intelligence. Thousands of people from around the world wrote heartfelt letters to tell Dr. Pepperberg how Alex had opened their eyes to the incredible minds of animals. The Economist, which usually devotes its weekly obituary to statesmen and celebrities, devoted it instead to Alex, noting, “by the end, Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not reached his full potential.”
When Dr. Pepperberg bought Alex at random at a pet store in 1977, there was nothing to suggest he would bring about immense change in animal science. To no avail, researchers had been trying to teach chimpanzees to talk, and few thought that parrots, with their walnut-sized brains, would do any better. (It was only later that researchers turned to teaching chimps sign language, with far more success.)
But evolutionary explanations for behavior were taking a new turn. British scientist Nicholas Humphrey, for example, argued that intelligence evolves in response to the social environment rather than the natural one. According to Humphrey, the reason chimps are so smart is that they live in complex societies, in which they must consistently reason, learn, and negotiate to survive. That got Dr. Pepperberg thinking. Since parrots also live in complex societies in the wild (and, like chimps, have long enough life spans to make investing time in learning worthwhile), perhaps they had also evolved advanced intelligence. And as parrots have vocal cords more suited to talking than chimps do, perhaps Alex really could be taught human language.
Alex’s education began slowly. Dr. Pepperberg and her colleagues at the University of Arizona (and later Harvard, MIT, and Brandeis) would hold objects in front of Alex and discuss them in detail. Conventional wisdom held that parrots could simply repeat words—“parroting”—but Alex soon began to express thoughts that seemed awfully similar to human ones. He’d ask to be taken to his play area, and then complain when he was taken to the wrong place. He understood and could discuss concepts like “bigger,” “smaller,” “same,” and “different.” By the end of this life, he knew fifty objects by name, and he could describe the colors and shapes of objects he’d never seen before. He even knew when and how to apologize when he antagonized Dr. Pepperberg. Before he died, Alex had been learning about optical illusions—which he perceived with an incredible likeness to the way humans see them.
As Dr. Pepperberg would later write, “Scientifically speaking, the 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 behavioral scientists believed—or, more importantly, were even prepared to concede might be possible.”
Nor are parrots the only birds to show such amazing abilities. In 2003, Cambridge University researchers camped out for months in the jungles of New Caledonia to study crows. By attaching miniature video cameras to the crows’ wings (the cameras fall off when the birds molt, leaving them unharmed), they observed the birds making advanced use of tools. Some used sticks to burrow into rotten trees for larvae, while others adapted dry grass to fish for ants. One intrepid crow even hauled a large stick hundreds of yards because it made such a useful tool. Researchers have since found that even crows raised by people, without the benefit of learning by experience, are capable of working out how to make and adapt tools.
More recently, scrub jays have gone even further toward upending our assumptions about avian intelligence. Scrub jays not only have episodic memories of the past that mimic our own, but also plan for the future—a trait that even infant humans lack. The researchers tested the jays’ memories by having them hide perishable wax worms and nonperishable peanuts. If they could access their cache after just a couple of days, they chose the wax worms, but if they knew they wouldn’t get back to the cache for weeks, they’d go for the peanuts—knowing the wax worms would have decayed in the interval.
To test their “future-planning” capacity, the researchers rotated the birds between different locations and gave them the opportunity to hide food in each one. They found that the birds not only stored food in locations where they anticipated they would be hungry the next morning, but also stored preferred foods where they anticipated only nonpreferred foods would be available. In other words, the birds were stocking up on their favorite breakfast foods, much as we might fill up the fridge before a busy weekend.
Although the countless mental feats of dogs are still routinely dismissed by behaviorists as mere “anecdotal” evidence, they, too, have often surprised researchers in formal tests. Just how smart are dogs? Rico, a border collie, astounded scientists in 2004 by demonstrating the ability not only to recognize the meaning of more than two hundred words, but also to infer the names of items she hadn’t seen previously. In a test described in Science, researchers placed objects in another room and then had Rico retrieve them by name. When asked to retrieve an object with a foreign name, Rico used what the researchers called “simple logic” to infer it must be the one object whose name she didn’t know, and she retrieved that one.
Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, doesn’t think these results are exceptional. He administers language and cognition tests devised for human infants to dogs and says that the most intelligent breeds square up well. Poodles, retrievers, Labradors, and shepherds can learn around 250 words, signs, and signals, according to Coren, and some even “get the idea of being a dog”—they are able to differentiate photos with dogs in them from photos without dogs.
As for the great apes, recent studies have turned up evidence of mental acuity that would impress even Jane Goodall. At Kyoto University, Ayuma, a five-year-old chimp, gave humans a humbling lesson in memory recall. He was placed in front of a computer screen and a sequence of numbers from one to nine flashed in front of him for a second before being replaced by white squares. He was able to remember the sequence almost perfectly, while humans could barely remember four or five numbers.
They even put Ayuma up against British memory champion Ben Pridmore—who can remember the order of a shuffled deck of cards in thirty seconds—and the chimp performed three times better. As Jonathan Balcombe relates, “When the numbers flashed for just a fifth of a second, Ayuma correctly recalled all nine digits 90 percent of the time, compared to 33 percent for Pridmore.” Balcombe concludes that chimps probably have a “botanist’s memory” for up to two hundred plant species, and that may have aided in their development of this amazingly rapid recall. In a head-to-head matchup on memory recall, the chimp won.
With language experiments, of course, great apes and parrots are no match for us. But what they can do is pretty impressive. The lowland gorilla Koko (whose niece, Binti Jua, was the one who rescued the fallen three-year-old boy at the zoo) has famously mastered more than a thousand signs in American Sign Language. Here we have a case of a gorilla learning human language—so how good are we at learning gorilla language? We probably wouldn’t do all that well. Balcombe frames the matter another way:
But how would a lowland gorilla do if she were tested on things that are important to her, such as the ability to recognize native plants and to distinguish edible from inedible ones? Or to predict weather changes in the lush African jungles where lowland gorillas live? Or to gauge the moods of other gorillas based on facial expressions, body postures, or their scent? By such measures, she would be a genius among humans. Gorillas’ evolutionary history and survival depend on these mental skills. Gorillas are intelligent at being gorillas. Similarly, a rat is probably no less intelligent than a rhino, but more to the point, a rat is intelligent at being a rat, as is a rhino at being a rhino.
One animal commonly praised for its intelligence is the dolphin, but even dolphins keep surprising us with all that they can do. They have brains remarkably similar to the basic architecture of our own, with folds in the neocortex that are thought to enable many of our most impressive mental feats. Dolphins off Western Australia, confronted with jagged coral reefs and spiny fish, have learned to hold sponges over their mouths as they trawl the ocean floor. And in one test, a captive dolphin named Akeakamai was able to grasp and act upon commands given in a form of sign language. To do so required not just receiving elementary commands like “fetch,” but to understand a series of thoughts that she was able to interpret and act upon. In a separate study some years ago, dolphins’ keepers asked them, by hand signals, to devise a trick of their own. Beneath the water, they communicated among themselves and then performed a synchronized trick—having never done it together before.
The tricks of trained dolphins have even found their way into the wild. In captivity, bottlenose dolphins will bide their time by creating underwater rings and helices of air to swim through, and then teach the trick to other dolphins. In the wild, they will surf in waves and play fight with other dolphins. In 2009, Australian wildlife rehabilitators taught a rescued dolphin to tail walk during a three-week recovery period, and then released the animal to the wild. Weeks later, they were astounded to see other dolphins performing the trick. The rescued dolphin had passed along the lesson, and before you knew it a new craze had swept the entire pod.
Lifesaving Dolphins and Dogs, Altruistic Elephants, and Other Remarkable Animals
IF ANYTHING HUMBLES US in what we learn about dolphins and other creatures, it’s not just their intelligence but how they’ve been known to use it. Stories abound of dolphins rescuing sailors and swimmers, even to the point of risking their own safety, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any adaptive advantage in that behavior. In 2004, for instance, four lifeguards in New Zealand found themselves suddenly encircled by a pod of dolphins, which seemed at first to spell big trouble. As it turned out, the real lifeguards that day had fins and could swim at thirty knots:
Lifeguard Rob Howes said he and three female lifeguards were on a training swim about 100 metres off Ocean Beach near Whangarei on the North Island.
About halfway through the swim, a pod of dolphins “came steaming at us” and started circling, startling the swimmers, he said.
Howes said he was unnerved by the speed of the approach, thinking perhaps it was a group of aggressive males or dolphins protecting their baby.
The dolphins bunched the four swimmers together by circling about 4–8 centimetres from them, and slapping the water with their tails for about 40 minutes.
Howes said he drifted away from the main group when an opening occurred. One large dolphin became agitated and submerged toward Howes, who turned to see where it would surface.
That, he says, is when he saw a great white shark about two metres away in the beach’s crystal clear waters.
“The form came and travelled in an arc around me. I knew instinctively what it was,” he said.
When the shark started moving toward the women, including his 15-year-old daughter, the dolphins “went into hyperdrive,” said Howes.
“I would suggest they were creating a confusion screen around the girls. It was just a mass of fins, backs and…human heads.”
The shark left as a rescue boat neared, but the dolphins remained close by as the group swam back to shore. At no point did the shark break the surface of the water, remaining near the bottom, he said.
Humans have been hearing stories like this since the days of the ancient mariners, and with the frequency of these rescues in our own day we know it’s not just lore. Off the coast of California in 2007, it was a surfer in trouble, a man named Todd Endris, and the great white had already gotten a piece of him: “The shark—a monster great white that came out of nowhere—had hit him three times, peeling the skin off his back and mauling his right leg to the bone. That’s when a pod of bottlenose dolphins intervened, forming a protective ring around Endris, allowing him to get to shore, where quick first aid provided by a friend saved his life.”
If ever a man needed a miracle, it was Todd Endris. And it came in the form of a group of strangers who happened to be passing through, acting on motives that, if they were human, we would instantly recognize as altruism and incredible courage. Humans who do things like that get the keys to the city, but all the dolphins receive in return, as in all such cases of animal heroics, is more labored theorizing from the skeptics, more attempts to explain it all away as so much preprogrammed behavior.
Anyone watching a service dog on the job, guiding a blind person through the perils of streets and sidewalks, is left with the distinct impression of an awareness, attentiveness, and commitment going beyond anything that training can instill. The animals really care, and they know that a lot depends on their jobs. The singular devotion of service dogs—their special bond with the people who depend on them—is much more than the right mix of positive and negative reinforcement. And it’s not just the professionally trained ones who show such qualities. Dogs rise to the occasion all the time, perhaps especially shelter pets. Most anyone who has rescued a homeless dog will tell you that it’s a favor they don’t forget.
In recent years, the HSUS has run a “Dogs of Valor” contest, recognizing canines whose alertness, loyalty, and bravery saved lives. The 2010 winner was Kenai, a fourteen-year-old Bernese mountain dog mix, from Erie, Colorado. Kenai’s owners, Todd Smarr and his wife, Michelle Sewald, were staying in the basement of a vacation house during a weekend getaway with family and friends, when Kenai awakened them at 4:00 A.M. by whining and barking. When Todd got up to comfort Kenai, another friend sleeping in the basement, Karen Hull, woke up and said she wasn’t feeling well. Minutes later, Michelle collapsed into Todd’s arms, unconscious. Todd rushed upstairs, roused their friends, and soon realized there was a carbon monoxide leak in the house. Saved by Kenai’s warning, the seven adults, two children, and four dogs in the house escaped into the fresh air to breathe another day.
The runner-up in the HSUS contest, Calamity Jane, was still recovering from having her leg amputated from an old gunshot wound and from giving birth to seven puppies when her foster mother, Shar Pauley, took her for a walk on a cold January night in Aledo, Texas. As Shar walked past the neighbors’ house, Calamity Jane suddenly bolted into the neighbors’ front yard, barking furiously, in spite of her somewhat feeble condition. A few moments later, Shar heard a car door slam and then saw a car speed out of the driveway. She quickly returned home, and minutes later the neighbor arrived, telling her to call 911. He said that his family and guests, including two children, had been held at gunpoint for close to an hour during a violent home invasion. But when the intruders heard Calamity Jane, they yelled to one another that there were people outside and fled.
Then there’s Jack, a terrier mix rescued from a trash bin. His best friend was little Maya Pieters, who as a three-year-old had been diagnosed with congenital bilateral perisylvian syndrome (CBPS), an extremely rare neurological condition that mainly affects the oral motor functions. One morning, as Jack slept downstairs in his open crate, he suddenly darted upstairs to Maya’s room where he began clawing and barking at the door. Maya’s parents heard the commotion and realized something was wrong. It turns out Maya was having her first grand mal seizure in her sleep. Her parents scooped her up and rushed to the emergency room. After Maya recovered and the family returned home, Jack dutifully stayed by the little girl’s side, knowing that he had a special ability to help her. Now, each time Maya has an epileptic event at home, Jack seems to sense it in advance. Once, as she suffered a seizure, he stepped in to cushion her with his body.
Like Jack, many dogs have an uncanny ability to detect oncoming seizures—whether it’s by smell or observing behavioral changes is unclear. Hungarian researchers trained a dog to warn a blind and epileptic man with barks and licks minutes before a seizure, allowing the man to call for help. Other dogs have been trained to turn on the lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, to remind their sick owners to take medication, and to aid severely depressed patients under suicide watch.
SUCH SKILLS AMONG DOGS take both smarts and empathy, and it’s seen in their wild cousins as well. When Marc Bekoff first began studying coyotes, he noticed a code of moral behavior among members of the pack. At the time, any capacity for a moral sensibility was considered a strictly human virtue, one of the scientific barriers that conveniently separated us from them. But Bekoff, leaving behind the constraints of a laboratory setting that can warp natural social behaviors, gathered his evidence in Grand Teton National Park near Jackson, Wyoming. There he observed coyote dogs in the wild, discovering complex societies with surprising rules of their own.
Video camera in hand, he found that coyotes and other canids begin their play fights with a “bow,” in which the animal crouches on her forelimbs and often barks or wags her tail vigorously. Seeing this gesture again and again, he established that this was a signal understood by one and all in the pack—saying, in effect, Let’s spar but keep it playful. Coyotes will often repeat the bow during play fights, especially before biting their opponents or doing anything else that could be confused with real fighting. And when they overstep the bounds, for instance by biting an opponent too hard, the coyote will bow to apologize. Coyotes who break the rules of play are duly punished: those who bow and then attack are less likely to be chosen as play partners, and more likely to be shunned.
Bekoff tells other stories of what he calls “wild justice.” In one, a hormone-crazed male elephant had knocked over a female elephant suffering from a leg injury. A third elephant rushed to her aid, touching her trunk to the sore leg as if to soothe the pain. In another case, an elephant matriarch set free a group of captive antelopes, using her trunk to undo the latches on the gate of their enclosure. Scientist Jonathan Balcombe notes that vampire bats even appear to exhibit reciprocal altruism—individuals will share food with ill and nursing bats, helping them out when they really need it.
Does all of this prove that animals possess morality, at least in the very basic sense of being able to care for one another and for us? There is certainly evidence of empathy among some animals, and empathy is often the starting point of moral action. Primatologist Frans de Waal has tested the extent of empathy in capuchin monkeys. He put the monkeys in pairs and gave each one an option: the monkey could choose a token that dispensed treats only to himself, or one that produced treats for both. He found that the monkeys consistently chose to share as long as their partner was familiar, visible, and receiving equal rewards. De Waal concluded that “they seem to care for the welfare of those they know.”
If acts of kindness are one expression of empathy, then grief is another. Researcher Cynthia Moss has documented elephant burials in which elephant families cover their dead relatives in branches and then stand vigil over the body for the night. Bekoff notes that such grief is common in the wild. Animals who lose a mate, family member, or friend may withdraw from their group and seek seclusion. They might try to retrieve the dead animal or stay with the remains for days. Some distraught animals even give up eating and mating—a response utterly at odds with evolutionary self-interest.
In 2009, chimpanzees at a West African sanctuary amazed volunteers by forming a kind of funeral procession to mourn the loss of an elder named Dorothy. As caregivers at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in eastern Cameroon bore Dorothy’s body by wheelbarrow, the normally boisterous chimps rushed to the edge of their wire enclosure and fell silent. They stood there—wrapping arms around each other, some leaning on the shoulders of troupe mates—as Dorothy was prepared for burial and lowered into the ground.
Along with sorrow, animals also can fall into depression just like us. It’s especially common among captive zoo animals, who are given medications to mitigate their condition—usually the very same antidepressants given to people. Rats separated from social contact will often choose morphine-laced foods over regular foods—a preference that ceases when the rats are returned to a more enriching environment, and not in the solitary confinement of a laboratory cage. When they’re together, in fact, and have a chance to play, rats show increased levels of dopamine—biochemical evidence of happiness.
That animals experience emotional trauma when they’re isolated, mistreated, or bereaved should not surprise us. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp notes that most fellow mammals show neural reactions in the brain similar to ours, and that human pain-relief drugs typically have the same effects on them. Mammals are attracted, likewise, to the same environmental rewards as people—food, social contact, and so on. In 2008, researchers at the University of Sussex even found that gorillas’ facial expressions are controlled by the same processes in the left side of the brain as they are in us—suggesting that when a gorilla winks, grimaces, or smirks, he really means it.
The hurts and losses that animals experience are more than skin deep, as in the especially poignant case of elephant calves who have seen their parents killed by poachers. Well into their lives, if not forever, they show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder. Scientists in Uganda were the first to document this after investigating a series of violent attacks by elephants on villagers over the last decade. Traditional wisdom held that elephant attacks were motivated by competition for scarce food, but at the time of the attacks, food supplies had never been so abundant and elephant numbers had never been lower. That led scientists to consider a different explanation: rampant poaching over three decades had wiped out some 90 percent of Uganda’s elephants, leaving just four hundred elephants, many of them orphans.
Scientists wondered whether these orphans, as they grew to adult size, were still acting out the effects of their childhood traumas. And they couldn’t figure out why the elephants were knocking down and stabbing rhinos with their tusks—a bizarre kind of violence almost never seen among these herbivorous animals who often share the same habitat. In South Africa, delinquent elephants were responsible for killing as many as thirty-nine rhinos—10 percent of the population—in Pilanesberg Park. It turns out that the parents and grandparents of these elephants had been culled by sharpshooters in Kruger National Park. The babies were spared, but apparently never forgot what they saw and had grown up without adults to teach them how to behave.
Sure enough, researchers found neurological signs of posttraumatic stress. In particular, orphaned elephants had nightmares and also had trouble forming emotional ties with other elephants—all clearly linked to having seen their mothers and families slain. Some researchers even suggested the possibility that these elephants might now be avenging the terrible things they witnessed. As Joyce Poole, research director at the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, says, “They are certainly intelligent enough and have good enough memories to take revenge.”
Considering all that has befallen elephants, it would be understandable if they held it against us. Yet such cases are so very rare, and the remarkable thing is that so many animals, when they come to know humans a bit, still see the best in us. They seem to feel the bond even when we have fallen short.
The Emotional Lives of Animals
WITH OUR NEW KNOWLEDGE of how animals think and feel come new obligations in how we care for them. Many challenges in animal welfare today are an attempt to apply our understanding in consistent ways, and a good example of the difficulties involves the care of captive wild animals in zoos.
I think of my friend Ron Kagan, who for thirty-five years has worked in the world of zoos. He’s still going strong despite years of resistance from the leadership of his profession. He’s challenged many of the set ways and myths within the field—lobbying for animal-welfare legislation, using the zoo as a sanctuary for many abandoned and confiscated exotics, and starting an animal-welfare teaching center at the zoo.
What really got Ron into trouble, however, was his decision to send the elephants living at the Detroit Zoo to an elephant sanctuary—essentially conceding that even the best-intentioned zoo, with financial resources to hire the best staff and to improve and expand the elephant enclosure, could not match the conditions of a dedicated elephant sanctuary in a warm climate with room to roam.
It was not an impulsive decision for Ron. In fact, it came about through a series of experiences that moved him gradually to the conviction that elephants are awfully difficult to maintain properly in a zoo.
In 1974, he was a new keeper, caring for elephants and rhinos at the Boston Zoo. On his first encounter with an elephant, the animal pinned him against the wall with his head—a message of just who was in charge and of the dangers to zoo staff dealing with enormous and highly intelligent animals. Several years later, that same elephant killed a worker at the facility, and the elephant himself was destroyed.
When Ron was the general curator of the Dallas Zoo a decade later, he helped to rescue a showbiz orangutan, a gorilla from a shopping mall in Washington State, and a rhino from a Florida circus. These experiences only heightened his concerns about the quality of life for certain captive mammals, such as great apes and elephants.
In 1990, while still working at the Dallas facility, Ron went to Kenya and met elephant researcher Joyce Poole at Amboseli National Park. Poole and her colleague Cynthia Moss have studied elephants in the wild for years. Their work has revealed that the animals live in matriarchal family groups, with elders living up to seventy years, and traveling as far as forty miles in a day. Kagan noticed that almost all of the captive elephants he knew about suffered from chronic and extremely painful foot and skin problems. He asked Poole whether the wild elephants at Amboseli had these same problems. “In the most polite way, she told me what a foolish question this was,” Kagan told me. She explained to him that they simply do not get this condition in the wild—it is an affliction that besets only captive elephants.
Just two years later, Kagan was selected for the top zoo job in Detroit, which, with its cold winters, can hardly be considered an ideal environment for a species built for savannahs and tropical forests. Kagan had two elephants in Detroit—Winkie came from a zoo in Sacramento, and Wanda from San Antonio. As the truck carrying Wanda approached the city, Kagan was excited at the thought that he’d have a new showcase animal for his exhibit, despite his growing doubts about keeping elephants in captivity. But his excitement turned to anguish when he heard her screaming and wailing when she arrived. “She didn’t know what was ahead of her,” he told me. “It was heartbreaking.” With everything else he had learned about elephants, he knew too much. “That experience was unnerving, and it contributed to the discussion of whether certain animals should be in captivity at all.”
So in 2003, Kagan and his colleagues decided to give up elephants at Detroit and send these two animals to the Performing Animal Welfare Society sanctuary in central California, where they would have dozens of acres, a mild climate, the company of other elephants, and the daily attention of people who understood them. It took a year and a half to complete the public discussion process, with some members of the city council and the community initially objecting. Eventually, Kagan won over the locals, but he couldn’t persuade the leaders of the other major zoos in America to rethink their own policies. They didn’t like the outcome in Detroit, and they sure didn’t care for the drift of the discussion over this whole matter. To the zoo establishment, this was more evidence that Kagan was trouble, and now he was opening up a larger debate that few were willing to have.
It didn’t help ease their discomfort that the elephants seemed to adapt quite nicely to the sun and wide open spaces of their new digs in California. After years on display, shipped around from one small place to the next, this was a kind of deliverance. They would never again be in the wild, but this was surely the next best thing.
Who takes in a homeless elephant, or any other captive wild creature in need of space and care? To his great credit, Kagan is among the rare zoo administrators who keeps an eye out for captive animals in need—the discards of roadside menageries and exotic pet fanciers who get in over their heads. For that gorilla whom Ron helped rescue in 1995—a thirty-year-old creature born in Africa, purchased by a shopping mall, and forced to live in a concrete-and-steel cage as a curiosity for shoppers—moving to an accredited zoo was a big upgrade. But giving sanctuary to the many thousands of animal castoffs and refugees is largely the work of a rather remarkable network of private charities and volunteer rescuers—smaller versions of Black Beauty Ranch. Name just about any animal or any kind of abuse, and somewhere there are people devoted to bringing shelter and relief. And different though they are, in their focus and their means, they are each called to the same kind and noble work, which in practice usually involves cleaning up after careless, selfish, or malicious people.
It’s not just good work, it’s hard work. And it takes a special kind of person to do it—guys like Matt Smith of the Central Virginia Parrot Sanctuary. It was a beautiful spring day when I stopped by to see Matt in May 2009. When I climbed the steps of a white-fronted colonial house, I knew I had the right place because I could hear the ear-piercing screeches of parrots inside. Before long, Matt, a clean-cut thirty-two-year-old with a winning manner, greeted me. Matt runs one of a handful of sanctuaries devoted to rescuing, rehabilitating, and if possible adopting out, these strikingly intelligent, demanding, and long-lived birds.
Matt’s youth is an asset in his chosen field. It’s a young man’s job to race around to care for dozens of parrots, build the enclosures they need, and give them the attention they deserve. If Matt lives into his eighties, many of his birds will still be with him. And the younger birds in his care will likely outlive him.
Matt told me people rarely know what they are getting into when they acquire a parrot. The data support that claim. Most birds have five to ten homes before they die, meaning that most of them experience a never-ending cycle of loss and separation from their owners.
As we walked out back, into the open-air aviaries, Matt asked me to hold out my left arm while a cockatoo named Callie stepped onto it. She was a large bird with a beautiful gorgeous head, thick with colorful feathers that would make any mother bird proud. But Callie had no feathers below the neck. She had plucked out every last one—leaving only little bumps across her bare, sickly-looking body. Animals always look so small and frail without their fur or feathers. All that was left of this poor creature’s glorious plumage were the feathers she couldn’t reach and pull out.
Callie’s previous owner had trouble coping with the noise and the persistence of the cockatoo, and his solution was to sequester her in a room where she was alone almost all of the time. In the wild, the birds live in flocks, fly for miles every day, and spend time breaking open nuts and other food with their powerful beaks. She had none of that stimulation in this man’s home—she was effectively in solitary confinement. With the downturn in the economy in 2008, he needed extra income and had to rent out his spare room—and that spelled eviction for Callie. It came to a better end than many other such stories, and at least her owner sought out a good sanctuary and found Matt Smith. Callie did not come with a dowry, only with a lot of problems, leaving Matt with the responsibility of indefinite care for a troubled creature.
“Some birds can come from great homes and pluck,” Matt told me. “Other birds come out of outright abuse and do not pluck. But what we do know is that feather plucking does not exist in the wild.” In captivity, 30 to 40 percent of parrots pluck their own feathers.
Matt said the best he can do is try to replicate the birds’ wild habitat as much as possible to minimize self-destructive behavior. Branches, ropes, flocks, and flight can improve the situation and provide some needed stimulation. But sometimes the birds are just traumatized. And he says that the dreadful disorder just beyond plucking is self-mutilation. “They tear into themselves. The muscle is exposed and bloody. We can use a collar, and then try to bring them a better life.”
The numbers are depressing. Matt estimates that between parrots and the passerines, there may be fifty million birds in captivity in the United States, a much higher number than industry surveys indicate. Mira Tweti provides a similar estimate in Parrots and People, her indictment of the captive bird trade. She notes that many of the older birds in people’s homes were captured from the wild and imported to the United States for the pet trade.
Young birds are typically captive-bred, because of the restrictions of the Wild Bird Conservation Act of 1992, which forbade the importation of wild-caught birds. This law unintentionally gave rise to an enormous industry of “bird mills”—the equivalent of high-volume breeding operations for dogs, or puppy mills—where birds are kept by the hundreds in overcrowded and permanently dark sheds, caged until they are removed for sale. It is pathetic, Matt told me, to see these extraordinarily intelligent birds locked in such squalid environments.
“There is no escaping the intelligence,” as Matt put it. “Rescuers and sanctuary folks can use the research on their intelligence as a call to protect them, but the pet trade uses that same research to promote their ownership as pets. To realize how smart a bird is, all you have to do is live with one. Eventually, most people will realize how wrong it is to keep them in captivity. A lot of people feel guilty—it’s a recurring theme.”
As I was about to leave, Matt showed me the flight cages he’d designed. “Flight is the most important component to a bird’s well-being,” he said. In these cages, the birds are together, and can stretch and use their wings, assuming their wings have not been clipped.
I just wish that potential buyers of exotic birds could see his sanctuary—a large bird colony filled with examples of how difficult it is to keep and maintain creatures made for the sky. Most captive birds eventually become the responsibility of someone else. Matt and others to follow, including some good-hearted souls yet to be born, will spend years of hard work cleaning up after the foolish decisions of others, and trying to make things right for these creatures.
I also feel so grateful to this young man for devoting his life to these birds. He is one in the growing ranks of people who see the need and answer the call, and whose unselfish efforts make a mark in the world every day. It is the mark of respect and appreciation, of understanding and empathy for creatures great and small who have the same spark of life that we do, and who so often deserve better than they receive at our hands.
Parrots yearn for the sky, like all the fowl of the air. Elephants are called to roam, unbounded by the designs of man. Chimps want to climb and swing and dance, rejoicing in the lives intended for them. They all have their own minds and desires; they all have a place and purpose of their own. They have their own dignity and their own destinies to fulfill, in a plan ultimately beyond any man’s power to know. Sparing or rescuing them from cruelty is a picture of humankind at our best. And so often in our dealings with animals, the greatest power we have is to stand back and let them be.
There’s so much to the mental and emotional lives of animals, and though the research affirming that fact is fairly recent, it all suddenly seems so obvious. Outside the professional journals of the behaviorist school of thought, or the animal-science departments subsidized by animal-use industries, very few people will tell you anymore that animals neither think nor feel in any meaningful way. All the evidence and every ounce of common sense tell us otherwise, even if we still do not put that understanding into everyday practice.
Darwin himself, in the 1870s, recognized and captured the rich emotional lives of animals. Yet by a strange selectivity, his theory of evolution had a profound impact on how we humans see ourselves, while his evidence about the emotional lives of animals had almost no impact on how we treat them. And for all the pathbreaking work of Donald Griffin, the Harvard ethologist who a century later picked where up where Darwin left off, somehow we’ve still had a hard time getting past the mechanistic dogmas of the behaviorists. In part because of the falsehoods they have spread, with their way of fitting every animal they study with the same scientific straitjacket, we’ve been in denial. Whatever common sense or our own good instincts tell us, we are still reluctant to ascribe sadness where we see tears and suffering where we hear cries, and to act accordingly.
It all reminds me a little of the scene of Terminator 2: Judgment Day when the Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, notices human tears and asks, “Why do you cry?” He has developed an unlikely bond with the boy he’s been sent to save, and the boy explains to the Terminator that people cry when they are sad or experience loss, or occasionally even when they are happy. The Terminator looks on skeptically, but the boy is providing a lesson on what it means to be human—seeming, for just a moment, to stretch the Terminator’s understanding beyond his programmed knowledge.
For a long time, in our dealings with animals, we have conducted ourselves like beings from another world, unfeeling, all-powerful, and strangely disconnected from the realities of animal consciousness and emotion. But it shouldn’t be such a stretch to recognize how much we have in common with creatures made of the same flesh and blood, or to imagine ourselves in their place—helpless, vulnerable, and afraid. It’s been slow to come to us, since in some manner we seem to have been programmed to see the world a certain way. As we gain greater understanding about animals, we cannot help but begin to develop a closer bond with them and to open our hearts to their plight.
Refusing to believe that animals have intelligence, or even conscious life, is not only counterintuitive, but also a little too convenient. Leaders of animal-use industries have hired their own veterinarians and other scientists to deny the emotional intelligence of animals or to say the industry’s treatment of other creatures is just fine—much like the biological determinists of another time who twisted reality to prove that certain races were inferior. When pseudoscientists tell us that animals are not conscious or aware, and are instead driven by mechanical, unfeeling instinct, the moral path has been cleared for economic interests to do as they please.
Mechanical and unfeeling, moreover, better describe humanity in action when we permit the boundless cruelties that modern industries inflict. In the treatment of animals, there’s a vast gap between what we know and what we allow, what objective science affirms and what the laws permit. And much of the modern animal-welfare movement is working to close that gap—to bring consistency into the moral equation. We know too much, and what might have been excused in other times can no longer stand up to reason. We know that pigs and other animals are intelligent, social creatures, and with that understanding comes moral responsibility. It is wrong to condemn them to the dark, wretched existence of the factory farm. In the same way, we now know better than to treat primates as if they are the raw and disposable material for experimentation, or to drown dolphins by the thousands as if they were just acceptable bycatch for fishing fleets, or to consider companion animals as expendable surplus when there are no companions to claim them.
In matters of animal welfare, as in everything else, stubborn denial only makes things worse. And the better outlook is to view these questions not just as moral problems, but as moral opportunities. Thinking for yourself always takes a little extra effort, and shaking off old ways always requires that extra measure of courage. But it sure beats having to go through life making excuses for harsh and unpleasant things, and there are plenty of brave and good-hearted people to show us the way.