The Feelings of Animals: Moving Toward a Living World

Anthropomorphizing is our inclination to attribute human feelings to animals. Perhaps it comes to us naturally because we don't want to live alone and isolated on a planet teeming with other life. For scientists, however, the temptation is to be resisted because it complicates the objective examination of other species.

At the root of this reluctance to anthropomorphize is more than just the subject object dichotomy — the "I" of self, as every mystic knows, always makes an object of everything else. But a recognition that animals actually feel would transform them from of things into beings, with huge implications for the way we treat them.

This reluctance to explore a personal relationship with animals is more a modern inclination than an ancient one, and more a Western tendency than an Eastern one. People who are intimately connected to nature commonly experience animals in more human terms. And Eastern philosophical, religious and mythological notions have always linked animals and humans in a graduated continuum of overlapping and ascending consciousness — reincarnation is just the formalization of this notion. In contrast, Western thought tends to think of animals in isolated categories that are bounded at the top by the overseeing presence of ourselves — it's insightful to notice that we are to animals as the idea of an omnipotent god is to us.

As for science in the West, it has the curious inconsistency of subscribing to the hierarchy of species in evolution's chain of growing biological complexity yet is reluctant to acknowledge that the same attribute could apply to the inner life of those same living things. If we can consider that birds' wings and whales' fins are the related anatomical extensions of human arms, why should we be surprised if these animals experience emotions that are also comparable to ours? A cursory examination of our motives should raise the possibility that our reluctance to admit a closer kinship with animals might be our unconscious avoidance to personalize them. The idea that we are alone and unique as a species, and that nature is a mere object, comes with the ethical licence to do with it as we choose. If we don't want to be alone on the planet, then we are clearly ambivalent about our relationship with animals.

Of course, anyone who knows animals personally — from pet owners to naturalists — is more comfortable with the notion of a continuity of shared feelings. Consider animal play, a behaviour that implies a large range of underlying insights and cognitions. In an article in the New Scientist (May 26/07, "Are you feeling what I'm feeling?"), Marc Bekoff describes buffalo "running onto and sliding across ice, excitedly bellowing as they [did] so." Other reports describe bears sliding down snowy hills, then running back to the top to do so again and again. In a more creative variant, ravens have been seen sliding down ice-covered roofs, opening their wings as they launch off the eaves, then flying back to the peak to wait in line for a repeat trip.

Grief is probably not an exclusively human experience, either. Bekoff describes a curious roadside ritual in Boulder, Colorado, where four magpies were gathered around the corpse of another magpie, likely killed by a car. Two of the birds carefully approached the body, pecked gently at it then stood back. "One of the birds flew off, brought back some grass and laid it by the corpse. Another did the same. Then all four stood vigil for a few seconds before flying away one by one."

Crows and ravens are known to mourn. Elephants are also known to display similar feelings. Llamas, too. Betsy Webb, Bekoff's friend, described in a letter to him how the death of her 27-year-old llama, Boone, seems to have caused the immediate death of his healthy, lifelong partner, Bridger. The effect on Webb's remaining llamas was remarkable. "For the next two days, stoic Taffy stood across the fence from the grave and stared at the hole in the ground. She barely moved from the spot. Excitable Pumpernickel stayed in his little barn and waited for two days. On the third day, they emerged from their grieving and resumed their normal activities."

In a more dramatic example of grieving, the world-renowned primate specialist, Jane Goodall, tells of a young chimpanzee named Flint, who was so distraught at the death of his mother, Flo, that he stopped eating. "The last time I saw him alive," recounts Goodall, "he was hollow-eyed, gaunt and utterly depressed, huddled in the vegetation close to where Flo had died." Then he went to the exact creekside spot where his mother's body had lain. "There he stayed for several hours, sometimes staring and staring into the water. He struggled on a little further, then curled up — and never moved again" (Ibid.).

Other tales suggest empathy. Babyl is an old, crippled, female elephant that has been with a herd at the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya for many years. The other elephants never leave her behind. If she can't keep up, they wait for her. The matriarch even feeds her if she is unable to find enough to eat (Ibid.). And, in documenting wildlife behaviour in BC's Great Bear Rainforest, Ian McAllister describes how a three legged wolf, quite unfit for hunting, has assumed pup-sitting responsibilities for the pack. In exchange, the strong animals share food from their kills.

In a gesture that would seem to be gratitude, Bekoff describes a December, 2005, event in which divers courageously decided to try to cut loose a 15-metre humpback whale that was in danger of drowning after becoming entrapped in crab lines off California's Farallon Island. The whale waited quietly while the divers worked on the lines. "When I was cutting the line going through the mouth," says James Moskito, "its eye was there, winking at me, watching me." After its release, the whale went to each of the divers and gently nudged them one by one. "It felt to me," recounts Moskito, "like it was thanking us, knowing it was free and that we had helped it."

As the Scottish poet Robert Burns lamented during one of his occasional mystical moments, "I'm truly sorry man's dominion / Has broken nature's social union." So maybe during this special winter season of celebration and renewal, we should start mending this rift. We might begin by singing, "Peace on Earth, good will to all" — and meaning every word of it.