We take walks at Bastrop State Park—I and my little dog—almost daily. We’re soul mates, joined at the hip. We get each other. There’s a special place on our route, a hilltop overlooking rolling native grasses, flanked by groves of loblolly pines on either side. It’s astonishingly beautiful. Every time we pass this area, my dog stops and stares, transfixed with little hobo eyes like he was watching life from inside a boxcar. It’s so quiet. The sounds too remote for all but the inner ear. Entranced, he will stand in awe for minutes, lost in time. And he helps me realize there’s such a small difference between forever and once.
Do animals have feelings? Souls? An age-old question, this. It depends on what kind of God you have. To have a soul means you know God. There are those who believe you know God through one particular religion, otherwise you are denied access to him. Others hold that God is in me, you, in all sentient beings—in everything. It’s all a matter of belief, and thus, unprovable. But there’s plenty of compelling anecdotal evidence.
There have been eyewitness accounts of animal grief, for example. Perhaps the most well-known is among elephants who mourn the loss of loved family members. One Marc Beckoff writes of foxes:
I also watched a red fox bury her mate after a cougar had killed him. She gently laid dirt and twigs over his body, stopped, looked to make sure he was all covered, patted down the dirt and twigs with her forepaws, stood silently for a moment, then trotted off, tail down and ears laid back against her head. After publishing my stories, I got emails from people all over the world who had seen similar behavior in various birds and mammals.
World famous naturalist Jane Goodall describes a chimpanzee emotionally moved at the sight of a majestic waterfall:
As he gets closer, and the roar of the falling water gets louder, his pace quickens, his hair becomes fully erect, and upon reaching the stream he may perform a magnificent display close to the foot of the falls. Standing upright, he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow, rushing water, picking up and hurling great rocks. Sometimes he climbs up the slender vines that hang down from the trees high above and swings out into the spray of the falling water. This “waterfall dance” may last 10 or 15 minutes.
It’s not illogical that animals have wide-ranging emotions, including joy, empathy, grief, embarrassment, and resentment, like us. You see, we all share brain structures with our mammal brethren, in our limbic system. It serves as the seat of our emotions. It could even be said human emotions are evolutionary gifts given by our animal ancestors. As for beliefs, I’ve made my peace with this. Was never much at war with it in the first place.
Here’s another question. Is animal behavior driven by instinct or intelligence? Instincts are supposed to be genetically hard-wired to help animals survive as a species. Examples include hunting, mating, escaping from predators, and nurturing young. Adult sea turtles return to the beaches of their birth to lay their eggs. Baby sea turtles crawl toward the protection of the sea upon hatching. Birds migrate thousands of miles and build nests without ever being taught how. Who teaches chicks to open their mouths when parents arrive? We have cocoon spinning for moths and butterflies, web making for spiders, and “dances” performed by honeybees after finding a food source for the hive. All of this is done the first time without any learning or practice required. These behaviors are rigid and predictable. All members of the species always perform the same way, regardless of the environment.
Human behavior is frequently described as driven by intelligence—we are free thinkers. Are we? What about the grasping behavior in infants who automatically grasp objects placed in their hands or the nursing instinct in response to oral stimulation. When the doctor hits just below your kneecap with his little mallet, do you consciously think to swing out your knee? We all eat, we all mate. What about the fight or flee reflex? Certainly not all human behavior is instinctive, but some is. Perhaps the way we act upon these drives can be consciously controlled and influenced. Whether or not some human behaviors are programmed in our genetics is a contentious topic amongst scientists. Is it not possible humans have both instincts and intelligence. Why not animals?
In the laboratory, animals push levers, pull strings, dig for food, swim in water mazes, or respond to images on computer screens to get information for discrimination, attention, memory, and categorization experiments. Research shows many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor skills that dwarf ours. Dogs can detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending dangers. Hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low frequency sounds to communicate over long distances. Bats, frogs, and various rodents use high-frequency sounds to find food and navigate their environments.
There are all kinds of problem-solving experiments that show animals are smart. Numerous studies show that, of all animals, pigs are among the best problem-solvers we have. While dogs, when presented with a problem, will turn to humans for assistance, pigs will ignore humans in lieu of figuring out the problem on their own. Some experiments have shown pigs can even outperform dogs on tests of cognition, memory, and other measures of intelligence. While you can teach both to “fetch,” only pigs can tell the difference between a ball and a frisbee.
Turns out, we share about 98% of our DNA with pigs, compared with only 90% in cats and 82% in dogs. This similarity in DNA explains why pigs are often used as human surrogates in the medical business. They serve either as models in medical or scientific research, or for use in medical training programs, due to their anatomical similarities.
Certain ravens, crows and parrots are also quite sharp when it comes to figuring out complex problems and puzzle-solving. Crows, for example, can remember individual human faces. Studies have documented that these birds can function at the four-year-old human level. Who among us will assert that raccoons and foxes are not clever? Animals can use tools to help them accomplish necessary tasks. Otters use rocks to crack open shells and get to their food. Chimpanzees use long slender sticks to scoop out tasty termites from their mound. The ability to understand and work with numbers has been documented in several animals, including newly hatched chickens, and some amphibians and fish. Animal communication is well-known in whales and dolphins, even going so far as to call each other by name.
While I can’t prove objectively that animals have feelings and emotions, perhaps using some simple thought experiments would help make my case. A thought experiment is a mental exercise in which you the reader imagines the answer to a question or situation from the standpoint of your own attitude, beliefs or experience—in essence deciding what is true for you. A personal truth as opposed to an objective truth. Let’s try a few on for size:
Is it possible for love to be a subject without an external object to receive that love? As a pet owner have you ever been on the receiving end of love? Have you ever experienced anger or jealousy coming from a pet? Imagine an animal being abused, either emotionally or physically. Do you think these acts affect that animal’s mood? If you were a young mountain lion cub, and a trophy hunter murdered your mother would you feel sadness and loss? If you were born a striped bass and were caught by a fisherman along the bank, would you feel pain from the fishhook in your jaw? As part of a migrating flock of ducks landing at a pond, when you hear shotguns going off around you, would you experience panic or fear? With a shattered wing, how would you feel being left as the flock made its escape over the horizon? These thought experiments are endless.
Animals share our planet, share the miracle of life and the certainty of death—just like us. Human inhabitants of this Earth separate themselves into tribes and cliques, creating different cultures and belief systems. Some of those belief systems separate people from the rest of the Animal Kingdom, holding that animals are lower than man—or more accurately—that they have been put here for the use and enjoyment of mankind. Of course, to those people animals have no God-nature, no soul in them. And when we part these divisive curtains, we find the puppeteers of politics and religion—the two primary causes of war and conflict among humans. Here’s my personal truth: it has been written that in heaven, the lion will lie down with the lamb—so there are definitely animals there.
By Larry Gfeller