By Claudia Martin
This talk is a religious talk. It is about the wonder and awe the human quest for knowledge and truth about life on this planet can give us. This knowledge can be a deeply spiritual experience. Our knowledge about animals is steadily growing.
The word animal has its root in the Latin word anima, which means soul or spirit. In my interpretation "soul" means the combination and interaction of a thinking mind and emotions. Translated into scientific terms, an animal is a living organism which has some sort of neural system, however primitive. Even a few milligrams will do.
Besides regulating bodily functions, a neural system registers and interprets sensory input and prompts action and reaction concerning the world outside the individual. Each animal harbors the spirit of life, the will to live. Thus, each animal has a soul. Plants are also living organisms but do not have a comparable neural system. All living organism on this planet share the genetic building blocks of DNA. This is our common heritage and on the genetic level we all speak the same language, brothers and sisters all. (Even the cactus in the desert!) The differences in DNA between humans and other mammals are relatively minor. The differences in abilities between humans and other animals are enormous. Although rudiments of most human abilities can be found in other animals, the difference lies in the quantity of abilities made possible by the complex human central nervous system. We certainly are unique in this respect.
Yet, we are connected to all other animals not just by DNA, but by our shared evolutionary heritage over an enormous time span, 450 million years. Imaging the wonder, that the same purple substance which enables us to see is already present in the light sensitive spots on an amoeba! Nature does not waste a good idea.
All animals can communicate with the outside world in some way. Even bacteria communicate with chemical messages. All multi cellular animals develop from fertilized eggs and grow into adulthood, they mate, they die. All of us, breathe, eat, digest, sleep, move about, and in different ways provide for our off-spring. We share many body features, internal organs and sensory organs. As recent research has discovered, all animals, in addition to mammals, have a certain capacity to learn, to remember, to make decisions, to have emotions and a will, even the lowly fruit fly, spider, octopus, and especially fish. I want to share with you the story of cleaner fish, who set up their cleaning station on coral rocks. Large fish of many species line up to be cleaned, that is the tiny cleaner fish eat the parasites and dead cells off the big fish. One cleaner fish can clean 1,000 big fish in a day. However, some of them cheat and take bites out of the big fish. Words gets around in fishdom and their cleaning stations are shunned. Not all is lost, however. The guilty cleaner fish performs a special dance around the back fins of the insulted customer and if the waiting lines get to be too long, they are given a second chance.
Animals with more developed nervous systems have shown a capacity of working together with others of their own species or even with other species. Another fish story: A school of groupers has been observed in a working relationship with an eel. If they felt like going fishing, they splashed the water next to the cave where the eel lived. The eel appeared. In close contact with the groupers, almost like friends, they swam together to an overhanging rock, where little fish hide. The eel slithered under and drove the little fish out, the groupers formed a barrier to avoid escapes,. ...and everybody had a fish fry (now I am anthropomorphizing!)
The forming of social units between individual animals is new dimension of cooperation. Social animals have rudimentary systems of rules for behavior in a group which they obey for the common good. This is a forerunner of human morality. They also at times go against the rules, have the ability for deception and stealing and for rivalry up to lethal combat, but also mechanisms of reconciliation and caring for others.
An example is the sharing behavior of vampire bats. They regurgitate blood obtained by their nightly forays to feed their unsuccessful kin and neighbors. However,some bats only take and never reciprocate. Their lack of social conscience is remembered and they don't receive charity anymore, till they reform and learn to share.
Besides life supporting concerns, many of us animals have the capacity for joy and suffering. Emotions are the motivators for initiating actions. Instead of being a strictly human capacity, rudimentary emotions are essential for all animal actions as well. Is this their "soul"?
Many animals are capable of recognizing cause and effect and can draw limited logical conclusions. I insert the story of a squirrel frustrated by a bird feeder hung on a string from a branch. The squirrel tried to pull up the string, but the feeder was too heavy. She sat ten minutes in intense thought. Then she bit through the string and the feeder fell to the ground. Mission accomplished.
All animals are part of the interconnected web of life, a part of the food chain. Consider the present problem for our agriculture with the apparent demise of honey bees. We need them badly. All creatures should have a right to exist even if their existence is sometimes detrimental to others. Do humans really need to use pesticides? The mechanisms of evolutionary selection will provide the weeding out of species which no longer fit into changed circumstances. But human interference is much too clumsy.
How far back do we all go? 600 million years ago in the Precambrium, the "Big Bang" of life occured. Single celled organisms cooperated to form larger multicellular organisms. What a fantastic happening! We should have a holiday to celebrate this event once a year! The first multi cellular organisms in shallow seas were jelly-like flat creatures, up to a foot long with many different designs. They were like fluid filled mattresses with many departments. They were stationary, did not have a digestive system. They received their energy through direct absorption of sunlight and seawater nutrients. It was a peaceful kingdom. Nobody ate anybody else. They could not. They had no mouth or anus. Scientists call them Vendobionts. They were neither animals nor plants and an evolutionary dead end. They lived and died. Only fossil records remain.
450 million years ago there was more oxygen available in the shallow seas. With an explosion of life, multi cellular animals developed who featured a division of labor by developing specific organs. They could move about, mate and eat each other. We animals were forever expelled from the peaceful Garden of Eden. The evolutionary cycle of eat and be eaten started.
Aggression and defense reinforced further development. This culminated in us humans, who are the most aggressive and destructive animals this planet has ever harbored. Fortunately, we are also the most imaginative, gifted creatures on earth, loving, creative, with a brain which now learns to understand itself. (So, all is not lost! We may even learn to control aggression.)
The very early animals already had rudimentary nervous systems. Did they have a soul? They certainly reacted to the world around them. Many of them were worm-like creatures. Charles Darwin in his later years studied and wrote a book about the intelligence of earth worms.He had great admiration for these creatures. Since his time, ten thousands of scientists all over the world have spent lifetimes studying particular animals and their behaviors. They discovered very complex behavior, active minds, and emotions.
Some world religions have always included animals as sentient beings in their worldview, have even made them into gods or sacred cows.
The Judeo-Christian religious convictions delegated animals to a "lower level". Only humans were supposed to have an eternal soul and to go to an afterlife. Only humans had the capacity to discern between good and evil and have a "free will". Cruel, negative behavior in humans was declared to be beastly, based on so-called lower instincts.
Pure reason was considered the shining domain of higher humanity. By contrast we
read in the Prologue to the drama Faust by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe how the devil talks derisively to God about humans. He states: "A little better would they live, if you had not given them the reflection of your heavenly light. They call it reason, but use it mainly to be more beastly than any beast." Think about that! Morality and empathy certainly is not limited to humans and humans fail just as often as they succeed in these areas. But from a Judeo-Christian religious viewpoint social relations as evidenced in a "moral sense" were considered to be an exclusively human capacity.
At the beginning of Western science in the Renaissance, Descartes declared animals as mere automatons, clockworks. The universe itself was regarded as a mechanical clockwork. Animal science was the victim of this view for centuries. The concept of "instinct" as a lower, automated motivator of animal behavior has dominated animal science even to the middle of the 20th century. Nowadays the term "instinct" is rather replaced by the term "genetic hardwiring", to borrow a term from computer technology. All animal brains, including humans', are equipped with hardwired reactions. Life would not be possible without these shortcuts. Life also would not be successful without the ability to assess the environment, to learn and to remember the lessons. Some of these lessons will also become fixated in the brain.
For many decades research into animal behavior was limited to laboratory studies, some of which we now consider unethical. Animals were kept isolated in barren cages, in a deprived, unnatural environment. Animal babies were raised without mothers and without contact with their own kind. The experimenters expected animals to conform to human-chosen tests, which often did not take into consideration the innate abilities of the test animal. They were subjected to electric shocks as negative reinforcement, or food as the only reward for pushing buttons and recognizing shapes. Researchers were extremely careful not to "antropomorphize', that is to read human emotions into animal behavior. Animals were not given names but numbers, like human prisoners dehumanized by being known by number only. They were treated solely as research objects without consideration to their feelings and personalities. Studies with rats were a favorite substitute for learning about human brain functions directly. One famous experiment had a rat press a button to obtain food, which action also at random dealt out an electric shock to a neighboring rat. The button-pushing rats stopped soon and went without food even for days, distressed over the screams of their fellows. Did the rats feel empathy? This experiment was also done with human students, who in obedience to the professor dealt out stronger and stronger shocks to their fellows. The human experiment had to be stopped.
Researchers who found emotional kinship with animals were ridiculed. However, during the last thirty years animal research finally went into the field, to study animals in their natural environments. Leaders of this new direction were female scientists like Jane Goodall, and Dian Fossey with their primate research in Africa, and Cynthia Moss with elephant studies. This is a much harder undertaking than laboratory work. It is based on individual observation of incidents, which in the normal life of any animal often cannot be repeated as a laboratory experiment can.
A lot of animal behavior facts are necessarily obtained through anecdotal evidence. But ten thousands of reports about behavior from field studies could no longer be rididuled as anthropomorphic and emotionally slanted observations. Quite on the contrary, human empathy had a much better chance to identify with and understand animal behavior. The individual personhood of animals was realized and to a certain degree celebrated. From now on, we know that we are no longer alone as sentient beings.
All lives are lived in time sequences which form a life history. Repeatable laboratory experiments cannot tell those ever-changing stories, although they are invaluable in establishing the mechanism of life. All of us are to some extent genetically determined clockworks as well as ever-changing individuals. Animal research has entered dimensions of sheer delight in the kinship of us all, with researchers reveling in the discoveries of individual "smartness" of the spiders or groundhogs they are studying. Pet owners have always have known that and countless anecdotal books are written about animal behavior. It is significant, that children's picture books to a large percentage have animals as characters, animals who speak and act like humans, from Babar, the elephant, to Charlotte, the spider. Television commercials are particularly successful if they use animals. It is so essential for humans to feel the kinship with other animals. At a university robotics lab a robot was built which could imitate emotions and express them in its eyes and wire-dimensioned face. Interestingly, it did not evoke emotional response in humans until it was covered with fur in a cute animal shape.
Instead of the fear of unscientific anthropomorphism in biological science, a whole new field of understanding has been opened up by researchers being able to empathize with animal emotions, as expressed in body language, actions, habits, courtship and parenthood. We can emphasize also with animal intelligence as shown in decision making and ability to learn and memorize learning. For a while, man, the tool and weapon maker, was thought to be unique among animals, but there are many animals who use their own bodies, sticks, thorns, rocks as tools to obtain food or as weapons. For instance, gorillas fasten large leaves to their foot soles with sticks between the toes, to avoid thorny patches. Dolphins use sponges to protect against spiny prey. The examples are endless.
Is man unique in using language? Animals have many ways of exchanging information. They can even understand the signals of other species. Years ago fruitless efforts were made by experimenters to teach Chimpanzees human language. Their vocal organ was not suited, but they had the brain capacity to learn sign language. What hubris to think that animals are interested in learning to push buttons and to respond to our requests! We cannot learn the language of bees, of sonar operating bats, of scents 100,000 times more subtle than we can detect.
Self-recognition is another threshold put up between humans and other animals. Typical experiments are whether animals can recognize themselves in a mirror. Apes and Elephants can and some birds. But do animals really define their selfhood visually? Some animals may define their selfhood by smells. Instead of Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am," a dog might define his selfhood by " I stink, therefore I am." Animals certainly can discern the selfhood and personalities of other living beings.
Man, the culture-maker, is also not unique. Culture is the transmission of learned behavior or knowledge through generations. Some social animals have developed special habits in specific small groups and handed them down through generations, while other groups of the same species did not. An example is the behavior of a group of dolphins in a specific Brazilian bay. There a group of dolphins has a fishing cooperative with local fishermen. When the dolphins detect a school of fish they splash their tails, the fishermen throw their nets at the place indicated, the dolphins catch those fish escaping from under the net. This method has been handed down for over 150 years from one generation of dolphins to the next, but only at a specific location.
Another question: Do only humans have a sense of beauty? I don't think so. Consider the choice of a mate. Many male animals have to go to great length to display colorful feathers, or large horns, fabulous tails or songs to be chosen. This makes life more risky for them, but oh, the rewards!
Animals do not seem to have knowledge of their own death, except fear when in danger. They can discern between dead and living objects. Animals can mourn the loss of offspring or mates, but a concept of past and future most likely is not present in animal brains. Maybe they are lucky.
Humans can learn from other animals, from animal child-rearing practices, their processes of learning, handling of aggression and reconciliation. Above all, humans do not have a god-given right for dominion over all other life on earth. More insights into animal life and empathy with animals hopefully will teach us more respect.
"All God's creatures have a place in the choir!"
Recommended books:
Wild Minds, What Animals Really Think, by Marc Hauser
Becoming a Tiger, How Baby Animals Learn, by Susan McCarthy