One elephant, trained to dance and to play “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” on the harmonica, was described recently as being probably the meanest elephant in the United States. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had good reason.
The Easiest Way to Be Wrong Again
The conventional assumption of our culture is still that animals do not have any of the higher feelings of which we are capable, such as compassion and love and reverence for life. It can be difficult for us to see how tainted we might be by the culturally sanctioned misunderstanding that animals are only mechanical bundles of instincts and reflexes, with no hearts or souls. Few of us have had the opportunity to learn to respect them for what they are—creatures of marvelous complexity, beauty, and mystery.
The idea of animals as machines without feeling has held sway in the collective psyche for so long that it has acquired a momentum of its own. We have gotten stuck in a very deep mental rut, a habit from which it is not easy to uproot ourselves.
And habit, as Laurence Peter put it, is often “simply the easiest way to be wrong again.”
We have seen this mental habit given credence by the church and philosophical expression through thinkers such as Descartes. To him, the body and soul were completely separate; thinking and feeling were attributes of the soul, not the body, and the body itself was simply a machine.28 Since animals could not speak, it followed for Descartes that they had no soul and so could not feel. According to Descartes’s point of view, which still permeates the psychic atmosphere of our times, all the nonhuman animals, from the ants up to what he called the “ape-machines,” have no capacity for ideas, freedom of action, choice, knowledge of any kind, or feeling. They are merely robots, driven by instincts. He likened animals to watches and clocks, with wheels, springs, gears, and weights. Marvelously contrived though they might be, they are, said Descartes, “mere automatons.”29
Descartes would sometimes kick his dog, just to “hear the machine creak.”
Do Animals Suffer?
I’m sorry to say that the point of view that animals are only machines, and thus incapable of suffering, is still very much with us today. It is part of our cultural heritage, and I am still frequently amazed as I discover how conditioned I am by it. In the culture at large, it is so taken for granted that it is rarely questioned.
I don’t know if the gentlemen of Kewaskum, Wisconsin, are still enjoying their annual Kiwanis turkey shoots. But I know that as of 1971 they had not felt any compunction about their annual “fun and games.” What, you may wonder, could be amiss in the “sport” from which the Kiwanis Club members derived so much amusement? Well, turkeys, those great birds who so astounded the Pilgrims when they first arrived in this land, may not be the smartest of God’s creatures, but with a dignity all their own they have long been a symbol of the New World for many Europeans seeking freedom. Dignity notwithstanding, at the annual Kiwanis festival they were tied into stalls by the legs in such a way that their heads were exposed as a target for the participants in the “gala” event. The birds couldn’t do anything to free themselves and they were shot at again and again by the drunken celebrants. In fact, they were tied in such a way as to guarantee that if they broke their wings or legs in their struggle to save their lives, as they often did, their heads would nevertheless be kept jiggling and exposed to the aim and merriment of the “brave” hunters.30
Champions of the idea that other animals don’t feel pain as we do say that animals operate entirely from instinct. Thus the Kiwanis marksmen felt no more pangs of conscience than they would if the turkeys whose heads they gaily shot off were made of cardboard. They probably honestly believed turkeys don’t suffer.
But a reliance on instincts is very different from a lack of ability to feel pain. The capacity to feel pain has an obvious survival value to any species, enabling it to avoid sources of injury. It is with our senses and nervous systems that we feel pain, not with our capacity for abstract thought. The nervous systems of nonhuman animals are finely tuned to their environments. Their senses, in many cases, are vastly more sensitive and refined than our own. Physiologically, there is no basis at all for saying that animals don’t feel pain. In fact, in The Spectrum of Pain, Richard Serjeant writes:
Every particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sensations at least as acute as our own. Apart from the complexity of the cerebral cortex (which does not directly feel pain) their nervous systems are almost identical to ours and their reactions to pain remarkably similar…31
The senses of animals often make ours look pathetic in comparison. For example, the cells essential for smelling are ethmoidal cells. We have about five million of these in our noses. A German shepherd, by way of contrast, has about 200 million. And when it comes to hearing, once again we pale in comparison. The German shepherd can hear sounds clearly at 200 yards that we cannot detect at a mere 20. Even the much maligned shark has enormously sensitive hearing. An Australian named Theo Brown has taken advantage of this fact to develop a musical shark repellent. He conceived the idea when he discovered that if he played fox trots or waltzes the sharks were attracted from great distances, but if he played rock music they left at once.32
We All Need Love
Proponents of the attitude that animals are ours to use, while sometimes acknowledging that animals may experience pain at a physical level, assert that they are not capable of suffering as we know it because their pain has no meaning to them. It is, say these “experts,” just sensation. Accordingly, animals can’t suffer as we can because their sensations of pain have no emotional meaning for them.
I don’t agree. There are many kinds of emotional suffering that we human beings have the ability to experience and all are connected, in one way or another, to our capacity to feel with other beings. And animals have that capacity.
There is a relationship between the capacity of a being to love and its capacity to suffer, regardless of its species. If a being, of whatever species, has the capacity to give and receive love, then certainly it will suffer if that capacity is thwarted. This is one of the reasons all the wisdom traditions of the world teach us that a sure way to make yourself miserable is not to express your love.
We need both to receive and to give love. Love is food for our souls, and without it we suffer greatly, just as we suffer physically if we starve. Have you ever watched an infant carefully, while it is being stroked and petted? We all know babies love and thrive on this kind of attention, but have you ever looked closely at the physiological changes they undergo? There is a distinct and well-defined pattern in their young nervous systems. The heart rate slows down, muscles relax, peristaltic waves increase, and digestive juices flow. Among other things, these changes allow for the formation of the crucial mother-child bonding. And so if the little one is not petted and stroked, and thus does not undergo these physiological changes, the bonding will not occur.
One of the results of this is that the little human baby will have a hard time establishing social bonds in its later life. Another result when an infant is deprived of touching is that it literally shrivels. Because its digestive juices are not fully activated, it fails to receive proper nourishment and so its physical growth is retarded. The little one will do the best it can to survive under the circumstances, and this may mean developing what we call neurotic or, in extreme cases, psychotic symptoms, in