Have you seen this?
http://www.earthlings.com/earthlings/video-full.php
Its beautiful, and painful at the same time....and worth the watch.
Hope this finds you well my friend.
Nikki
Apologies to Mr Balcombe
Posted By Harry on October 13, 2010
Second Nature & Pleasurable Kingdom
Apologies to Jonathan Balcombe – I started reading Second Nature yesterday, raced through the first half but, like Pleasurable Kingdom, will probably not finish it. It’s not that I don’t enjoy your books Mr Balcombe (you can rest assured I’ll buy your next one), it’s just that, how do I say this without sounding disrespectful? … I get bored. By halfway through I’ve said too many “That’s obvious”, “Of course”, “But who could possibly think non-human animals don’t have feelings” to read any further. If you were ever to read this post I rest assured knowing that you would not take offence; every statement I utter is simply paraphrasing what you so eloquently put into words in your books: “What the …? Do we honestly need Science to prove to us what we see and feel every day? That humans aren’t the only animals that can love, play, plan, hope, grieve? Be happy, be sad? Feel wanted, feel cared for, feel lonely, feel used? Or abused?”
As a long-term disciple of Science (well perhaps at times pseudoscience – medicine) I am acutely aware of the value it can bring into our lives. But our reverence for Science has reached a foolish excess when we look to it to prove that what we experience every day is in fact real. It was not that long ago that the medical fraternity held the belief that neonates did not experience pain like older children and therefor did not require analgesia post surgery. Had mothers, rather than Science, been listened to far fewer children would have suffered. Similarly, I do not need Science to confirm that Chelsea’s withdrawn behaviour over the last week is her grieving the loss of Plato. It would be arrogant to the extreme to think that only Sue and I, human animals, could grieve the loss of a family member. Arrogant to the extreme when you consider that while Sue and I have known and experienced life without Plato, Chelsea never has.
Chelsea caring for Plato on his last day
To be fair, few would deny Chelsea her grief. But they would deny a milking cow her grief at the loss of her calf. Year after year after year. They’d deny the despair a mother pig feels when imprisoned in a sow stall, unable to build a nest for her young. Unable to mother the way she instinctively and desperately wants to. Reduced to a machine. They’d deny the pain a chicken feels when her beak is sliced through. And they’d deny the loss a pony feels when she’s been ‘outgrown’ and, torn from the family she has come to know and love, is sold like an inanimate chattel, experiencing the first of many such traumas to come.
I know how this pony feels not because some scientist has proven that she has the requisite parts of a brain to be able to feel such loss, or because another scientist has proven that she can indeed use those parts of the brain to feel loss, but because I’ve seen and felt such emotions in animals. I’ve witnessed Harley, a big, black nonchalant horse, cycle through a gamut of emotions on my arrival home after being away for three weeks. On my entering the paddock he was the first of the Avondale equines and caprines to gallop towards me, stopping just short of arm’s length. And there he stood, showing me his discontent, chasing away the other horses, goats and donkeys if they tried to get close to me. Standing, watching, chasing. Standing, watching. He was upset, angry, hurt, relieved, jealous. Punishing. And in his whirlwind of emotions he became selfish … and shitty to his mates.
Harley near the old pickers' hut
At 3am on a mid-winter’s night I’ve raced out of bed, across our frosty front lawn onto the river rocks, stark naked but for torch in hand, scanning the trees for Eddie, Avondale’s patriarchal peacock, as he screeched “Murder!” (as only a peacock could). My presence quietened him instantly and I wondered if it was just a cruel trick to get some early morning company. Or at least have a chuckle. But on leaving, fresh wallaby-poo squelching through my frozen toes, my torch alighted on a pair of big red eyes scampering from the chook house.
Eddie. He sleeps in the tall gums to his right.
I’ve watched Eddie pace purposefully up and down a section of scrub, silent but for the sound of his tailfeathers brushing the ground. Surprised by such unusual behaviour I’ve explored to find a hawk circling overhead … and a nest of rabbit kits deep within the scrub. Deciding a meal should not be that challenging, the hawk circled once more then soared down the valley. Thanking Eddie I headed back down to the house, magnificent peacock following me, turning periodically to check scrub and sky.
Now to us Avondalians Eddie’s one very special bird. But he is just a bird. Just a bird like the ravens and seagulls that Mr Balcombe writes about. Who like us, just humans, feel and experience a huge range of emotions, desires and fears as we journey through what it is to be alive. And we shouldn’t need Science to show us that just dogs, just ponies, just pigs, just chickens, just cows, just bats and just mice feel a whole lot too.
(Mr Balcombe, should you ever chance upon this post please don’t stop writing those books. You, Marc Bekoff, Jane Goodall and a whole bunch of other gentle people are shining leading, loving lights as you show Science the error of its ways. Thank you.)
EDIT – I finished Second Nature. After writing this post I spent some time pondering over why I struck a brick wall in the middle of the book. It wasn’t because I was ‘bored’ as stated, it was because I was frustrated and upset that non-human animals’ emotions and zest for life have to be proved by that oft fallible tool called Science. But if we open our eyes and hearts we’ll see the evidence all around us. So I picked it up again after a few days and continued reading. What some have observed is truly remarkable. And worth reading & learning about. Being Nice: Virtue and Rethinking Cruel Nature are chapters that really help us human animals put our views of non-human animal lives back in perspective. (Harry, 31 October 2010)
I spent a number of years in graduate school being inculcated in an approach to knowledge acquisition about the physical world called the scientific method. It is a very powerful and (when used correctly) useful tool. However, it is just that, a tool.
One of the worst accusations that could be made against you in the scientific field was that you were “anthropomorphizing” (ascribing human traits to non-human animals). My sense is that this epithet is losing much of its power and this can only be a good thing. Time for us to remove ourselves from a pedestal….
My particular area of specialization is psychology and I remember clearly the furor over Jane Goodall and her research when she first started publishing….she was reviled along with her methods, conclusions and observations. Now Jane Goodall is revered and showered with accolades….this is change and change in a positive direction for the eventual acceptance and acknowledgment of our fellow animals as being our equals in the community of life…..
Science is not an inevitable path to wisdom. Since it must always start with a base of skepticism, science can be remarkably devoid of information if scientific attention has not been paid to a particular topic or subject matter. And scientists, taken individually, are no wiser or more foolish than the average person.
Science is made up of people and people tend to think like the culture in which they are embedded. It would seem to me that science has been no more ignorant and wrong-headed about other animal people than has the great majority of people in the world.
I am sure that you (or I) do not need science to tell us or show us that our animal friends have personalities, feelings, thoughts, moods, etc……but….maybe there are those that cannot accede to the truth of this until some sort of scientific imprimatur is applied. If so, I welcome anything that advances the recognition of the significance and exquisiteness of our fellow animals.
What I think is going on is that some of science is just now starting to focus on the feelings, personalities, culture (if you will) of these other animal people where for decades there has been a tremendous void (for fear of being accused of anthropomorphizing)…..it is refreshing to see science waking up to the fact that scientific knowledge in this area has been weak, error ridden and absent….perhaps it is the case that “the times they are a changing.” Certainly things cannot be made worse than they already have been for our fellow animals……and maybe, just maybe, they will be made better.
Hi VeganElder
Thanks for your comment. I too am strongly supportive of how people like Jonathan Balcombe, Jane Goodall and others are engaging science to make the world a better place for our fellow animals. The are indeed using the tool powerfully.
In some ways I feel that what I wrote in my post may have come out wrong – it certainly was not against Balcombe or any other scientist doing the sort of great work he is doing, but rather it was against “the culture in which (we) are embedded”. And against how tightly shut our eyes must be to be missing that which these scientists now have to show us. I’m not even sure us humans do have our eyes that tightly shut; there’s an element of humans not wanting to accept that non-human animals feel pain and emotions like we do – acknowledging such means that so much of what we do will have to radically change: our diet, our ‘pet ownership’, our sports involving animals, our experimentation, our clothing, our gambling on horse and dog-racing … the list goes on.
Sometimes I think of books like Second Nature as being a necessary sledgehammer of indisputable fact that we humans can no longer hide from, can no longer claim ignorance as justification for our cruelty, can no longer claim that we’re imagining what we see … It’s just sad that we need such books.
The sadness you reference at the need for such writings as Balcombe’s and Goodall’s is a response that I too experience….along with many other not so gentle feelings. The apparent ease with which we as a “species” seem to be willing to distort, ignore, deny and avoid aspects of reality which run counter to our desires or wishes is also scary as hell to me.
American academic psychology (and thus most of american psychology) was virtually ruled by the behaviorist viewpoint for many decades and the behaviorist viewpoint flat-out declared that any processes that occurred “inside the box” (i.e. emotions, etc) were unknown variables that could safely be ignored in the quest to understand behavior.
This is an extreme (near nonsensical) position with near delusional implications, yet it held sway for many, many years.
I am also enraged (at times) at the apparent ease with which we human animals appear ready to say screw what is, what we want is what counts and we will pretend that reality agrees with what we want…..science then either supports such stupid and destructive nonsense or else…..says nothing.
I wish science were more supportive of reality than that, in fact, the rules of science should result in being more reality affirming but the problem with science is that it is a tool that is used by us human animals………..