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© Davidson Loehr
February 11, 2007
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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The sermon today is on empathy, on that essential quality of being able to feel another’s pain, and the hope that if we can feel for them we will care for them, and their fragile hopes and dreams will be safe with us. Against that background, I’ve chosen to share a poem with you as our prayer. It is not about empathy, unless a tale of murder can be said to be about life. I think you’ll find that it needs the silence following it. DuBose Heyward wrote it in 1924. He was the Southern white man who in the same year wrote the novel “Porgy,” from which George Gershwin’s folk opera “Porgy and Bess” was derived eleven years later. This poem has the same poignancy, and is named “The Mountain Woman”:
PRAYER:
“The Mountain Woman,”
by DuBose Heyward
Among the sullen peaks she stood at bay
and paid life’s hard account from her small store.
Knowing the code of mountain wives, she bore
the burden of the days without a sigh;
and, sharp against the somber winter sky,
I saw her drive her steers afield that day.
Hers was the hand that sunk the furrows deep
across the rocky, grudging south slope.
At first youth left her face, and later hope;
yet through each mocking spring and barren fall,
she reared her lusty brood, and gave them all
that gladder wives and mothers love to keep.
And when the sheriff shot her eldest son
beside his still, so well she knew her part,
she gave no healing tears to ease her heart;
but took the blow upstanding, with her eyes
as drear and bitter as the winter skies.
Seeing her then, I thought that she had won.
But yesterday her man returned too soon
and found her tending, with reverent touch,
one scarlet bloom; and, having drunk too much,
he snatched its flame and quenched it in the dirt.
Then, like a creature with a mortal hurt,
she fell, and wept away the afternoon.
– DuBose Heyward
SERMON
The ability to sense another’s feelings, needs, fears, and act on them is the greatest blessing we can offer to life. And when we hear of someone who seems to lack that ability to sense another’s hurt, or to care – as in that poem about the Mountain Woman – it is almost an affront to humanity. How could “her man” not tell that flower, that little piece of living, fragile beauty was her umbilical cord to beauty and what was left of hope?
Sometimes I think that if you can just respond to natural beauty, there is greatness about you.
I read of a young man who was working in Africa with chimpanzees, as part of Jane Goodall’s efforts there. One afternoon he took a break and climbed to the top of a ridge to watch a spectacular sunset over Lake Tanganyika. As the student watched, he noticed first one and then a second chimpanzee climbing up toward him. The two adult males were not together and saw each other only when they reached the top of the ridge. They did not see the student. The apes greeted each other with pants, clasping hands, and sat down together. In silence and awe, the human and the chimpanzees watched the sun set and twilight fall. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 192)
Some who have observed bears in the wild speak of them sitting on their haunches at sunset, gazing at it, seemingly lost in meditation. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 193)
We live in troubled and quite brutal times, but I want to see us as part of an ancient and noble heritage of life that cares about and responds to the feelings, fears and needs of other life. I want to remind us of our deep animal heritage, and to empower us by giving us some animal stories to take with us.
Most of those who work with and write about other animals have a particular concern over the way we treat animals in biomedical research and on the factory farms that produce most of the meat for our species. For over three hundred years at least, we have conducted many scientific experiments on animals, or on other humans, that are far worse than the mountain man’s drunken insensitivity. Some scientists still scoff at the suggestion that animals even have feelings. This seems to have come from the philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) who said, more than three centuries ago, that animals had no feelings, no intentions, but were like machines. This may sound like harmless silliness, but it’s not harmless. A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin wrote about one of these experiments, in a passage that has been quoted hundreds of times:
“” Every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.” (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 48)
The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp from Bowling Green State University writes, “There is overwhelming evidence that other mammals have many of the same basic emotional circuits that we do” At the basic emotional level, all mammals are remarkably similar.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 106)
Our sensitivity to others runs so deep even modern brain scans show it to be an absolutely archaic part of us, which means we would have to share this sensitivity with tens of thousands of other species.
Neuroimaging shows that making moral judgments involves a wide variety of brain areas, some extremely ancient (Greene and Haidt 2002, from Frans de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers, pp. 56-57).
Asked to watch photographs of facial expressions, we involuntarily copy the expressions seen. We do so even if the photo is shown subliminally, that is, if it appears for only a few milliseconds. Unaware of the expression, our facial muscles nevertheless echo it. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 177)
New research shows that when someone we love feels physical pain, our brain responds as if we felt it. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 170)
Yet the kind of experiments Darwin mentioned still go on, whether to test cosmetics, drugs, or scientific and medical curiosities.
In one set of tests on monkeys, the animals had been subjected to lethal doses of radiation and then forced by electric shock to run on a treadmill until they collapsed. Before dying, the unanesthetized monkeys suffered the predictable effects of excessive radiation, including vomiting and diarrhea. After acknowledging all this, a DNA [Defense Nuclear Agency] spokesman commented: “To the best of our knowledge, the animals experience no pain.” (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 140) The willful blindness in that statement is just incredible. It’s something the Mountain Man might have said, but he was drunk.
And we are often just as insensitive to the feelings of our fellow human animals, aren’t we? Think of Abu Graib, Guantanemo, or the 650,000 Iraqi citizens we have killed since illegally invading and occupying their country, or the million of them whose deaths we caused in the 1990s through Bill Clinton’s sanctions. I remember Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright being asked to respond to Amnesty International’s estimate that the sanctions had caused the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children, when she said, “We think it’s worth it.” Or think of living in the country where over 40% of our citizens have no health coverage – the largest percentage in the civilized world. We routinely dehumanize people in wars to kill them, and Clinton, Albright and the Bush administration have dehumanized over a million and a half Iraqis to remain oblivious to the fact that we caused their deaths. But we have also dehumanized tens of millions of our own citizens, haven’t we?
What is so puzzling and frustrating is that empathy in the 200 species of primates is such a rich area that one researcher analyzed, in an unpublished work, over one thousand examples of empathic behavior in monkeys and apes. So empathy is an ancient and deep part of us, and if it seems rare today, it may be because something else is getting in the way – things I’ll talk about in the next two sermons in this series.
But for now, let me share just a few stories about empathy in other animals, so you can get a feel for how ordinary it is, and how easy it is for you to make a very good guess about what these animals felt, needed, and intended to do through their behaviors.
During one winter at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, after cleaning the hall and before releasing the chimps, the keepers hosed out all rubber tires in the enclosure and hung them one by one on a horizontal log extending from the climbing frame. Most of the tires had tears or holes in them, and the water leaked out. But one tire was in good shape, and remained full of fresh water. A female chimpanzee named Krom wanted to get this tire down. Unfortunately, the tire was at the end of the row, with six or more heavy tires hanging in front of it. Krom was slightly crippled, and also deaf. She had never mated, but had helped raise many of the young chimps, acting as a kind of aunt. She pulled and pulled at the tire she wanted but couldn’t remove it from the log. She pushed the tire backward, but there it hit the climbing frame and couldn’t be removed either. Krom worked in vain on this problem for over ten minutes, ignored by everyone, except Jakie, a seven-year-old Krom had taken care of as a juvenile.
Immediately after Krom gave up and walked away, Jakie approached the scene. Without hesitation he pushed the tires one by one off the log, beginning with the front one, followed by the second in the row, and so on, as any sensible chimp would do. When he reached the last tire, he carefully removed it so that no water was lost, carrying it straight to his aunt, placing it upright in front of her. Krom began scooping up the water with her hands. (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, pp. 31-32)
Jeffrey M. Masson, who has written two wonderful books of animal stories, writes that in some extraordinary wildlife footage he got to watch, a small impala antelope in Africa raced away from a pack of wild dogs into a river where she was immediately seized by a large crocodile. In the world of antelopes, this is known as a very bad day. Suddenly a hippopotamus rushed to the rescue of the dazed antelope. The crocodile released his prey and the hippo then nudged the small animal up the bank of the river and followed her for a few feet until she dropped from exhaustion. Instead of leaving, the hippo then helped the little creature to her feet and, opening his mouth as wide as possible, breathed warm air onto the stunned antelope. The hippo did this five times before returning to the forest. “There seems to be no possible explanation for this remarkable behavior except compassion.” If this would seem easier to believe if the animal had been a dolphin rather than a hippo, many evolutionary theorists believe that hippos are the closest living relatives to whales, which evolved some 25 to 38 million years ago, and to dolphins, which evolved only 11 million years ago. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie, p. 94, and online references about the relationship to whales and dolphins.)
Almost every day, newspapers and TV shows around the country report stories of dogs who have saved people’s lives. The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on its front page some years ago (in March 1996) the extraordinary story of two stray dogs, a dachshund and an Australian cattle dog, who kept alive a mentally disabled boy when he became lost in the woods for three “bone-chilling” days. The boy’s mother called the dogs “angels from heaven” after ten-year-old Josh Carlisle, who has Down syndrome, was rescued from a dry creek in Montana by a searcher on horseback. In temperatures close to zero, the dogs had played with him and cuddled him to keep him warm at night. Josh hadn’t eaten while he was lost, but the dogs must have led him to water, for he was not fully dehydrated. The boy had mild frostbite on all ten toes, having spent his first night with a light snow dusting the ground. When Josh was carried to the ambulance, the dachshund followed and kept jumping up to see in the window. “I’ll never forget that dog’s face,” said one of the rescuers. Both dogs found a new home with the child’s family, and his mother told reporters, “They fell in love with my son during those three days.” (Frans de Waal, Dogs Never Lie, pp. 97-98)
This is two-way empathy. The mother also felt that she knew how the dogs must have felt in order to help the boy, and to follow him to the ambulance because they”d formed an emotional connection with him. And the boy’s family formed the same connection, and adopted both dogs. When all the species involved care for the life they see in another, everybody wins.
Studying apes brings the familiarity much closer, as they “think” (or “assess”) much like we do. How much?
Allen and Beatrice Gardner, who first obtained the baby Washoe from our Air Force, began teaching her sign language. They, however, were not fluent in it themselves, so their vocabulary was more limited than that of some of Washoe’s later contacts. They taught Washoe to sign “napkin” for “bib” because they didn’t know the sign for bib. Washoe kept wanting to draw the outline of a bib on her chest with her two index fingers, and they kept correcting her. Several months later when a group of human signers at the California School for the Deaf were watching a film of Washoe, they informed the Gardners that the baby chimpanzee was not signing BIB correctly. It should be signed, they told the Gardners, by drawing a bib on the chest with the two index fingers. Washoe had been right all along – and had reasoned just as the humans did who first invented the sign for BIB. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 83)
One beautiful moment early on during Project Washoe illustrated the common need of chimps and children to use their signs. The Gardners were in their kitchen entertaining some friends whose toddler happened to be deaf. Washoe was playing outside. Suddenly, the child and Washoe saw one another through the kitchen window. As if on cue, the child signed MONKEY at the same moment Washoe signed BABY. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 88) How different do the recognition and thought processes of these individuals from two different species sound?
And Washoe would often sign QUIET to herself as she sneaked into a forbidden room. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 72)
There are lots of stories about empathy in chimpanzees and bonobos. Bonobos are apes that look a lot like chimpanzees. Bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest relatives. One story is about the two-year-old daughter of a bonobo named Linda, who whimpered at her mother with pouted lips, which meant that she wanted to nurse. But this infant had been in the San Diego Zoo’s nursery and was returned to the group long after Linda’s milk had dried up. The mother understood, though, and went to the fountain to suck her mouth full of water. She then sat in front of her daughter and puckered her lips so that the infant could drink from them. Linda repeated her trip to the fountain three times until her daughter was satisfied. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 4) So far, she looks more evolved than the mountain man.
Frans de Waal tells another story of how a troop of monkeys treated one of their infants, who was born blind. The infant was born into a free-ranging population of rhesus monkeys released onto a Caribbean island. Apart from being sightless, the infant appeared perfectly normal: he played, for instance, as much as other infants his age. Compared to his peers, he often broke contact with his mother, thereby placing himself in situations that he could not recognize as dangerous. His mother responded by retrieving and restricting him more than other mothers did with their infants. In other studies of blind infant monkeys such infants were never left alone, and specific group members stayed with them whenever the group moved. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 51-52)
Another story shows the strength of the ape’s empathic response. One woman [Ladygina-Kohts] wrote about her young chimpanzee, Joni, saying that the best way to get him off the roof of her house (much better than any reward or threat of punishment) was by arousing his sympathy:
If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his plays or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists. (Ladyginia-Kohts, 2002 [1935]: 121) (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers)
Jane Goodall describes chimp behavior around the body of Tina, a chimp killed by a leopard. Some of the chimpanzees stay with Tina’s body for over six hours without interruption. None licks Tina’s wounds, as these apes sometimes do when a companion is injured but still alive. Some of the males do drag Tina’s body along the ground a short way, while other chimpanzees inspect, smell, or groom it. Brutus, the community’s most powerful or “alpha” male, who had been a close associate of Tina’s, remains at her side for five hours, with a break of only seven minutes. He chases away some chimpanzees who try to come near, allowing only a single infant to approach. This is Tarzan, Tina’s five-year-old brother. Recently, Tina and Tarzan’s mother died. Now, Tarzan grooms his dead sister and pulls gently on her hand quite a few times. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 10)
Brutus’s behavior toward Tina’s little brother indicates that he, Brutus, knew that Tina and Tarzan meant something special to each other. Taken together with other evidence to be reviewed in this book – this information suggests that Brutus was capable of feeling something like empathy. If so, Brutus was able to project himself into Tarzan’s situation and imagine what Tarzan might experience at the sight of his sister’s dead body. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 10)
Frans de Waal recorded an incident that occurred at the Wisconsin Primate Center. The adult males in a group of stumptailed monkeys became extremely protective of Wolf, an old, virtually blind female. Whenever the caretakers tried to move the monkeys from the indoor to the outdoor section of the enclosure, the adult males would stand guard at the door between the sections, sometimes holding it open, until Wolf had gone through. (from Good-Natured, p. 52)
Captive Diana monkeys have been observed engaging in behavior that strongly suggests empathy. Individuals were trained to insert a token into a slot to obtain food. The oldest female in the group failed to learn how to do this. Her mate watched her failed attempts, and on three occasions he approached her, picked up the tokens she had dropped, inserted them into the machine, and then allowed her to have the food. The male apparently evaluated the situation, helped his mate only after she failed, and seemed to understand that she wanted food, but could not get it on her own. He could have eaten the food, but he let his mate have it. There was no evidence that the male’s behavior benefited him in any way other than to help his mate. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 102)
Frans de Waal tells two stories of intuitive empathic communication. “In the course of her studies, Amy Parish developed close relations with zoo bonobos, and the females treated her almost as one of their own. On one occasion when the San Diego bonobos were given hearts of celery, which were claimed by the females, Parish gestured to have the apes look her way for a photograph. Louise, who had most of the food, probably thought that she was begging and ignored her for about ten minutes. Then she suddenly stood up, divided her celery, and threw half of it across the moat to this woman who so desperately wanted her attention.” (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 157)
The female bonobos had bonded with Amy, but not with De Waal: apes make precise gender distinctions among people. Amy later visited these same bonobo friends after a maternity leave. She wanted to show the apes her infant son. The oldest female briefly glanced at the human baby, and then disappeared into an adjacent cage. Amy thought the female was upset, but she had only left to pick up her own newborn. She quickly returned to hold the ape baby up against the glass so that the two infants could look into each other’s eyes. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 156)
Here were two females, both friends and proud mothers, showing off their babies. Emotionally, how different do we seem to be from these apes with whom we share over 98% of our DNA?
Roger Fouts is the man I mentioned last week, who has spent forty years teaching the chimpanzee Washoe to communicate through American Sign Language, and establishing a deep and respectful friendship with her. Once Roger had broken his arm and came with it in a sling, but not in a cast, to contain it until the bones knitted.
The chimpanzees must have seen the pain he was trying to hide, because instead of giving their usual, raucous, pant-hoot morning greeting, they all sat very still and intently watched him. Washoe signed HURT THERE, COME, and Roger approached and knelt down by the group. Washoe gently put her fingers through the wire separating them, and Roger moved closer. She touched him, then kissed his arm. Another chimp also signed HURT and touched him.
What is perhaps most amazing about their reaction was that Washoe’s ten-year-old son Loulis didn’t ask Roger for his usual CHASE game. In fact, he didn’t ask Roger to play his favorite game until several weeks later, when Roger’s arm was on the mend. That’s empathy. I”m betting they would also have understood the Mountain Woman’s love for that little crimson flower. (Deborah and Roger Fouts, “Our Emotional Kin,” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 207)
Fouts says that he and his wife Debbi “had never hugged one another or been demonstrative in Washoe’s presence. This precaution went all the way back to the late 1960s when Washoe would sometimes misinterpret physical affection and attack the “offender.” Washoe had rarely been to our house since then. As far as we knew, Washoe thought Debbi and I were friends or coworkers. Out of habit, we kept up this act in Ellensburg (Washington) for the first year, but on one of six-year-old Hillary’s first visits to our lab, Washoe asked to hug her good-bye before she left. After they hugged I asked Washoe, WHO THAT?, pointing to Hillary. Without hesitating, Washoe signed ROGER DEBBI BABY. Nobody reads nonverbal behavior like a chimpanzee. And all those years we thought we had Washoe fooled!” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 270)
Other animals also have a sense of “justice,” or at least revenge for behavior that crosses the line – a line we understand immediately when we hear these stories. A few weeks ago, I told you the story of the vengeful camel:
Edward Westermarck (1862″1939), retold the story of a vengeful camel that had been excessively beaten on multiple occasions by a fourteen-year-old boy for loitering or turning the wrong way. The camel passively took the punishment, but a few days later, finding itself unladen and alone on the road with the same conductor, ‘seized the unlucky boy’s head in its monstrous mouth, and lifting him up in the air flung him down again on the earth with the upper part of the skull completely torn off, and his brains scattered on the ground.” (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 338)
Here’s another story about an animal sensing behavioral boundaries, and teaching humans a lesson – a less violent lesson – about justice: Ola, a young false killer whale in an oceanarium, was accustomed to a staff of human divers working in his tank. One diver took to teasing Ola surreptitiously. Oceanarium management had their first inkling of this one day when Ola placed his snout on the man’s back, pushed him to the floor of the tank, and held him there. (He was wearing diving gear, so he did not drown.) Seeking to free the diver, trainers gave Ola commands, tried to startle him with loud noises, and offered fish, to no avail. After five minutes Ola released the diver. Subsequent investigation brought out the teasing. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 174)
Feelings of all kinds cross over species lines – sometimes with results that can sound funny to members of one species (though probably not members of the other species).
Roger Fouts tells of the time when Washoe developed a head-over-heels crush on Josh (Roger’s son). “It seems that my son’s looks and sexuality had matured just enough that Washoe’s own teenage hormones now began raging at the mere sight of him. Whenever Josh entered the lab, Washoe literally threw herself at his feet and began shrieking like a desperate, lovelorn suitor. It was bad enough, Josh said, that he couldn’t get the girls at school to pay attention to him. To have a female chimpanzee throwing herself at him every day really added insult to injury. After a few months of Washoe’s entreaties, Josh decided to avoid the lab for a while.” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 272)
Being able to read us also lets chimps and other apes trick us, which they love to do. When I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta last November, I saw – from a safe distance – a female chimpanzee named Georgia, about whom I had read enough to want to stay away from her. She absolutely loved playing the same trick on visitors every chance she got. When she saw a new face, she would go fill her mouth with water, then saunter back over to the fence and act cute, luring visitors in so she could spit the water all over them, then jump up and down hooting her self-satisfied chimp laugh. And of course we can trick them too, though they don’t like it.
There is also a great story about a young man who worked with chimpanzees in the wild, in the Gombe area in Tanzania as part of Jane Goodall’s group. They weren’t allowed to interact with chimps. But an adolescent female chimp developed a small crush on this young man, and kept coming up to groom him. So he suddenly acted as if he saw something in the distance. He moved his head a little from one side to the other, like owls do. The adoring chimp stopped grooming and looked in the direction he was looking, then made a few steps in the direction of his glance and looked back at him. He kept up his act, and she walked off in that direction and disappeared.
A little later she returned, came straight up to him, and slapped his head, thereafter ignoring him for the rest of the day. He said the slap was probably a punishment after she realized that he had tricked her. I’d say, ask some teen-aged girls how they would feel if they got tricked like that by a boy they had a crush on, and whether they might feel like slapping him in the head then ignoring him. (by Frans X. Plooij, “A Slap in the Face” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 88)
Roger Fouts said that it was Washoe who taught him that “human” is only an adjective that describes “being,” and that the essence of who we are is not our humanness but our beingness. There are human beings, chimpanzee beings, cat and dog beings, all kinds of beings. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 325)
That’s what I think these animal stories invite us into: the larger view of life in which we human beings have the opportunity to know, and to protect, all the other kinds of beings around us.
In 1993, a book titled The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity was published. This important book launched what has become known as the Great Ape Project (GAP). The major goals of the GAP were to admit great apes to the Community of Equals in which the following basic moral rights, enforceable by law, are granted:
(1) the right to life,
(2) the protection of individual liberty, and
(3) the prohibition of torture.
In the Great Ape Project, “equals” does not mean any specific actual likeness but equal moral consideration. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 142-143)
For fourteen years, The Great Ape Project has fought to guard the life and liberty of gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos, and to protect them from being tortured by members of our species. Think of that story from the first installment in this sermon series, about the gorilla who saved a three-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo in 1996, or today’s story of the hippo saving the antelope, the dogs saving the boy in Montana and some of the others. We respond to these stories because we also have these feelings and this capacity for empathy.
One of the great ironies in studying the natural world and the civilized world is that civilization and the artificial rules of our cultures are so often used to anesthetize the natural caring that animals feel for one another, and to make us more brutal.
One of our greatest dreams must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible for us to live without regret. (adapted from Barry Lopez, from Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 179)
There are more animal stories in this series, but You’re beginning to see, I”m sure, that these aren’t just animal stories. They are snapshots taken from our own family album: the family of all life on earth with the capacity to care for one another.
Marc Bekoff, like many of the people who spend their time with other animals, is a strong opponent of the brutal practices of our factory farms. While there are hundreds of disturbing stories, these three will give some of the sense:
About five million dairy cows are kept in confinement in the US. Female dairy cows are forced to have a calf every year. Their calves are removed from them immediately after birth so they do not drink their mother’s milk. This is extremely demanding on their bodies and on their psychological states. These dairy cows are literally milk machines, and they are not allowed to be mothers, to care for their young. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 151)
Up to about 25 percent of hens sustain broken bones when they are removed from their cages to be transported to a processing plant. Each hen now lays upwards of 300 eggs per year, as compared to 170 in 1925. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 152)
And Bekoff is clear that education makes a difference, and that we can make a difference, when he notes that the production and demand for formula-fed veal has dropped sharply since 1985 and has now stabilized at approximately eight hundred thousand calves per year, a decrease of over 400 percent. Public outrage over how veal calves are treated was the major reason for this decline. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 153)
One last poignant story, a parable of a voice crying in the wilderness:
For twelve years, a deep-sea whale wandered the north Pacific, tracked by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Traveling all on its own, the whale roamed from the waters off California north to the Aleutians. Using deep-sea microphones borrowed from the U.S. Navy, the scientists eavesdropped as the whale repeatedly called out, trying to contact another of its kind, probably a female. As he matured, his voice deepened, just as an adolescent boy’s does. No response to the whale’s calls was ever heard.
What species of whale this was remains unknown, but the calls heard differed from calls of blue, fin, and humpback whales swimming in the same waters. It is a mystery why this whale received no response. One guess is that some sort of biological miswiring caused his calls to be transmitted on the wrong frequency. Another possibility is that he is a hybrid, the product of a mating between two whales of different species – and thus truly unique, with no others of his kind in the world.
Whatever the explanation, the result makes for a haunting image: a highly social and smart animal, swimming up and down the Pacific Coast for well over a decade, calling into the depths of the sea for a companion who never answered. “He must be very lonely,” said one marine scientist. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, pp. 164-165. Her footnote says, “Kate Stafford quoted in Andrew C. Revkin, “A Song of Solitude,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 2004)
Some of these animal stories feel like the tale of the lonely whale, but with a twist. The whale, perhaps, really is one of its kind, doomed to a solitary life that may bring forth plaintive cries every day until it dies. We resonate with the story because we too need to have connections with the life around us, and often feel the need for more, and more significant, connections. But we are not alone. We share emotional responses with tens of thousands of species of other animals, if only we would be open to it. Our sin is one of ignorance: we are ignorant of the fact that we are not alone on the earth, that our cries need not be into empty space or onto projected deities created in large part to fill that need for connection (the root meaning of “religion” is “reconnection”).
Perhaps we are broadcasting on the wrong frequency. For centuries, we have judged ourselves – amazingly! – as the world’s only “reasoning” creatures, and to this day, continue to treat animals in experiments and on our factory farms as unthinking, unfeeling brutes.
In 1789, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham spoke to a world already badly misled by Descartes’ silly notion that we alone have a “ghost” in our “machine” placed there by God, enabling us – but no other animals – to reason and to feel. Bentham was concerned, as are many today, about the subject of our treatment of other animals in scientific experiments, and he said, “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”
Can they suffer? Monkeys dying of radiation poisoning, vivisected dogs, veal calves confined in two-foot wide pens and kept anemic for the duration of their short miserable lives (because whiter veal sells better), chimpanzees who have their teeth knocked out so dentistry students can practice on them – these, and thousands more like them: can they suffer? Could our customary indifference to the suffering of these other animals be related to our national indifference to Iraqi citizens, to the poor and desperate of other countries and the poor and desperate of our own country? Could this learned callousness be crippling our own souls, and making us feel more alone and isolated from the rest of Life’s family than we need to be? If so, how do we differ from the Mountain Man that DuBose Heyward brought to imaginative life over eighty years ago? Is that comfortable? If not, might we expect more of this species that has named itself “the Wise”? What do you think? What do you feel? What do we do?
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This version, like other online versions of this series of animal stories, has been expanded (in this case, by about 3,000 words) from the version delivered as a sermon. Many addition stories have been added back to this version, which has about 6,300 words.
