REFLECTIONS ON ANIMALS AND HUMANS

Donca Vianu

 

Recently, a friend sent me the link to a fourteen-minute video in which Anna Breytenbach talks with a black panther in a South African wildlife reserve. Since its rescue and arrival in the reserve six months earlier, the panther had been unmanageably aggressive.

Persuaded by a common friend, a very sceptical reserve caretaker invited Anna Breytenbach — an animal communicator — to make contact with the panther. The result of Anna’s half-hour conversation shook the caretaker to the core, and changed the panther’s behaviour permanently. He became quiet and peaceful. So much so that he was given a new name: Spirit, instead of his old name: Devil.

Intrigued by the video, I gave the matter some thought, supported by more recorded conversations with animals on YouTube, old documentaries on the lives of animals, and two or three books and articles. What follows is the result of my musings, readings, and watching.

 

The word animal comes from the Latin animalis, meaning: breath. All organisms that breathe belong to the kingdom called in Latin Animalia. This encompasses human animals and animal animals — yet in day-to-day language, we use the words humans and animals as if the organisms they designate belong to two distinct orders of being.

In reality, humans and animals share a broad common base. Both are born, age, and die. Both need to eat and eliminate waste, need a favourable climate, need to reproduce for the continuation of the species. The senses are similar too: both see, hear, taste, smell, and feel emotions — including pain, fear, sadness, grief, anger, joy, jealousy, love, and happiness. Both need company, guidance, protection, safety. Both possess an innate intelligence that enables them to live a satisfying life. Whether one has naked skin, feathers, fur, or scales — whether one is small and the other comparatively large — we share these basic features.

Of course there are many differences. A cat can jump ten times its height. A dog possesses three hundred million olfactory receptors and can detect a rotten apple among a million barrels — we possess six million. Marine crustaceans see not only the spectrum of our visible light but also ultraviolet, infrared, and polarised light. Sharks detect half a billionth of a volt. Beetles sense fire tens of miles away. Elephants hear infrasonic sounds, smell water at great distances, and sense seismic activity. Iguanas detect temperature differences of two degrees Fahrenheit in sand. Birds are endowed with GPS.

But human beings have social skills, we say. Surely this is what sets us apart?

It is not. The social organisations of animal animals are often more complex than our own. They include collective deliberation, division of labour, ritualised conflict resolution, diverse forms of cooperation, educative punishment, self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, rules for leadership recognition, and sophisticated courtship. Many animals — rats, monkeys, elephants, bats among them — display more mutual solidarity than humans routinely do.

Vampire bats do not let another bat go hungry: they regurgitate ingested blood to feed a fellow who found no food that night. They recognise each other and remember the past, which makes cheating a perilous undertaking — cheaters are quickly identified and excluded. Monkeys who fail to call other members of the colony when they find food are hit when discovered.

An elephant matriarch must sometimes have the discernment and strength to follow her head rather than her heart in moments of great peril. Only someone who knows the depth of elephant love can appreciate the immense wisdom this requires — leaving a dying calf behind in order to save the whole family.

About self-sacrifice: Jules Masserman investigated how macaques respond to another monkey’s suffering in a laboratory experiment in 1963. The question was simple and devastating: if securing food would give an electric shock to another monkey, what would they do? Masserman’s monkeys often prolonged their own hunger rather than see a fellow monkey receive a painful shock. One monkey refrained from taking food for twelve days. Their behaviour demonstrated beyond doubt the reality of their empathy, compassion, and aversion to causing pain.

The same year, Milgram conducted his first famous experiment with human animals: sixty-five percent of the participants administered increasingly powerful electric shocks to their subjects — up to and including a final massive dose of 450 volts.

I find the results of these two experiments disturbing in a way that has not left me since I first encountered them.

What I was taught in school as settled fact — and heard countless times in conversation — that brutish or simply dumb humans are pejoratively called animals — turns out, on examination, to be prejudice and self-serving bias dressed as common sense.

The mind-body-spirit of each species leads to different sense acuity, different perceptions, different world views, behaviours, and languages — and to different kinds of knowledge. The intelligence of the animal animals is the intelligence they need for their lifestyles. The intelligence of human animals is suited to our lifestyle. What would we do in New York with the intelligence of a hippopotamus living on the banks of the Nile? What would my cat do with the intelligence of an urban, academically trained professional?

Animal animals are not only intelligent but prescient and wise, as has been demonstrated in many experiments and reported by many human animals in documentaries, non-academic and academic books and research papers. Animal animals can be more prescient and wiser than human animals. Human animals can be, and too often are, more primitive and more ignorant than animal animals.

Primitive humans are not primitive because they are more animal than human. They are primitive because their humanness is not developed. They are stuck at the bifurcation between humans and animals, possessing only a rudimentary animalis base — and this is what makes them primitive.

The concept that human animals are superior to animal animals is a fallacy, thousands of years old, and we have paid dearly for it.

Human animals have befriended a number of animal animals — cats, dogs, horses, cows, sheep, donkeys, goats, elephants, camels. These are our friends. We have moved them from their natural habitats and bound them to us. We are responsible for them. We owe them protection, care, and gratitude. We are obliged to work with them in harmony. Everything else is a perversion of what the relationship was always meant to be.

I rebel against the phrase the animal in us, so often conceived as our lower side.

We do not have an animal in us. We are animals.

We share a common base — animalis — with the other living beings on this earth. Animal animals are as evolved as we are, and often more so. There are individual differences among animal animals just as among human animals: one cat may be wiser than another, not all female elephants are the matriarch. Not all human animals are sages. But any elephant is wiser than a primitive human.

We, human animals, can communicate with animal animals — and they can communicate with us. Right now, only especially gifted people can do this with fluency. But we can all develop this capacity.

We can learn to cross the language barrier between our two species. It is a barrier we built ourselves, over millennia. We can learn to translate from one language into the other.

The language of animal animals resembles, it seems to me, the language of the unconscious parts of our own psyche. When the unconscious is addressed — in a hypnotic trance, in an altered state of consciousness — these two languages reveal the same structure, the same pattern, the same texture. The language of the unconscious is sensorial rather than abstract: images, feelings, emotions, smells, tastes, acoustic signals. The same is true of the language of animal animals. Both are the language of direct experience, carrying meanings.

In order to communicate with animal animals, we have to silence and bypass the abstract language of our daily consciousness and anchor ourselves in the language of direct experience. And in doing so, we learn not only to communicate with animals — we learn to communicate with ourselves, at a depth our ordinary consciousness does not reach.

We may be convinced that we consciously shape our lives with our daily consciousness. This is far from the truth. The level from which our lives are actually shaped lies in the unconscious, in the hidden meanings it carries.

We stay all under the sway of Destiny — whatever name or definition we give it. Dharma, Moira, Tyche, Parcae, the Will of Adonai, Qadar, Nature, Karma: whatever the name, the meaning is the same. There are invisible, unfathomable forces that hold the ultimate power over our lives. At any given moment the fabric of a life can be torn, leaving us at the edge of an existential abyss.

Just as we constrain the animal animals, invisible forces constrain us. And if we want these forces to have mercy on us, we must have mercy on the animal animals we have befriended, and whom we have too long misused and mistreated.

In the face of Fate, we are all equal. Which is to say: we are fundamentally equal.

To understand better our predicament — and its consequences for ourselves and for our animal friends — I did two thought experiments.

In the first, I imagined that all animal animals had left the Earth. I saw endless processions of wild and tamed animals, endless shoals of fish from giant to tiny, endless flocks of birds, myriads of insects, disappearing one after the other into the unknown — the biggest and final migration ever. The last to leave were the bees. No paw, tail, wing, fin, fur, or feather remained anywhere, and a deep silence descended on the Earth.

Their absence had immense practical consequences — no wool, no cotton, no eggs, no butter, no cheese, no fruits, no vegetables, no nuts, no grains, no coffee. But worse than the practical consequences, almost impossible to bear, was the pain their departure brought. An abyssal grief, loneliness, abandonment, despair — beyond any loss I have known.

In the second thought experiment I imagined the opposite: human animals conceiving of animal animals as equal. As a consequence, they understand each other’s language and communicate with one another as naturally as among themselves. The experience was difficult to describe. The Earth became indescribably more alive, more abundant, more felicitous. I heard, sensed, saw, even smelled and touched — and understood — elephants, whales, bears, horses, grasshoppers, spiders. They played with me, told me jokes, explained things from their own perspective, complained, consoled me. I felt loved, accepted, understood, part of a much bigger, warmer, safer, and more generous world.

For a short while, I was in communion with all living beings on Earth.

It was blissful.

There is a way back from the estrangement: recapturing, step by step, a worldview rooted in the concept of equality. This is not a sentimental vision. It is a recognition of what has always been true — that we were never separate, that the hierarchy we imposed was always a fiction, and that the cost of maintaining it has been paid by every living creature on this earth, including us.

Human animals and animal animals are equal. If we can truly grasp this — not merely as an idea but as a living reality, enacted in how we treat, speak about, and make room for the other species who share this planet with us — we take a step toward something we have only glimpsed in stories and dreams.

The Earth ceases to be a place of bloodshed and sorrow. It recovers its quality of the Garden of Eden — not a place we return to, but a place we finally recognise we never fully left.