The Animal Manifesto (7 page)

In the hustle-bustle of our days, it’s so easy to dismiss this sort of encounter. It’s easy to forget that, globally speaking, we ‘ve intruded into the homes and lives of our fellow animals and that this incessant and unrelenting trespassing will only continue as humans grow in numbers and available habitat dwindles. Getting out into nature reminds us how lucky we are to see and feel the presence of animals, and it can remind us that this land is their land, too. So is the air they breathe and on which they soar and the water in which they feed and frolic. We need to make room for other animals. I like what author Terry Tempest Williams wrote in
Finding Beauty in a Broken World
as she reflected on watching black-tailed prairie dogs: “They are teaching me what it means to live in community.”

We know we need to coexist. But coexistence involves many intricate, difficult ethical choices. We can’t even agree among ourselves if there are right or wrong answers to certain questions, such as: Should we kill nonnative red foxes to save endangered native birds? Should we shoot feral goats whose grazing threatens certain plants with extinction? To
what degree should we make environmental changes that benefit us but are a detriment to individuals, or to a particular species? To what degree should we limit human society so that animals or a species can thrive? How do we value animals and nature?

Expanding our compassion footprint means thinking of animal welfare in our smallest routine decisions. John Hadidian, author of
Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living with Wildlife
and the director of urban wildlife programs for the U.S. Humane Society, believes we can always do more to form a community and coexist with our wild neighbors. Many of the things we can do are really simple. For example, raccoons tend to go for corn when it ripens. Rather than trap or kill the raccoon, Hadidian suggests leaving a radio “tuned to an all-night talk show” out in the garden on the nights just before harvest. He reminds gardeners that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act protects most species of birds; killing birds to protect a garden may be breaking the law even as it fails to solve the problem. Woodchucks are a classic case; if you don’t alter the burrow system or protect against reinvasion, others will come back.

We must all accept that our living space encroaches on that of other animals; we should expect to see animals, and learn to recognize and address potential conflicts with them before they happen. Where I live encroaches on the terrain of mountain lions and many other carnivores, including coyotes, red foxes, and black bears. The likelihood of my meeting one of these beasts is fairly high, but in my many years living in the foothills above Boulder, none of these wild, and potentially dangerous, animals has ever caused me harm. The animals allow me to come and go as I please. Indeed, recent studies of mountain lions living around Thousand Oaks, California, show that “lions, which feed primarily on mule deer, are posing no threat to people or to their pets and show no desire to be ‘urbanized.’
. . . They are doing the best they can to stay out of the way. . . . Mountain lions see people more than people see them.”

Much happens in the complex lives of our animal kin to which we’re not privy, but when we’re fortunate to see animals at work, how splendid it is. Red foxes entertain me regularly by playing outside of my office or on my deck. When it’s hot and dry, they queue up on my deck to drink any water that has collected in indentations after a storm. One morning when I was riding my bicycle up Flagstaff Mountain near my house, a young fox ran alongside me and playfully nipped at my heels. Foxes and other animals seem extremely comfortable sharing my home range with me, having habituated to my presence over the years. And really I was the one who moved into
their
home. Somebody had redecorated and disrupted their habitat by building my house in the middle of their living and dining rooms.

I’ve also been lucky. Nature doesn’t hold court at our convenience, and I’ve survived a series of unplanned encounters with various animals. I once had a young male black bear casually stroll onto my deck and try to swat open the screen door that leads to my dining room, where I happened to be eating dinner at the time. He stepped back when he couldn’t get the door to open, looked at me, and just hung out until I went to the door and asked him what he thought he was doing. He continued to look at me, shrugged as if he couldn’t care less about my being there, and wandered down the hill to rest under my neighbor’s hammock.

On July 1, 2008, as I was preparing for a long trip to Budapest, Hungary, I opened my front door and heard some loud footsteps on my deck. I knew that it wasn’t the usual entourage of foxes who show up around five o’clock to take a drink out of
the water bucket and then look for an inattentive mouse who might be caught unawares. I was right. I confronted a large black bear. Perhaps he’d come to say good morning and now was hanging out, waiting for what I’m not sure. He just sat and looked as happy as could be. I know better than to toss food over my porch or to leave garbage outside. To get to my car, I have to walk about a hundred feet up a hill, but I really couldn’t with the bear right there, so I waited until he meandered off to see what treats my neighbor might have. Ten days later, when I returned home from my trip around midnight, I stepped in a pile of fresh bear poop left right at my front door. Welcome home!

Mountain lions have also visited my home with little or no hesitation. Or, more accurately, after someone built a house in the middle of where they live, they have become extremely comfortable sharing their home range with me. Lions and I truly are close neighbors, so it’s not surprising that I’ve had some very close encounters with them. Once, in fact, I almost fell over a huge male as I walked backward to warn some of my neighbors of his presence.

Sometimes we don’t know just how lucky we are that other animals have allowed us to live in their homes and allowed us to coexist with them. We ought to pay them the same favor and make room for them in our own lives. This land is their land, too.

“It is remarkable how often the sounds that birds make suggest the emotions that we might feel in similar circumstances: soft notes like lullabies while calmly warming their eggs or nestlings; mournful cries while helplessly watching an intruder at their nests; harsh or grating sounds while threatening or attacking an enemy. . . . Birds so frequently respond to events in tones such as we might use that we suspect their emotions are similar to our own.”

— Alexander Skutch,
The Minds of Birds

IF ANIMALS COULD CONVINCE HUMANS
of only one thing with their manifesto, it would be that they think and feel. Animals are sentient, and they care about what happens to them. In their various ways, animals are passionate, deliberate, logical, self-aware, and have individual personalities.

Animals are, in other words, a lot like humans, even if they are not the same as humans. The emotions of our fellow animals are not necessarily identical to ours, and there’s no reason to think they should be. Their hearts and stomachs and kidneys differ from ours, and those of one species differ from those of another species, but this doesn’t stop us from recognizing that animals have hearts, stomachs, and kidneys that serve the same functions as ours. There’s dog-joy and chimpanzee-joy and pig-joy, and dog-grief, chimpanzee-grief, and
pig-grief. Just because other animals feel differently does not mean that those animals don’t feel.

At a meeting in Palermo, Italy, a biologist told me about his dog, who for twelve years was friends with a mule. After the mule died, the dog followed the cart in which the corpse was being carried, and when the mule was buried, the dog slowly walked over to the grave of his friend and wailed. The biologist had never seen his dog do this before. The biologist told me that before my lecture on animal emotions, he ‘d been hesitant to tell this story. After all, how could he know what his dog’s behavior meant, if anything? But after hearing stories of animals ranging from turtles to magpies to elephants who displayed grief, he was now certain his dog had also grieved the loss of his longtime friend.

Anthropomorphism
is attributing human characteristics to animals and inanimate objects. Is this what we’re doing when we sense that animals are expressing sadness, anger, or joy? Are we just projecting human emotions onto them? It’s a valid concern. Humans have a history of solipsism, seeing anger in a hot wind and malice in shark attacks. We have a way of making everything about us.

In this case, though, we more often make the opposite mistake: we prefer to discount what is right before our eyes and consistently underestimate what animals know, do, think, and feel. Consider, for instance, that our human likes and dislikes are in fact useful; they help us make successful choices and move through the world, and animals have the same type of emotional compass. Further, animal feelings aren’t private,
hidden, or secret. The emotional lives of animals are very public. Animals display exactly how they feel about what is happening to them. Instead of recognizing this for what it is, scientists especially have argued that we can’t “know” what animals think and feel. Yet today, this is no longer simply a conservative interpretation of the scientific data; it is an excuse to retain the status quo and prop up the idea of human superiority. Historically, humans have differentiated themselves as higher than other animals in large part based on the special quality of our feelings and thoughts. However, denying animal emotions now flies in the face of a growing mountain of solid, challenging, and exciting scientific research — more of which is appearing almost every day.

For example, mammals share the same brain structures that are important in processing emotions; this alone suggests that they serve a similar function. Interestingly, as we rehabilitate animals who have experienced trauma in zoos or through habitat encroachment, we are finding that many psychological treatments for humans also can work for animals, precisely because of our shared neural structures. In a 2008 essay in the
New York Times,
James Vlahos wrote about “pill-popping pets.” He noted that we give the same pills to animals that we give to ourselves to relieve their psychological distress and trauma, such as abuse, aggression, separation anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Vlahos asks: “If the strict mechanistic Cartesian view were true — that animals are essentially flesh-and-blood automatons, lacking anything resembling human emotion, memory and consciousness — then why do animals develop mental illnesses that eerily resemble human ones and that respond to the same medications? What can behavioral
pharmacology teach us about animal minds and, ultimately, our own? “

Birds are quickly being recognized as equal to mammals in terms of cognitive ability. Magpies have a sense of self and some birds plan future meals. Burrowing owls attract their favorite beetle meals by placing mammal dung around their homes, and New Caledonian crows are better than chimpanzees at making and using tools. We know that all birds have a similar version of what is called the language gene, FOXP2. In the zebra finch, its protein is 98 percent identical to ours, differing by just eight amino acids. Constance Scharff at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany, discovered that levels of FOXP2 expression are highest during early life, which is when most of their song learning occurs. In canaries, birds who learn songs throughout their lives, levels of this protein increase annually and reach their peak during the late summer months, when they rework their songs.

We’re trained to think our personal impressions are too subjective, and therefore must not be right, but when it comes to animal emotions, this assumption is wrong. Extensive research by ethologist Françoise Wemelsfelder and her colleagues has shown that even regular folks (as opposed to trained scientists) do a consistently accurate job of identifying animal emotions. Research by Audrey Schwartz Rivers, who runs animal-assisted programs for at-risk youth, agrees with Wemelsfelder, and other researchers have come to the same conclusion — whether people are observing wolves, dogs, or cats, they discern emotions nearly as well as trained researchers. This means that animal emotions really aren’t well hidden and that humans have a natural ability to discern emotions in other species.

Animals aren’t emotional beings because we want them to be but because they must be for their own survival — just like us. And what is so interesting is that our intuitions are being strongly supported by scientific research — science is finally catching up with what we ‘ve sensed all along.

There’s so much going on right now in the field of cognitive ethology — or the study of animal minds — that it’s hard to keep up. Did you know that monkeys teach their kids to floss their teeth? That magpies recognize their reflection? That bees display consciousness, and crabs don’t just feel pain but remember it? Each of these discoveries is exciting on its own, but taken together, they drive home the truth that animals think and feel, just in their own various, distinctive, marvelous, surprising ways.

However, it’s worth remembering that it’s only for humans that this remains headline news. Animals, if they could, would no doubt tell us much more about their abilities, and humans have had ample evidence for a long time. Consider, for instance, the ability of cormorants to count: since the 1930s, certain Chinese fishermen have used cormorants to catch fish for them. This cooperative arrangement is striking in itself, but in the 1970s, a researcher discovered that some fishermen rewarded their birds by allowing them to eat a fish after every seventh fish caught. Once each cormorant had caught his or her quota, the bird would not fish again or even move till he or she was fed the fish. As the researcher noted, “One is forced to conclude that these highly intelligent birds can count up to seven.”