“After a promising start over 120 years ago, when Darwin
explored the terrain in his book, The
expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, very few scientists have
acknowledged, researched, or even speculated about animal emotions.”
“Jane Goodall finds the scientific reluctance to accept
anecdotal evidence a serious problem, one that colors all of science. “I’ve
always collected anecdotes, because I think they’re just terribly, terribly
important – whereas most scientists scorn the anecdotal. ‘Oh, that’s merely
anecdotal.’ What is anecdotal? It’s careful description of an unusual event.” She tells of a research assistant in a
laboratory charged with logging the response of male rhesus monkeys to females,
some of whom were being treated with hormones or had had their ovaries removed. “She told me…the most fascinating thing to
her was that there was one old female that she observed in all these different
states, ending with having her ovaries out, and whatever state she was in, she
was the most popular. But she was one
monkey and that was ignored. There must
be literally millions of observations like that that have never crept into the
literatures.” Such observations would
provide a rich and suggestive ground for analysis and further investigation,
yet there are almost none. While it is
possible and customary to describe such events without using words that connote
emotion, such a lean description is not necessarily more accurate.”
Our cultural biases say that would cannot be quantified
cannot be studied. If it is not
numerical than it is not science – an issue that affects everyone who wants to
become a scientists and there are few who will challenge this orthodoxy. The problem is that emotions are a range of
sensations, feelings, responses, and reactions that vary with each person based
on their chemistry and their personal experiences. Trying to define emotions and create a
starting point is one example of the difficulty.
“One psychologist compiled a list of 154 emotion names… Rene
Descartes said there were six basic emotions: love, hate, astonishment, desire,
joy, and sorrow. Immanual Kant found
five: love, hope, modesty, joy and sorrow.
William James defined four: love, fear grief and rage. J. B. Watson postulated three basic emotions
X, Y, Z (roughly equivalent to fear, anger and love). “
And just as in social Darwinism, science, like religion, can
be used to justify existing bias – racism, social elitism…
“It was not so long ago that ethnologists thought that there
were some cultures (obviously inferior) where the full range of Western
emotions could not be expressed, and were probably not experienced)”
And of course we want to maintain the upper hand. We thought animals could not use tools, but
that has disappeared – species by species.
Then we said that they could not communicate (sure – all that sound in
nature is just random) and of course we had Alex the Parrot and Koko the Ape
show us that they could even use our contrived letters, computers, etc… So now
we hope that they cannot feel because that would, again, allow us to feel
superior.
“If feelings can cross cultures, it seems likely they can
cross species.”
“Human beings presumably benefit from treating animals the
way they do-hurting them, jailing them exploiting their labor, eating their
bodies, gaping at them, and even owning them as signs of social status. Any human being who has a choice does not
want to be treated like this.”
“The philosopher Mary Midgley puts it: ‘The fact that some
people are silly about animals cannot stop the topic being a serious one. Animals are not just one of the things with
which people amuse themselves, like chewing-gum and water-skis, they are the group to which people belong.
We are not just rather like animals; we are
animals.’ To act as if humans are a
completely different order of beings from other animals ignores the fundamental
reality.”
“A park warden reported coming across a herd with a female
carrying a small calf [elephant] several days dead, which she placed on the
ground whenever she ate or drank: she traveled very slowly and the rest of the
elephants waited for her. This suggests
that animals, like people, act on feelings as such, rather than solely for the
purpose of survival.”
“Orcas grow up to 23 feet long, weigh up to 9000 pounds, and
roam hundreds of miles a day. No cage
and certainly not the swimming pools were they are confined in all oceanariums,
could possibly provide satisgaction, let alone joy. They are believed to have a life expectancy
as long as our own. Yet at Sea World, in
San Diego, the oceanarium with the best track record for keeping orcas alive, they
last an average of eleven years.”
Reading this book you are constantly amazed as the
creativity displayed by the animals in the anecdotes and the range of emotions
that are apparent unless you are trying to deny them. But what is also apparent is the extreme
cruelty that humans show in their “experiments”. This is the same barbarity that has been
exhibited throughout human history to slaves, serfs, people of other color and
other beliefs. It is the Nazi, the
animal experimentation laboratories and throughout our history.
“Social play is not a valid category of behavior because it
is so difficult to define” so rather
than study the complex we deny the emotions and try to shut up the “emotional”
people who “anthropomorphize”. In
fact, the worst act of
anthropomorphizing is in the denying to other species the emotions that we
arrogantly reserve for only our species (and only those who we deem advanced
within our species).
“Alaskan Buffalo have been seen playing on ice. One at a time starting from a ridge above a
frozen lake, the buffalo charged down to the shore and plunged onto the ice,
bracing their legs so that they spun across the ice, with their tails in the
air. As each buffalo skidded to a halt,
it let out a lout bellow…then awkwardly picked its way back to shore to make
another run.”
“In the fifteenth century, when giraffes were known in
Europe as camelopards, Cosimo de’ Medici shut a giraffe in a pen with lions,
bloodhounds, and fighting bulls to see which species was the most savage. As Pope Pius II looked on, the lions and dogs
dozed, the bulls quietly chewed their cuds, and the giraffe huddled against the
fence shaking in fear. These leaders of
men were disappointed at the absence of bloodshed, and wondered why the animals
were not more savage.” So who in this
scenario was savage? Which species
deserved to be the saint? What is the
excuse for humans who use their power of conversation and speech to deny
emotion to other species?
Joseph Wood Krutch wrote: “Whoever listens to a bird song and
says, I do not believe there is any joy in it,” has not proved anything about
birds. But he has revealed a good deal
about himself.”
“Treating them [animals] as either machines or people
denigrates them. Acknowledgment of their
emotional lives is the first step: understanding that their emotional lives are
their own and not outs is second.”
“Human life cannot be understood without emotions. To leave questions of animal emotion as
forever unapproachable and imponderable is arbitrary intellectual helplessness.”
“In the end, when we wonder whether to ascribe an emotion to
an animal, the question to ask is not, ‘Can we prove that another being feels
this or any emotions?’ but rather, ‘Is there any reason to suppose that this
species of animal does not feel this emotion?’”
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