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© Davidson Loehr
January 28, 2007
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.
PRAYER
Let us fall into life – kicking, screaming, laughing, loving, let us fall into life.
Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the too comfortable, let us fall into life.
Let us land upright in life and go forward to try and make love more likely, understanding less underrated, peace more possible, violence more rare.
We have a favor to repay. For we have received as a gift of life – everything. Our life, love, hope, compassion, our feeling for those who suffer, the feeling that wants to help, to reweave the torn tapestry of life. All of these come with the gift of life which we have received.
All this and more have we received. And life asks that we return the favor, and give life, hope, love and peace to others, to all others we can reach.
Let us answer by saying, “We are here. We hear you. We feel you coursing through our veins. We feel the love of life; we are the love of life.”
Let us fall into life, fully alive, for more than anything our world needs people who have come alive.
Amen.
SERMON
I want to talk about emotions in us animals today: love, attachment, and grieving, passions from the heart of life. This is an area where it’s easy to find religious stories, fables, myths and children’s stories talking about these things, because They’re so important to us. You think of a saying like “God is Love,” “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” or Jesus” saying that the quality of your faith is judged by how you treat “the least among you,” whatever group that happens to be for you.
But you almost never hear these sayings applied to animals, just other people – and history shows the religious teachings haven’t done much there either. Just think of our wars, present and past.
Other cultures, formed in part by other religions, have a more natural inclusion of other animals as our kin. In Japan, there is a famous park called the Deer Park of Nara. It was set aside centuries ago as a sanctuary to experience the kinship of all living creatures. In this park, deer walk side by side with people.
In a pond near the Deer Park, Japanese Buddhists buy and release small fish in an ancient ceremony of setting life free. Small children come to the edge of the pond carrying a bowl containing a tiny goldfish. Parents and Grandparents stand by giving their blessings and encouragement as the children gently release the fish into the pond. In a flash of golden light the fish vanish. The children’s faces are full of wonder, for they have given the gift of freedom as the fish swim among their companions in the natural wonder of the pond. (Sharon Callahan, from http://www.anaflora.com/articles/oth-sharon/animal-bud.htm) And when I was in Thailand a few years ago, we visited a temple where people bought birds, in order to let them out of their cages.
But we have been taught that animals have neither intentions nor feelings, and that saying something like “the dog wants to go out,” or – even worse! – “my dog loves me” is committing one of science’s cardinal sins: anthropomorphizing. In other words, it’s ascribing to animals feelings that only humans could possibly have. As silly as this is, it has been with us and in our sciences for a long time. Most people trace it back to Rene Descartes. Animals, declared Descartes, are merely automata, responding mechanically to whatever stimuli confront them. Feelings are no part of the equation. (Humans are different, he said, because of the “ghost in the machine” – a divine inspiration that informs our nature, and ours alone.) (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 22)
Even today, in biomedical and other experiments done to dogs, monkeys, chimpanzees and other animals, it is easy to find scientists saying They’re sure the animals feel no pain.
Our blindness to our deep kinship with other species lets us treat them in awful ways – and, in the factory farms of cows, calves, chickens and others, in positively vulgar ways. But it also cuts us off from the connection with a larger picture of life that we need. I read part of an interview that Frans de Waal did with the NY Times several years back, and was struck when he said, “Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, “Doesn’t this guy have a dog?”” (Frans de Waal, interview, New York Times, 26 June 2001, from Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 102)
Do animals really have feelings like ours? Don’t ask a scientist, ask a pet-owner. Ask someone who’s been loved by a dog, and loved it back. Animals love, form attachments, and grieve at the loss of the one they loved, sometimes dying of grief. They can recognize and respond to the distress and loss of others, and seek to comfort them, and welcome reciprocal comfort. This is the Golden Rule in action, tens or hundreds of million years before there were humans.
In the last few years we have learned that there may be more communication between the human fetus and the mother than was previously thought possible. We know that the fetus hears sounds in the womb: similarly, in chickens information is communicated by the embryos inside the egg to the incubating hen. Even before birth the chick is capable of making sounds both of distress and of pleasure, to which the mother hen reacts. A day or so before hatching, the chick often utters distress peeps. The mother hen then moves her body on the eggs or makes a reassuring call to the embryo, which is followed by a pleasure call on the part of the chick. In other words, the bond between the chicks and the mother hen starts before birth. So it makes sense that a chick responds immediately after birth only to the calls of his mother. He recognizes her voice. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon p. 65)
A mother duck is usually silent while sitting on her eggs. But as soon as her unhatched chick inside the egg begins to peep, she too makes a quiet squeaking noise. Ducklings and mother ducks respond to each other’s calls before the eggs hatch. (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 189)
And what about the odd fact that a dog only wags his tail for something that has life? (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 187) You can have a machine give the dog its food, and the dog will eat the food, but won’t wag its tail at the machine. But it will wag its tail at people, even those who don’t give it food.
People who train dogs to do rescue work, such as finding people buried under an avalanche, or under rubble when a building collapses, say that the dogs need to find a certain number of people alive or they become so disappointed that they refuse to work any longer. After the bombing in Oklahoma City, a rescue worker found that her rescue dogs were becoming depressed at having no success, so she decided to plant a live person in the ruins for her dogs to find. This cheered the dogs up considerably, and they were happy to go back to work. The dogs weren’t doing the work just for treats: they wanted and needed to feel that they were saving live people. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 109)
What about love? It’s hard to say whether animals love, but sometimes it’s even hard to say whether people love. Perhaps the best we have to go on is the behaviors we can see.
Take the matter of long-term loving relationships. More than 90 percent of bird species are monogamous, and in many of them the pairs mate for life”. Fewer mammals are monogamous, and the nonhuman primates appear comparatively callous when it comes to commitment. Chimpanzee males, for example, don’t spend much time courting, mating, or remaining with a female whose young they’ve fathered. And if divorce statistics in our society are any indication (about half the marriages in the US dissolve), we ourselves are hardly role models of committed love. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 30)
Some animals are also good at keeping romance alive. In some monogamous species in which the same male and female breed from year to year, courtship is prolonged and vows need to be renewed. In coyotes and wolves, for example, males and females who mated previously may act like strangers the following mating season, and a new round of courtship and companionship is in order before they pair off again, rejecting all other suitors. Once their young are born they stay together, forming a true family unit, until next breeding time. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, pp. 30-31) Here, there seems to be an awareness of attraction, mixed with a spark that keeps it alive by insisting on a fresh courtship cycle every year. Sounds pretty advanced!
It’s also hard to imagine anything more tender than the nurturing that many animals lavish on their babies. To begin to grasp the depth of parental love, we need only watch a gorilla mother ceaselessly grooming and cuddling her infant, or a cat bathing her newborn kittens, or whales tirelessly escorting their calves and protecting them from predators. Animal mothers and in some species fathers, older siblings, aunts, uncles, and even cousins will feed youngsters, retrieve them if they stray, patiently teach them the skills they’ll need to survive. Their devotion is selfless and unflagging. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 31)
There have also been stories of animal emotions in the popular press. In one story, a troop of about one hundred rhesus monkeys in India, brought traffic to a halt after a baby monkey was hit by a car. The monkeys encircled the injured infant, whose hind legs were crushed and who lay in the road unable to move, and blocked all traffic. A government official reported that the monkeys were angry, and a local shopkeeper was quoted as saying, “It was very emotional – some of them massaged its legs. Finally, they left the scene carrying the injured baby with them.” (Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of animal play” p. 635)
In another incident, baboons in Saudi Arabia waited for three days on the side of a road to take revenge on a driver who had killed a member of their troop. The baboons lay in waiting and ambushed the driver after one baboon screamed when the driver passed by them. The angry baboons threw stones at the car and broke its windshield. (Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of Animal Play,” p. 635)
Did the monkeys love their baby? Did the baboons have a sense of outrage, justice or vengeance against the human who killed one of theirs? Is the Pope Catholic?
And if monkeys, baboons and others show behaviors we would call loving, what about love that extends not only to their kind, but even to other species? That’s going well beyond even the Golden Rule. Here’s a story about Joanne and Lulu. Joanne was a human, and Lulu was her 200 lb. pet Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.
Joanne was in her kitchen one afternoon, feeling unwell, when Lulu charged out of a doggie door made for a 20-pound dog, scraping her sides raw to the point of drawing blood. Running into the street, Lulu proceeded to draw attention by lying down in the middle of the road until a car stopped. Then she led the driver to her owner’s house, where Joanne had suffered a heart attack. She was rushed to the hospital, and the ASPCA awarded Lulu a gold medal for her heroism. Joanne knows in her bones that Lulu’s sixth sense saved her life.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 27)
But was it really heroism? Isn’t it simpler to call it love? That’s what we”d call it if Lulu were a human.
What did it require for Lulu to do what she did for Joanne? Obviously a commitment to her friend, some awareness of how to bring help, the desire to do so, and the ability. It seems unlikely that all this could have happened without conscious awareness of how to bring help, the desire to do so, and the ability. Yet we are unwilling to credit the pig with a thought like: “Oh dear, Joanne is in serious trouble. At whatever cost to my own well-being, I must bring her the kind of help that can save her life.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 27) But her behavior showed that those sensitivities, concerns, motives and abilities existed in her, as they have existed in animals for tens of millions of years before we came along.
And what if Lulu hadn’t been able to save Joanne? Do you think she would have grieved? Of course she would have. Animals have been grieving forever, as farmers and pet-owners have always known.
Konrad Lorenz, the great Austrian naturalist who spent his whole life living with and studying animals, once wrote that you can’t really do a good job of studying an animal unless you love it. He was famous for his experiment on imprinting, where he got a whole batch of baby greylag geese to imprint on him and follow him around as though he were their mother. After years of studying them, he wrote that “A greylag goose that has lost its partner shows all the symptoms that John Bowlby has described in young human children in his famous book Infant Grief”. The eyes sink deep into their sockets, and the individual has an overall drooping experience, literally letting the head hang.” (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 113)
There are a lot of stories of animals grieving, and we seem to recognize what They’re feeling immediately.
For example, here’s an interesting paragraph by Alexander Skutch, who at ninety-seven years of age was still conducting field research on birds in Costa Rica. In his book The Minds of Birds, Skutch wrote:
“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, 1996, pp. 41-42) from Marc Bekoff, “Evolution of Animal Play“
It’s how it sounds to some who work with birds. In the Rocky Mountains, biologist Marcy Cottrell Houle was observing the eyrie of two peregrine falcons, Arthur and Jenny, as both parents busily fed their five nestlings. One morning only the male falcon visited the nest. Jenny did not appear at all, and Arthur’s behavior changed markedly. When he arrived with food, he waited by the eyrie for as much as an hour before flying off to hunt again, something he had never done before. He called out again and again and listened for his mate’s answer. House struggled not to interpret his behavior as expectation and disappointment. Jenny did not appear the next day or the next. Late on the third day, perched by the eyrie, Arthur uttered an unfamiliar sound, “a cry like the screeching moan of a wounded animal, the cry of a creature in suffering.” The shocked House wrote, “The sadness in the outcry was unmistakable; having heard it, I will never doubt that an animal can suffer emotions that we humans think belong to our species alone.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 91)
Cynthia Moss, who has studied elephants in Africa for over 35 years, describes (in Elephant Memories) the response of elephants in Amboseli National Park when a poacher’s bullet entered the lungs of a young female, Tina. After the herd had escaped from danger, Tina’s knees started to buckle, and the others leaned into her so as to keep her upright. She slipped beneath them nonetheless, and died with a shudder.
Teresia and Trista, her mother and sister, became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and one even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth.
Afterward, the others sprinkled earth over the carcass, then went of into the surrounding bushes to break off branches, which they placed over Tina’s body. By nightfall the corpse was almost completely buried. When the herd moved off next morning, Teresia was the last one to leave. Facing the others with her back to her dead daughter, she reached behind herself and felt Tina’s body with her hind foot several times before she very reluctantly moved off. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 53-54)
Marc Bekoff, another scholar who teaches at the University of Colorado and has lived in Boulder for three decades, works mostly with wolves and coyotes. He wrote about a pair of foxes that lives near him, had been together for several years. One day as he was leaving, he saw that some animal had killed the male fox, and the female was digging dirt on it, to cover it. Several hours later when he returned, she had completely covered the body of her dead mate. It looks like we didn’t invent the idea of burying our dead, doesn’t it?
So elephant mothers and whole communities grieve for the loss of a young one. Orphan elephants who saw their mothers being killed often wake up screaming. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 113)
And perhaps the most important part of this is that the love, attachment, and grieving aren’t restricted to their own species. They seem to happen with whatever we have loved or been loved by. Some of these stories come from animals that bonded with animals of another species – like some of the chimpanzees that were raised by humans back in the 1970s when this was in vogue.
Roger Fouts, the man who began teaching the chimpanzee Washoe American Sign Language in 1967 and is still with her at his university in Washington state, tells several stories of watching young chimpanzees raised by humans dying of grief, or a terminal kind of separation anxiety.
“I had been teaching Maybelle for about nine months when her foster mother, Vera Gatch, decided to leave her chimpanzee daughter for the very first time. Vera was one of Lemmon’s students and a psychotherapist with her own private practice and a teaching post at the university. She had raised Maybelle from infancy and had never left her daughter alone even for one night. Now that Maybelle was four, Vera felt the time was right to attend a conference out of town, and she arranged for someone Maybelle knew to stay with her in her home.
“As soon as Vera was gone a full day, Maybelle went to pieces. She developed terrible diarrhea and a respiratory infection. Those of us who knew Maybelle set up shifts to care for her around the clock. Day after day we sat at her bedside administering fluids and trying to get her fever down, but poor Maybelle was wasting away before my very eyes and I felt utterly powerless to save her. Her diarrhea became dysentery and her lung infection turned to full-blown pneumonia. The doctor came but there was nothing he could do. By the time her mother returned home, Maybelle was dead. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 168)
“Nearly two years later I watched my youngest pupil, barely older than a baby, also shrivel up and die in the absence of her human mother. Salome began learning sign language at four months of age, about the same age when deaf children begin signing. Thanks to her precociousness she appeared in the 1972 LIFE magazine spread with Lucy and other famous chimps. Salome was raised by a married human couple. Just when Salome was out of infancy, Susie became pregnant. After the baby was born, the couple decided to take a vacation with their new child, and immediately Salome lapsed into pneumonia and was close to death. Her adoptive human parents rushed home and Salome recovered from her grief-induced illness. Shortly thereafter, they decided to try another vacation. But this time Salome didn’t make it. She died within a few days.” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 168) The grief looks like the same grief that Flint showed when his mother Flo died, in that story from Jane Goodall, and we recognize it immediately.
And Jane Goodall, who has been observing wild chimpanzees in Africa for over forty years, has many stories of grief. Here’s one poignant and often-quoted story about an eight-year-old male chimp named Flint, who was thrown into the deepest grief after his mother Flo died:
Never shall I forget watching as, three days after Flo’s death, Flint climbed slowly into a tall tree near the stream. He walked along one of the branches, then stopped and stood motionless, staring down at an empty nest. After about two minutes he turned away and, with the movements of an old man, climbed down, walked a few steps, then lay, wide eyes staring ahead. The nest was one which he and Flo had shared a short while before Flo died”. In the presence of his big brother [Figan], [Flint] had seemed to shake off a little of his depression. But then he suddenly left the group and raced back to the place where Flo had died and there sank into ever-deeper depression”. Flint became increasingly lethargic, refused food and, with his immune system thus weakened, fell sick. The last time I saw him alive, he was hollow-eyed, gaunt and utterly depressed, huddled in the vegetation close to where Flo had died”. The last short journey he made, pausing to rest every few feet, was to the very place where Flo’s body had lain. There he stayed for several hours, sometimes staring and staring into the water. He struggled on a little further, then curled up – and never moved again.
– Jane Goodall, Through a Window
I don’t want you to feel like rescue dogs who aren’t finding any live ones, so here’s one more story about the care of a dying young creature with a happier ending.
Barbara Smuts writes, “Near the research station where I lived, an adult female baboon was found dead in a poacher’s snare. Her baby, cloaked in the velvety black fur of newborns, was still clinging to his mother’s cold body. Another researcher brought the baby home, fed him milk, put him in a cage in a warm room, and then forgot about him. I stumbled over him the next morning.
“He was barely alive. His eyes were cloudy, unfocused, and swollen half shut. His body was cold, his breathing almost undetectable. I removed him from the cage, remembering all I’d learned about how infant primates respond to maternal loss. I held him close, groomed him, and carried him everywhere for the rest of the day. Although I thought he was too ill to make it through the night, I wanted to comfort him during his last hours. That evening he went to sleep lying on my chest, his head against my heart. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a rambunctious baby baboon who wanted to play!
“The next morning, clear-eyed, he stayed close to me, venturing only a few cautious steps away when I sat down. But if I removed him when he was clinging to me, he threw a tantrum, writhing on the ground and screaming, just as baboon infants do with their mothers. And like the baboon mothers, I couldn’t bear his suffering, so I would pick him up again. Immediately calm, he would then gaze at me with utter devotion.
“When we took Hilary (she named him) to the Nairobi drive-in, we had to pay for him. In response to our protests, we were told, “Well, He’s going to watch the movie, isn’t he?” And in fact he did.” (by Barbara Smuts, “Child of Mine,” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, pp. 151-152)
Since animals can’t speak English, some people think we can’t ever really know whether they feel as we do. But some of the apes who learned to communicate through sign language or keyboards can communicate directly with us, so we can know.
Roger Fouts tells a story about Washoe, the most famous of the chimps who use sign language – still alive at age 42, which is getting old for a chimpanzee. Fouts required all the volunteers who worked with the chimps to learn sign language, and he told the story of one of them, a woman named Kat, who had worked with Washoe. Kat was pregnant, and Washoe was very interested in the woman’s belly, always asking about her BABY.
Unfortunately, Kat had a miscarriage, and afterwards, she didn’t come in to the lab for several days. When she finally came back Washoe greeted her warmly but then moved away and let Kat know she was upset that she’d been gone. Knowing that Washoe had lost two of her own children, Kat decided to tell her the truth.
MY BABY DIED, Kat signed to her. Washoe looked down to the ground. Then she looked into Kat’s eyes and signed CRY, touching her cheek just below her eye. That single word, CRY, Kat later said, told her more about Washoe than all of her longer, more grammatically perfect sentences. When Kat had to leave that day, Washoe wouldn’t let her go. PLEASE PERSON HUG, she signed. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 291)
Reading these animal stories and others like them has convinced me that one of the worst stories ever told about the human condition is that Christian story about all of us being born in a state of original sin: sinners to the core, needing the intervention of the church and its priests. It’s an evil story, and wrong all the way down. It’s a story designed more to ensnare us than to empower us. We need a better and more true story out of which to live.
We are born embedded in a world of living, feeling beings who can feel joy and sorrow, who can love and lose, and who can reach out to others, sometimes with just a single gesture, like CRY, that offers us a reconnection with the force of life itself.
But we have taught ourselves bad stories, unfeeling stories that glorify selfishness, greed, invasion and occupation of another country, stealing their oil and murdering their people. Today, when the cries and screams of agony and grieving arise, they most often arise because of our armies, our economic policies, our official heartlessness.
Think of those little goldfish the children set free in Japan’s Deer Park, or the small birds that Thai Buddhists set free as acts of liberation and piety. Those are messages from the heart of life: life telling us what it needs from us. We too can set life free. Within and around us, we can set life free. Let’s do.
