… and vice-versa?
July 5th, 2007Commenting a recent article where I wrote about treating people more like animals (i.e. as irrational beings), Emily pointed out the fact that too many people believe animals have no feelings. If you are one of these people, please stick with treating people like people.
Why is it that humans often believe animals have no feelings? Are we stupid enough that we apply the same reasoning in this domain as when we were kids and believed spiders did not mind having their legs plucked because we did not hear them scream? Probably. Just because a cat cannot moan does not mean it feels no pain when it is sick. Just because a dog does not sob all day in the couch, looking blankly at the TV set and using up two full boxes of tissues does not mean it does not feel depressed. Just because a cow cannot say ‘I violently object to having my newborn taken away so that you can continue to milk me!’ does not mean she is indifferent to being separated from her calf.
As a matter of fact, I believe exactly the contrary. I am but an amateur in human and animal psychology, but my gut feeling is that our feelings (precisely) have nothing to do with our humanity. Fear, anger, love, joy, anxiety, exhileration, despair, hope: they do not need language, they do not need culture, they do not need reason. I strongly believe that all our deep feelings, those that are immediate — as in ‘requiring no mediation’– have an animal origin. They were there first. Our sophisticated language, our proud culture, and our victorious reason, are like a shipful of European explorers making a landing on a terra incognita: they put names on feelings with the intention of possessing and dominating them, but it cannot change the truth that feelings were there first.
Language, culture, reason: humanity came afterwards and vainly attempted to colonize feelings that had been inherited from our animal nature. We try to build rational enclosures, language walls and cultural cells to keep our feelings under control, but they break away repeatedly, like a herd of wild horses frightened by stray dogs and jumping over the fence. I find it ironic that all those noble exaltations of the soul that our romantic writers placed on a high pedestal are probably just the remainder of our lowly simian extraction. I wonder how Châteaubriand or Byron would feel about all this.
If feelings were there first, other animals have them too — or more accurately, we have them too. Probably not exactly the same feelings — by the way, if I am not myself quite sure I can describe exactly what I feel, I cannot expect to know what my neighbour feels, let alone another species — but feelings nonetheless. The violence of their feelings is very certainly completely independent from the means of expression they have. Dogs are very expressive, but I am not sure a cat has less feelings: it’s just that a dog, as a social animal, has an interest in making his feelings known to the other dogs. A cat is a lonely animal: why would he share his feelings at all?
Therefore, although many animals have very few means to convey their feelings, I am certain they have such feelings. And when we consider mammals (or at least great apes), I think our feelings are extremely similar to theirs. Even our fear of death is very probably completely animal, which means that there is absolutely no reason an animal does not fear death just like we do.
There is no way we can be sure. But look at this as a (minor) Pascal’s wager: I may be stupid to believe animals have feelings when they haven’t, but I will be cruel if I believe animals have no feelings when they have. I have made my choice.
All so true, and eloquently expressed. I completely agree.
I find this a difficult subject to discuss, since those who believe differently seem to have so much invested in convincing us that animals do not feel, cannot think, cannot experience pain or anguish. To those people I sometimes quote the writer Richard Nelson, who wrote Heart and Blood: Living With Deer in America. Nelson said that maybe he could never know empirically if animals could feel pain or suffer in the way humans do, but that “I am absolutely certain it is wise and responsible to behave AS IF these things were true.”
Maybe we really want to believe animals have no feelings when we think of everything we do to them, otherwise we could not bear the thought.
Your explanation of emotions is quite interesting and makes perfect sense to me; I like the idea of reason as what we use to try to make sense of and control emotions, which are older and came to us first.
Now if we are to go into paleopsychology, there is a lot of work to be done to distinguish and classify feelings between those that have a crocodilian origin, those that came with our mammalian branch of the family, those that go with our being primates, etc. I suspect it is much more complicated than that actually.
What a lovely essay on feelings. My mother, who is a Sufi, has an acquaintance in her community who is an ER nurse by day and an animal communicator in her free time–or she provides the service when requested, anyway. When Fiona was very sick and nothing we tried made her better, I called her. What she said about Fiona was true in my experience and so I began to trust what she would say about her illness. Much of what was said had to do with the way Fiona felt about things and what she knew about why she was sick…and she knew quite profound things. But there’s no doubt in my mind that animals experience emotion. What cracks me up is when we talk to them (or each other, for that matter) about it. As if speech, which we know is in fact lodged in a sector of the brain uninvolved with emotion, would somehow access feelings. And then I think, ‘but babies are not taught to cry when sick or upset; so vocalization is in fact, instinctive in some species…” ah. So it’s the words that are the issue.
Anyway. Lovely essay.
Thank you.
I believe our mistake lies in thinking that the only way to communicate is through words. Emotions, being such primal things (as you point out so correctly, they were there first, before us, before words) are extremely difficult to talk about. And much communication occurs through body language. I find it hard to believe that there are actually people who argue that animals have no feelings, when it is so patently obvious that Ruby is expressing unalloyed joy at my return when she leaps repeatedly into the air on the other side of the back door. The cat that gives you the long cold stare and then turns his back on you pointedly is feeling anger at some trespass you have committed. And anyone who thinks the cow doesn’t care about being separated from her calf has never gone through the period of nearly deafening absolute chaotic distress caused by weaning the calves.
Nice essay, Mandarine.
Of course, DesCartes told us all that animals feel no physical pain, a ludicrous idea. I can’t imagine how people can believe animals have no feelings (or even thoughts, for that matter), but I’ve definitley known people who will argue this point.
I remember going to the Bronx Zoo years ago and stopping by the chimpanzee “exhibit.” So many of the chimps were sitting around in what we has humans could immediately identify as “depressive postures.” It made me wonder how we can possibly believe these animals are happy to be in zoos. It also made me think, “Well, I recognize a depressive posture in a chimp, because they’re so similar to humans genetically. But who’s to say the giraffe and the elephant weren’t also displaying depressive postures?” I can’t go to zoos now, even though I know a lot of them (including the Bronx Zoo) are actually doing all kinds of wonderful things to save animal species, as well as to educate us stupid humans, so that we’ll care more about other species.
Healingmagichands: being capable of unbiased observation is a quality that few humans are endowed with.
Emily: for all the respect I have for his ‘discours de la méthode’, I am deeply dissatisfied with Descartes. It is as if he wrote the ‘discours’, and then forgot everything in it (about e.g. doubting absolutely anything before making one’s mind) and fell into the usual pitfalls of his century.
Well, with all those great thinkers, you almost always have to throw out the dirty bathwater and keep the baby, hoping he’ll grow into something that changes the world. Some of them have dirtier water than others. Descartes’s was really pretty clean.
You mean, in comparison to Nietzsche?
Certainly fear and aggression are animal instincts in us - the fight or flight responses works from what we might call our lizard brain, and it’s relatively immune to being calmed down by words. We’ve got to get out of the situation before it’s happy. But I’m not so sure about animals having the range and the nuance in emotions that humans do. And I don’t believe they can alter their emotions the way we can, and deal with them. So yes, I agree that animals have emotions, but I still think there are degrees of possession that differentiate us.
Thank goodness there are. I would so hate to have all these feelings but not the words and the conscience that can be really helpful in dealing with them. Just like when we go to the doctor’s and are relieved to know we just have an ordinary cold (even though it still hurts), it is much more comfortable to be able to identify frustration, jealousy, bitterness or euphoria in addition to feeling them.