Distinctly Human?

In grassy groves of sunlight, little baby elephants are trying to get the hang of their trunks, then seeking that reassuring nipple. I’m enthralled.

“Look at how friendly these two families are being,” Vicki is saying. “Elin decided to move closer to the water, Eloise agreed, then she waited as the whole group moved up.” Now they’re walking together. “They’ve obviously chosen to just spend time together today.”

Obviously.

What causes elephant friendships? Certain young ones like the same games and always play together. Certain older individuals are “compatible,” Vicki says, in “when they want to eat, when they want to sleep, where they like to go, what kinds of foods they like.”

Compatible. Interesting. Difficult enough in humans.

 

 

The best answer to the question “Is an elephant conscious?” is that all the evidence indicates widespread consciousness. So the interesting question now is “What is consciousness like for other animals?” Consciousness might seem like a no-brainer to most pet lovers, but I can almost hear some people say, “Not so fast.” Many researchers and science writers insist that we simply have no way to access the mental experience of animals. I think I understand where they’re coming from. But I think they’re mistaken because we now know more than we did.

Animal behavior is a young science. Some of the most basic things about animals were first recognized by scientists less than one hundred years ago. The simple fact that chickens establish a “pecking order” was not formally recognized until the 1920s. Also in the 1920s, Margaret Morse Nice first discovered that birds defend territories—and that’s one of the most basic things about their lives and their singing. To establish animal behavior as a science, the pioneering behaviorists of the mid-twentieth century, such as Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch, had to purge centuries of folklore and superstition (owls presage death, wolves are the devil’s familiars) and fables that posed animals as caricatures of human impulses (grasshoppers are lazy, turtles persistent, foxes tricky).

The new scientists were wonderful, insightful observers. They succeeded in stripping metaphorical projections that had built up on many animals like old coats of paint. Their approach: look carefully and describe just what you see. They had to prove that watching animals could be objective work, and they did. For their studies of honeybee dance-language, fish courtship, and how ducklings “imprint” on the first moving object they see, von Frisch, Tinbergen, and Lorenz shared a Nobel Prize in the category “Physiology or Medicine.” Such a categorical stretch for the awarding committee underscored how important the new work seemed. For the three curious naturalists, such honor and recognition must have felt euphorically vindicating.

 

 

When the science of animal behavior was getting established, there was no scientific way to approach a question such as “What does an elephant feel when she nurses her baby?” There was nothing to go on. No one had watched free-living animals’ real lives. Brain science was in its infancy. So speculation about their feelings could only draw on our own feelings—leading ourselves in circles. The new scientists insisted on observation, not speculation. Speculation was messy guessing that one had to avoid. We can observe what an elephant does. There’s no way to know how the animal feels. So just count how many minutes she nurses her offspring for. As even the noted elephant communication expert Joyce Poole has explained, “I was trained to view non-human animals as behaving in ways that don’t necessarily involve any conscious thinking.”

My own initiation into formal training included the classic directive to steer strictly clear of anything smacking of attributing human mental experiences—values, thoughts, or emotions—to other animals. (Doing so is called “anthropomorphism.”) I appreciate that. We shouldn’t assume that animals (or, for that matter, lovers, spouses, kids, or parents) “must be” thinking and feeling just as we would if we were them. They’re not us. By not assuming, we open a clearer path to understanding what’s really going on.

But it wasn’t that the question of animal thoughts and emotions awaited better data; it was that the whole subject became verboten. The successful matter-of-fact observational approach hardened into a rigid mental straitjacket. Wondering what feelings or thoughts might motivate behavioral acts became totally taboo. Radio blackout. Professional behaviorists could describe what they saw, period. Description—and only description—became “the” science of animal behavior. You could say that a lion was stalking a zebra. If you said the lion wanted to catch it, you’d be accused of “projecting your human emotions.” After all, the lion might be an utterly unconscious machine—you can’t know. You could say, “The elephant positioned herself between her calf and the hyena.” The mother wouldn’t position herself between her baby and an antelope. She knows hyenas are a threat. But if you said, “The mother positioned herself to protect her baby from the hyena,” that was out of bounds; it was anthropomorphic. We can’t know the mother’s intent. And this was stifling.

In establishing the study of behavior as a science, it had originally been helpful to make “anthropomorphism” a word that raised a red flag. But as lesser intellects followed the Nobel Prize–winning pioneers, “anthropomorphism” became a pirate flag. If the word was hoisted, an attack was imminent. You wouldn’t get your work published. And in the academic realm of publish or perish, jobs were at stake.

Even the most informed, insightful, logical inferences about other animals’ motivations, emotions, and awareness could wreck your professional prospects. The mere question could. In the 1970s, a book humbly titled The Question of Animal Awareness caused such an uproar that many behaviorists relegated its author, Donald Griffin, to the fringes of the profession. Griffin was no upstart; he’d been famous for decades as the luminary who’d solved the problem of how bats use sonar to navigate. So he was a bit of a genius, actually. But raising the Question was simply too much for many orthodox colleagues. Suggesting that other animals can feel anything wasn’t just a conversation stopper; it was a career killer. In 1992, readers of the exclusive journal Science were warned by one academic writer that studying animal cognition “isn’t a project I’d recommend to anyone without tenure.” It was no joke. Seriously.

 

 

By banning what was considered anthropomorphic, the behaviorists facilitated the opposite error. They helped perpetuate the all-too-human notion that only humans are conscious and can feel anything. (The sense that everything revolves around us is called anthropocentrism.) Certainly, projecting feelings onto other animals can lead to us misunderstanding their motivations. But denying the possibility that they even have any motivation guarantees that we’ll misunderstand it.

Not assuming that other animals have thoughts and feelings was a good start for a new science. Insisting they did not was bad science. Peculiarly, many behaviorists—who are biologists—chose to overlook the core process of biology: each newer thing is a slight tweak on something older. Everything humans do and possess came from somewhere. Before humans could be assembled, evolution needed to have most of the parts in stock, and those parts were developed for earlier models. We inherited them.

We don’t rate all the credit we give ourselves. Witness, for instance, the journey of jointed legs: from arthropod to quadruped to bipedal people. A frog’s upper rear leg bone is a femur, no less than in a chicken, as in a child. Thus we trace a transformation of mobility from amphibian to flying bird to triathlete. A creature that sleeps is sleeping, species notwithstanding. One that sneezes is sneezing. Yawning—ditto. These bundled programs are cabled into the branches of Life. Species to species, they differ—but are often not very different. Only humans have human minds. But believing that only humans have minds is like believing that because humans have skeletons, only humans have skeletons. Of course, we can see skeletons in fish, birds, and elephants. We can’t see their minds. But we can see their nervous systems, and the workings of minds in the logic and limits of certain behaviors. From skeletons to brains, the principle is the same, and if we were to assume anything, it might be that minds, too, exist on a sliding scale. That’s not what happened.

Professional animal behaviorists inserted a hard divider between the nervous system of the entire complement of the animal kingdom and one of its species: humans. Denying the possibility that any other animals have any thoughts or feelings reinforced what we all most want to hear: We are special. We are utterly different. Better. Best. (Talk about projecting!)

 

 

For several decades, scientists who went beyond describing behaviors, who stepped out of bounds, continued to face withering scorn from their colleagues. A few new revolutionaries who were not trained behaviorists—Jane Goodall being perhaps the first such pioneer—experienced just that. Goodall recalls that after her first studies of chimpanzees, when she later enrolled as a doctoral student at Cambridge, “It was a bit shocking to be told I’d done everything wrong. Everything. I shouldn’t have given them names. I couldn’t talk about their personalities, their minds or their feelings. Those are unique to us.”

That’s what they told her. To this day, “anthropo”-phobia remains widespread among behavioral scientists and among science writers who ape the outdated hypercaution of the orthodox behaviorists who trained them. We are not to attribute to other animals any emotions that humans have, they say to each other—and to their students, who parrot their rigidity and feel professional.

 

 

But what is a “human” emotion? When someone says you can’t attribute human emotions to animals, they forget the key leveling detail: humans are animals. (We have to keep reminding ourselves, because we’re only human.) Human sensations are animal sensations. Inherited sensations, using inherited nervous systems.

All of the emotions we know of just happen to be emotions humans feel. So, simply deciding that other animals can’t have any emotions humans feel is a cheap way to get a monopoly on all the world’s feelings and motivations. People who’ve systematically watched or known animals realize the absurdity of this. But many others still don’t. “The dilemma remains,” noted author Caitrin Nicol as I was writing this book, “how to get an accurate understanding of the animals’ nature and (if appropriate) emotions, without imposing on them assumptions born of a distinctly human understanding of the world.”

But tell me, what “distinctly human understanding” hampers our understanding of other animals’ emotions? Is it our sense of pleasure, pain, sexuality, hunger, frustration, self-preservation, defense, parental protection? Ours doesn’t prevent us from understanding theirs; it helps us. But okay; doesn’t that lead us right back to mistaken assumptions? Not if we incorporate all we’ve learned. Consider romantic love. It is obvious that elephants, with their matriarchal families, wandering males, absence of male-female pair bonds, and no male care of young, don’t have romantic love. And because it’s so, elephant researchers don’t make that mistake. Thus, evidence and logic can be trustworthy guides. In other fields, they’re recognized as the best tools we have. In fact, one term for evidence + logic is: “science.”

We never seem to doubt that an animal acting hungry feels hungry. What reason is there to disbelieve that an elephant who seems happy is happy? We can’t really claim scientific objectivity when we recognize hunger and thirst while animals are eating and drinking, exhaustion when they tire, but deny them joy and happiness as they’re playing with their children and their families. Yet the science of animal behavior has long operated with that bias—and that’s unscientific. In science, the simplest interpretation of evidence is often the best. When animals seem joyous in joyful contexts, joy is the simplest interpretation of the evidence. Their brains are similar to ours, they make the same hormones involved in human emotions—and that’s evidence, too. So let’s not assume. Be careful and objective, certainly. But don’t insist on wearing blinders. Let’s not bury evidence.

Just one week before I finished this book, a colleague in Australia who studies corals wrote to me, “Good luck with your book; sounds interesting though I bet difficult to separate anthropomorphic factors from what is actually occurring.” I think the bigger problem is the bias that almost forbids us from recognizing what’s occurring. A person steeped in fear of anthropomorphism might observe, “The dog is scratching the door.” Yet they would insist that we cannot know whether the dog “wants” to go out. (Meanwhile, of course, your dog is thinking, “Hellooo—let me out; I don’t want to pee in the house.”) Obviously, the dog wants to go out. And if you insist on ignoring the evidence, have a mop handy.

 

 

The ability—and the need—to form deep social bonds developed through deep time. It didn’t just suddenly appear with the emergence of modern humans. Parental care, satisfaction, friendship, compassion, grief—all began their journey in pre-human beings.

Our brain’s provenance is inseparable from other species’ brains in the long cauldron of living time. And thus, so is our mind. Our mind arrived with other species’ minds in one long gesture in the continuous sweep of Life.