The Animal Manifesto (12 page)

Nearly anyone who has cared for a companion animal (or pet) knows that animals are capable of love and compassion. Domestic animals exhibit these qualities so naturally and
powerfully that they are enlisted in numerous programs to help heal and care for humans, to bring happiness and joy to those who are sick, disabled, elderly, or otherwise alone. Dogs, for example, are taken to assisted-living homes and catalyze happiness in people who have little else in their lives. Dogs and other animals also bring joy to troubled children and adults. They truly are our companions, helping us through difficult times — failing health, the loss of friends and family members — just as we do for them. In his memoir
Dog Years,
poet Mark Doty describes his moving relationship with his two dogs, Arden and Beau, trying to understand and express the complexities of cross-species love, compassion, communication, and understanding. Doty eloquently describes how his dogs helped heal and care for him and his partner during their emotional and physical illnesses, and how Doty later did the same for his dogs as they grew old and died. Consider a study conducted by psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler: she wanted to observe the responses of young children to the distress of a family member, so she went into the homes of a number of families and observed how children reacted to parental distress. However, the behavior of the household pet turned out to be just as interesting as the behavior of the child. When a family member feigned sadness or distress — when he or she pretended to cry or choke — the household dogs would often show more concern than the children, hovering nearby or nudging their owners, or gently resting their head on the distressed person’s lap. In a completely different study, one focused on alleviating stress, Karen Allen, a researcher at the School of Medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo, also discovered that our pets might actually provide better support and reassurance than our loved ones.

When it comes to our pets and domestic companions, if the question is “Are animals capable of compassion and empathy?” then it seems we have already answered it.

As we ‘ve seen, scientists have a hard time coming up with rigorous, replicable experiments to measure emotion, empathy, and love. Indeed, what’s in an individual’s heart is hard to quantify, and is often inexpressible, even among humans who share language, culture, and history. What do we find when we look into the eyes of our spouse, our children, anyone we love?

For this reason, evidence for compassion between animals often relies on anecdote and subjective impressions. Let me share two stories that exemplify this and that highlight the power of eyes. The first was sent to me by Alexandria Neonakis, who wrote in an email:

My entire life has been touched by birds. I am fascinated by them. I’m one of those people who will scream “Oh my God!” and stop on a highway if I see an osprey or a hawk flying overhead. As a twentythree year old, my friends find this kind of funny. They always get a bit of a shock when I yell and pull to the side of the road, and they always sort of give me a bored/exasperated look and roll their eyes at me with the obligatory, “It’s just a bird, Alex.” But to me, birds are something special.

When I was in the tenth grade, I got my first real taste of heartbreak. I was staying with my grandmother while my mom was camping with my siblings.
Walking along a street, I saw a bird in the middle of the road. Assuming it was dead, I kept walking, but out of the corner of my eye, as I passed it, I noticed it move its head. I looked back, but at that moment a car was coming. It passed over it, narrowly missing him. He made a small squeaking noise, so I rushed over and put my hand down toward it, not really knowing what to expect. He immediately jumped into my hands. I was startled at first. He was a starling, and this was not normal behavior for a bird. I pulled him close to me and sat on the side of the road to inspect him. He had been hit by a car. His wings were badly mangled. As I held him in my hands, I could feel his heart thumping against my fingertips. I could tell he was scared. So I started to sing to him really softly and pet his back. He looked up at me and watched me as I sang to him. I could feel him calming down, and he became kind of inquisitive, looking at me, cocking his head to the side, kind of like a puppy does. I continued to rub his back. Then in an instant, a change came over him. His heart rate was slowing. I could feel it. He looked at me and his eyes said something that I couldn’t explain in that moment. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. He closed them slowly, and died in my hands. I held him for a long time after he died, singing softly to him, and rubbing his back. Then I carried him home and buried him under a bush in my grandmother’s garden.

I thought long and hard about what had happened in the instant before he died. There was something about the way he looked at me. It was gratitude. But it
wasn’t the gratitude a human feels toward another human, or even that which a bird feels toward another bird. It was the gratitude shared only between him and I. It was him thanking me for letting him finally calm down enough to just let go and die, as he was too afraid to calm down enough to just let it happen, as he sat on the road watching death pass over him every few seconds.

Shannon Griffith sent me the following, equally moving story:

Last winter I was walking my dog in the woods near my home. He ended up chasing this gull that was sitting down by the water into a thicket bush. This gull was all tangled up, and the briars were in knots around his wings. I could not have left him because he would have surely been dinner for some other hungry animal. I approached this bird — who was very scared and hissing and trying to peck me with his bill — and I tried to unwrap his wings. I then quietly said to him, “It’s okay, I am here to help.” And he immediately stopped moving, hissing, and pecking. I think he understood me; maybe not my words, but the tone of my voice probably soothed him. I finally got him all untangled from the bushes, lifted him up in my arms — which was an amazing experience — and then he took off like an eagle from my hands. He looked back at me and stared, and it almost looked like he nodded his head. I knew by the way he looked back at me that he was saying “Thank you,” and I simply said, “You’re welcome.”

When it comes to our companion animals, the individuals with whom we share our homes, we all recognize that we have accepted an obligation to care for them, to show them compassion, to the end of their lives. But isn’t it equally true that the entire world is our home, and all beings share it, so that all beings have an obligation to care for one another? Isn’t this what the stories of Binti Jua and Shannon Griffith demonstrate — that all beings feel this obligation, and that it springs forth naturally, innately, even across species? When my dog buddy Jethro died in July 2002, I wrote an epitaph about his life I’d like to share:

Jethro never hesitated to tell me when it was time for a hike, dinner, or a belly rub. I was constantly on call for him, a large German shepherd/Rottweiler mix with whom I shared my home for twelve years. I rescued Jethro from the Humane Society in Boulder, but in many ways he rescued me.

As he got older, it became clear that our lives together soon would be over. The uninhibited and exuberant wagging of his whip-like tail, which fanned me in the summer, occasionally knocked glasses off the table, and told me how happy he was, would soon stop.

What should I do? Let him live in misery or help him die peacefully, with dignity? It was my call and a hard one at that. But just as I was there for him in life, I needed to be there for him as he approached death, to put his interests before mine, to help end his suffering,
to help him cross into his mysterious future with grace, dignity, and love. For sure, easier said than done.

Dogs trust us unconditionally. It’s great to be trusted and loved, and no one does it better than dogs. Jethro was no exception. But along with trust and love come many serious responsibilities and difficult moral choices. I find it easiest to think about dog trust in terms of what they expect from us. They have great faith in us; they expect we’ll always have their best interests in mind, that we ‘ll care for them and make them as happy as we can. Indeed, we welcome them into our homes as family members who bring us much joy and deep friendship.

We’re responsible for giving each and every individual the best life we can. Even in death we must let our friends go with compassion, empathy, and love, putting their interests ahead of our own. Because they’re so dependent on us, we ‘re also responsible for making difficult decisions about when to end their lives. I’ve been faced with this situation many times and have anguished trying to “do what’s right” for my buddies. Should I let them live a bit longer or has the time really come to say good-bye? When Jethro got old and could hardly walk, eat, or hold his water, the time had come for me to put him out of his misery. He was dying right in front of my eyes, and in my heart, I knew it. Even when eating a bagel he was miserable. His eyes had lost much of their luster and glee.

Finally, I chose to let Jethro leave Earth in peace. After countless hugs and “I love you’s,” to this day I swear that Jethro knew what was happening. When he

went for his last car ride, something he loved to do, he accepted his fate with valor, grace, and honor. And I feel he also told me that the moral dilemma with which I was faced was no predicament at all, that I had indeed done all I could and that his trust in me was not compromised one bit, but, perhaps, strengthened. I made the right choice and he openly thanked me for it. And he wished me well, that I could go on with no remorse or apologies.

Let’s thank our animal companions for who they are, let’s rejoice and embrace them as the amazing beings they are. If we open our hearts to them, we can learn much from their selfless lessons in compassion, humility, generosity, kindness, devotion, respect, spirituality, and love. By honoring our dogs’ trust, we tap into our own spirituality, into our hearts and souls.

And sometimes that means not only killing them with love, but also mercifully taking their lives when their own spirit has died and life’s flame has been irreversibly extinguished. Our companions are counting on us to be there for them in all situations, to let them go and not to let their lives deteriorate into base, undignified humiliation while we ponder our own needs in lieu of theirs. We are obliged to do so. We can do no less. Our commitment never ends.

Finally, here is a well-known passage by Harry Beston from his wonderful book
The Outermost House,
which summarizes poetically how our fellow animals might indeed ask humans to reconceive our life together:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

IF ANIMALS WROTE A MANIFESTO
, they would surely insist that they are not in competition with humans to dominate and control the world. Ecosystems thrive when they are in balance, and species that throw ecosystems out of balance usually suffer. No one is exempt from the wanton destruction that humans wreak on the planet and beyond. In fact, animals would, I believe, scoff at the still-prevalent idea among humans that “evolution” is essentially a “survival of the fittest” competitive game. The strongest and biggest species do not always prevail, nor could top-of-the-food-chain predators live long if every other link in that chain isn’t nurtured and respected. The reverse is also true, incidentally; we have discovered that when ecosystems lose their top predators, other species are thrown just as firmly out of balance and into jeopardy.

Instead, survival requires both competition and cooperation, selfishness and reciprocity. Compassion and empathy are also essential. We are apparently hardwired to understand that caring for others spills over to caring for ourselves. In the big picture, when all nonhuman beings thrive, we thrive too. It’s not really a dog-eat-dog world because dogs don’t eat other dogs.

What this means is that if we nurture our connection with animals and care for them better, we humans will benefit directly. The “animal manifesto” this book represents would, if adopted, improve the lives of all animals, including humans. For instance, I feel very close to most animals, but this doesn’t distance or alienate me from other humans. In fact, over the years I feel that I have become more aware of the human condition as a result of my devotion to the plight of animals. Compassion begets compassion. As we develop compassion, we expand our moral circle to include all animals and people; this is the ultimate goal of expanding our compassion footprint.

This concept of interdependence is not new. Thomas Berry stresses that no living being nourishes itself; each is dependent on every other member of the community for nourishment and the assistance it needs for its own survival. This is likely the evolutionary seed of compassion, which as Dacher Keltner notes in
Born to Be Good,
is the central ethic of all world religions and spiritual philosophies — compassion generates more compassion and brings diverse peoples together. Keltner also reports that empirical research shows that exercising compassion makes people feel more connected to vulnerable groups, such as the homeless, the ill, and the elderly. This surely extends to nonhuman animals. Whenever we expand our compassion footprint, we only gain more
compassion, and we increase the likelihood that we ourselves will be met with kindness. We receive what we give.