“All things share the same breath—the beast, the tree, the human. … What are people without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, people would die from a great loneliness of spirit.”
CHIEF SEATTLE’S APPEAL TO PRESIDENT FRANKLIN PIERCE, 1854
BY THE TIME HE spoke those words, it was too late for Chief Seattle to save the ancestral homes of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Skagit, and other Indian nations on land that is now called Washington and Oregon. At least three quarters of the Indians living on this continent before Europeans arrived had already perished, and “Indian removal” was isolating the rest on reservations. The territory governed by his council of nations was sure to be confiscated eventually, regardless of whether the council agreed to its “sale.”
Nonetheless, the chief made a leader-to-leader appeal to President Pierce. “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?” he asked. “If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?”
Only those who respected nature, he said, could claim it:
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. … The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices of the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and the people—all belong to the same family. … We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. … He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold. … His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.
Yet the chief’s request was not for more payment or even for a continuing claim on the land. He knew that was impossible. What he asked for was on behalf of this land’s inhabitants, those who could not speak for themselves. “I will make one condition,” he said: “The white man must treat the beasts of the land as his brothers. … For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to the man. All things are connected.”6
This feeling of connection to all creatures, a feeling shared by the most ancient and psychologically sophisticated of cultures, has been lost or suppressed in centuries of religions that demonized nature and created an otherworldly hierarchy. In the fifth century, Saint Augustine declared animals to be outside God’s moral universe; in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas maintained that man had unlimited power over animals by virtue of God’s gift to Adam of “dominion” over them; and by the seventeenth century, philosopher René Descartes had concluded that animals were soulless machines with no ability to feel pain—an assumption then “proved” by scientists for whom an animal’s cries were no more evidence of feeling than a clock’s chiming.
Instead of comparing people to animals as an honor, as ancient and indigenous cultures had done, this hierarchical view used such comparisons to keep people in low-status positions. When eighteenth-century activists objected to racial slavery and to women’s status as chattel, for instance, they were ridiculed with the argument that, if slaves and women had rights, soon animals would have them, too. Prejudice justified itself by calling people animal names: reducing a man of color to an ape or a monkey, or woman to a bird or a cow. By the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin postulated evolutionary links between humans and animals, there was shock and rage at the idea that humans might be connected to these despised creatures who existed only to serve us—a rage fed by repressed sexuality, too, since the church and many other structures of patriarchal society were dedicated to the denial of “animalistic” urges, except for purposes of reproduction. It is partly this desire to suppress an “animal” sexual nature that keeps religious fundamentalists fighting against evolutionary teachings even today.
When evolutionism prevailed, it gave a new respectability and clout to those who felt an empathy with other sentient beings. Thanks to the antivivisectionist and prevention-of-cruelty movements of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth-century groups that argue against everything from sadistic methods of trapping wild animals to the testing of medicines and cosmetics on laboratory animals, people in even the most denatured societies have begun to protest against the cruel treatment and extinction of other species. Though such groups are still trivialized, as if only human concerns could be taken seriously, they are gradually forcing us to reexamine our attitudes toward the animal world and to see in them an index of our attitudes toward each other. For some, this reexamination leads to vegetarianism or to using canvas instead of leather. For others, the concern is just to stop the suffering and wanton killing of animals. After all, Native Americans held the buffalo sacred, yet they killed it for food and skins, sparingly, with apologies to the animal’s spirit. What they didn’t do was take pleasure in pain or killing for no purpose, upset the balance of nature, take more than they needed, or otherwise defile their links to nature and each other. All that changed when hierarchical views of life began to make human beings the most dangerous species on earth.
The eighteenth-century English rationalized everyday sadism by insisting, as Diane Ackerman documents in A Natural History of the Senses,
that torturing an animal made its meat healthier and better tasting. … They chopped up live fish, which they claimed made the flesh firmer; they tortured bulls before killing them, because they said the meat would otherwise be unhealthy; they tenderized pigs and calves by whipping them to death with knotted ropes; they hung poultry upside down and slowly bled them to death; they skinned living animals. Recipe openers from the era said such things as: “Take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death.”7
In some ways, the only difference between the days of those recipes and the present is that we are now more distant from the killing. But a critical mass of people in most countries seem to be feeling Chief Seattle’s “great loneliness of the spirit.” Some postindustrial, nonhierarchical sense of linkage with the animal world seems to be forming: a vision that goes beyond evolutionism’s picture of Homo sapiens as the peak of the developmental tree and considers each species as an end in itself. As unsentimental a body as the European Parliament is considering an animal-rights act that would outlaw cockfighting, bullfighting, fox hunting, and other time-honored blood sports. In the United States and Canada, both health and animal-rights activists protest the millions of chickens who live out their lives wedged into a space smaller than the pot they will eventually be cooked in, and whose force-fed, hormone-injected flesh may be a long-term health hazard to those who eat it. The U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld an animal-rights argument against the killing of monkeys for experimental purposes by the National Institutes of Health, and many cosmetic and drug companies are bowing to consumer boycotts and also discovering that some alternatives to animal testing are cheaper, quicker, and potentially more accurate. Even Spanish bullfights, the most famous of all sadistic spectacles, are becoming less popular, especially with younger generations. More and more, we have come to recognize that the devaluing of animal life is a kind of training ground for devaluing all life. As one Spanish activist put it, bullfighting is “the root of all the acts of savagery in our country.”8
Television and films have helped distant and urbanized people to feel an ancient linkage again by showing us intimate glimpses of animals in their natural habitat. We have also become increasingly outraged witnesses to their fate at the whim of humans: gorillas whose hands are cut off for sale as ashtrays, or tropical birds stuffed headfirst into tight cardboard tubes for a Middle Passage to other countries that few survive. In the American Northwest, bears—the animal that Native Americans considered the model of childrearing—are slaughtered so their gallbladders can be sold as aphrodisiacs in Asia. Throughout the country, abandoned or stolen cats and dogs are sold to hospitals where their vocal cords are sometimes cut so their cries won’t disturb experimenters. Internationally the tanker spills that suffocate birds and other sea creatures in coats of oil now average one a day. In the Gulf War of 1991, the image of one lone, staggering seabird dying after Saddam Hussein’s vengeful opening of oil pipelines became for many people around the world the symbol of human waste and cruelty; an emblem of all innocent victims who die each time we go into battle with each other.
Because the truth is: We cannot harden our hearts selectively. In Fire in the Belly, Sam Keen warns men especially, who have been so historically pushed toward hard-heartedness, “The ability to feel is indivisible. Repress awareness of any one feeling, and all feelings are dulled. … The same nerve endings are required for weeping and dancing, fear and ecstasy.”9
Bonding with animals—or rather, admitting the bond we work so hard to ignore—is one way of increasing health and strengthening a sense of self. A wide variety of studies have shown that on the average, people who have pets or live close to animals have lower blood pressure, heart rates, stress levels, and incidence of depression, while enjoying longer life expectancies. Anecdotal evidence shows they also have higher levels of responsibility, independence, self-confidence, and optimism. If you haven’t experienced the power of this bonding with pets, start a conversation with any group of friends who have them, and watch the faces light up as they tell stories of creatures with whom they share their homes. Even people institutionalized for catatonic withdrawal have responded for the first time when given an affectionate animal to hold, as have the institutionalized elderly so depressed or overmedicated that they would respond to nothing else. In eighteenth-century Germany and England, hospitals and retreats for the insane discovered that cats, dogs, horses, and birds were healing catalysts, as if the animals’ freely given energy could pierce a human wall of isolation.
In this country, programs that teach handicapped people to ride horseback have increased their confidence and independence, and others that allow autistic children to swim with dolphins have resulted in unprecedented levels of response and speech. Some observers have insisted that the dolphins seemed to sense the kids’ vulnerability and protect them. Among a group of women prisoners in Washington State, recidivism was eliminated when they were given dogs to train and care for. In Ohio, suicide and depression among the criminally insane were reduced by allowing prisoners to care for fish and small animals in their cells.10
For skeptics who say this is the power of expectation—that like a placebo, any intervention works if those participating believe it will—there are also plenty of accidental discoveries. In a California hospital, for instance, nurses were asked to care for a patient’s Seeing Eye dog by keeping it at their station. To the surprise of everyone, nurses began to report less job stress, and patients became more active and ambulatory. Among people who have animals but become too ill to keep them at home, there is often an unexpected and rapid decline. In major cities hit hard by the AIDS epidemic, pets have had such a clear impact on the self-esteem of homebound patients that volunteer groups now help to maintain them when their owners can no longer cope. Thanks to one such program in New York City called POWARS (Pet Owners With AIDS/ARC Resource Service), volunteers pay daily visits to feed and walk the pets of bedridden patients. “People with AIDS and ARC often feel like pariahs and outcasts,” explains Steve Kohn, a cofounder of POWARS, but animals provide the greatest gift: “a feeling that they are unconditionally loved.”11
In Northern California, the Animal Assisted Therapy Program, a project of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, has selected kittens and roosters, dogs, guinea pigs, and sometimes even a boa constrictor for their sociability and taken them into children’s wards and prisons, abuse shelters, and retirement homes—anyplace where people are feeling robbed of affection and identity. “Animals don’t care if a person is losing sight or can’t walk,” as one of the program leaders explained. “All they want is to love you, and that quality brings out therapeutic things in us.” There is also another goal: “What we’re primarily doing is helping animals by promoting the idea that they are a very valuable part of our lives.”12
In fact, animals have been found to boost human morale, communication, and self-esteem more reliably and quickly than almost any other kind of therapy. The animals themselves seem to sense their impact and to thrive—unlike their isolated fate in many zoos and other institutions. As a result of the success of such programs, forty-eight states now permit pets in hospitals, all fifty states allow them in nursing homes, and the National Institutes of Health has officially noted “the crucial role pets may play” in physical and mental health—a big change from a decade ago when the presence of any animal was forbidden in health-care facilities.
Perhaps the least expected testimony to our potential for radical empathy is its crossing not just of species lines, but of elements. In addition to dolphins, other underwater creatures respond to human beings—and vice versa—as scuba divers or aquarium lovers can testify. Diana James, a colleague whose pet for twenty-seven years was a medium-sized turtle, found she and he developed a bond. When she had a cold or a migraine, he became sympathetically ill, and when he was wedged under rocks in his aquarium and in danger of drowning, she awoke in another room to rescue him. In an expedition organized by marine explorers Jacques Cousteau and his son Philippe, scuba divers descended into one of the few ocean areas where spear fishermen, ships’ motors, and dragnets had never been, and found an underwater life that was curious, friendly, and unafraid. Fish swam close to their human visitors and allowed themselves to be touched and petted. Only because Philippe Cousteau filmed these remarkable scenes were they believed. On the other hand, in ocean areas where humans have brought great danger, sea life seems to learn caution and fear in just one generation.
Clearly, human beings fare better when we feel an empathetic bond with the other passengers on this Spaceship Earth. When we are not being the terrorists on this spaceship, they seem to thrive around us, too.
I often wonder: What would life with animals be like if, as Chief Seattle said, we shared “the same breath”? I’ve felt that possibility only once, while living in India.
In our student hostel in Delhi, small gray monkeys often left their perch in trees outside our windows and came in to visit. They sat on our desks and watched while we studied. They hid our pencils and jewelry when we were out, watched with amusement as we searched for things they finally “found” for us. They were delightful companions—graceful, funny, mysterious, and never boring. By being so alive in the moment, they made us feel more alive and aware, too.
Later, in a South Indian village where I stayed with a family for a few days, I remember elephants gliding past each morning with their keeper, or mahout, on the way to the fields. Often the little boy of the household would give them a treat of plantains, but one morning, he mischievously poked one elephant’s trunk with a sharp pin instead. She squealed, but did nothing—until, on the way back from that evening’s drink at the river, she raised her trunk over the garden wall and drenched the boy with a trunkful of water she had saved up for the purpose. Then she calmly lumbered on.
As his mother and the mahout explained to the little boy, this was shabash—very clever—but it was also serious elephant wisdom. Without hurting him, but also without sacrificing one whit of her dignity, the elephant had taught him a lesson in fairness he would never forget.
In a way, animals are professors of self-esteem: unself-conscious, confident, and utterly themselves. I thought again of what humans could learn while reading about Koko, a female gorilla who was taught sign language by Dr. Francine Patterson, a primatologist. Thanks to Koko’s ability to understand some spoken language and respond in a vocabulary of 500 signed words, we know some of her thoughts on everything from her favorite foods to using a camera. We know about her dislike for someone she called an “obnoxious nut” and her gentleness and love for a kitten that was given to her as a pet—as well as her sadness and mourning when that kitten was killed by a car.
Here is one of the exchanges Dr. Patterson recorded:
“I turn to Koko: ‘Are you an animal or a person?’ Koko’s instant response: ‘Fine animal gorilla.’ ”13
Self-esteem is natural, and only humans create inequality by simply believing in it. By unhardening our hearts to animals, perhaps we open them to ourselves.