2459. Do Non-Human Animals Have "Soul" Too?

By Michael Jawer, Aeon, September 15, 2016

Elephants circuling one that was poached.

In common parlance, the word ‘soul’ pops up everywhere. We may speak of a vast, soulless corporation or describe an athlete as the ‘heart and soul’ of his team. Soul music gets us swaying. We want our lover, body and soul. In each case, ‘soul’ connotes deep feeling and core values. ‘Feelings form the basis for what humans have described for millennia as the … soul or spirit,’ the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio eloquently expounds in his groundbreaking book Descartes’ Error (1994).

Today, studies increasingly show that many non-human beings feel. Elephants appear to feel grief, while dolphins and whales express joy, or something much like it. Parrots can become cranky, pigs and cows terrified, chickens saddened, monkeys seemingly embarrassed. Experiments have shown that rats become agitated when seeing surgery performed on other rats and that, when presented with a trapped lab-mate and a piece of chocolate, they will free their caged brethren before eating. There’s even evidence that rats take pleasure in being tickled.

None of this will come as a surprise to pet owners or anyone who has observed virtually any kind of animal for any length of time. Science is rediscovering what Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) concluded: that the variations between humans and other species in their capacity to feel and express emotion are differences in degree rather than in kind. It’s a short step from there to recognition that individual animals have personalities, and to reckon that not only do they live – they have lives.

One might even argue that other creatures are more cognisant of feelings than humans are, because they possess a primary form of consciousness: they are aware of themselves and their environment but are less burdened by complexities such as reflection and rumination that typify human consciousness. They live closer to the bone, so to speak. Jeffrey Masson, author of When Elephants Weep (1995), has remarked that animals possess feelings of ‘undiluted purity and clarity’ compared to the ‘seeming opacity and inaccessibility of human feelings.’ Furthermore, we should consider that humans may not experience the full range of feelings found in the animal kingdom. As Humane Society ethologist Jonathan Balcombe points out: ‘In light of their sometimes vastly different living circumstances and sensory capabilities, other species may experience some emotional states that we do not.’

Sentience – the capacity of an organism to feel – is fundamental to being alive. If human beings have souls, they must be more about sentience than consciousness. We are motivated far more by passion than by intellect – what we feel deeply is what drives us, for good and ill. In his book Pleasure: A Creative Approach to Life (1970), the late psychoanalyst Alexander Lowen meditated on these connections, proposing that ‘The soul of a man is in his body. Through his body a person is part of life and part of nature … If we are identified with our bodies, we have souls, for through our bodies we are identified with all creation.’ As long as we are alive – and therefore feeling – we are connected to one another and to the natural world. We are, in a word, ensouled.

Extraordinary examples of ensoulment among non-human animals abound. Ethologist Adriaan Kortlandt once observed a wild chimp in the Congo ‘gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors’, forsaking his evening meal in the process. Elsewhere, African elephants belonging to the same family or group will greet one another after a separation with a loud chorus of rumbles and roars as they rush together, flapping their ears and spinning in circles.

Thanks to the internet, there’s a steady stream of examples of animals demonstrating compassion, from an ape saving a crow to a gorilla protecting a 3-year-old boy when he fell into her enclosure. A particularly striking case of animal gratitude occurred in 2005 off the California coast, where a female humpback whale was found entangled in nylon ropes used by fishermen. As recounted by Frans de Waal in The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009): ‘The ropes were digging into the blubber, leaving cuts. The only way to free the whale was to dive under the surface to cut away the ropes.’ The divers spent an hour at the task, an especially risky one given the sheer strength of the animal’s tail. ‘The most remarkable part came when the whale realised it was free. Instead of leaving the scene, she hung around. The huge animal swam in a large circle, carefully approaching every diver separately. She nuzzled one, then moved on to the next, until she had touched them all.’

Animals that express gratitude, play, contemplate nature, act to save a fellow creature, or react mournfully to the loss of family members or other close companions, are all, in my view, demonstrating aspects of connectedness. Such connectedness is the root of spirituality – with the capacity to feel and emote being central.

In the end, soul may be a profound matter of fellow feeling. The stronger the capability of a given species for fellow feeling, the more that species can be said to exhibit soulfulness. To view things in this way offers another important step in humanity’s progression towards understanding its place in creation – and to appreciate the inheritance we hold in common with other sentient beings on this increasingly small, restive, and fragile planet.

1964. Book Review: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

By Gregory Cowles, The New York Times, August 3, 2015

Given the subtitle of Carl Safina’s fascinating and expansive new book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel,” it’s no surprise that Dr. Safina frequently discusses animal cognition.

The surprise is that he also talks about animal precognition. (Read an excerpt.)

“How do we explain certain remarkable stories about elephant communication?” he asks at one point, noting that a conservationist who has worked with the animals for decades flatly believes in pachyderm telepathy. The conservationist says she has seen free-living elephants in Kenya show up at a nearby reserve just before rescued orphans were scheduled to arrive, ready to meet and greet.

“I filed her claim in my mind’s ‘unlikely stories’ bin,” Dr. Safina acknowledges. “But that bin gets cluttered; there are many ‘unlikely’ stories about elephants.”

And not just elephants: In a chapter cheekily titled “Woo-Woo,” he entertains similar ideas about the psychic abilities of killer whales and other members of the dolphin family.

Dr. Safina, a marine conservationist and professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, is clearly unafraid to challenge scientific orthodoxy. He accepts as a given that animals are capable of thought and emotion, a proposition that, as he notes impatiently and not a little defensively, is far from settled among animal behaviorists.

“Why do researchers judge the mental performance of other animals against a standard that humans could not possibly reach?” he asks. “You have to deeply deny the evidence to conclude that humans alone are conscious, feeling beings.”

This renegade spirit is a source of the book’s great charm, the pepper in its woo-woo sauce. Dr. Safina takes frequent droll pleasure in puncturing claims to human exceptionalism.

“Maybe more than anything, what ‘makes us human’ is our ability to generate wacky ideas,” he writes. And at another point: “There is in nature an overriding sanity and often, in humankind, an undermining insanity. We, among all animals, are most frequently irrational, distortional, delusional, worried.”

Dr. Safina is a terrific writer, majestic and puckish in equal measure, with a contagious enthusiasm for the complex social lives of the animals he’s observing — in this book, chiefly elephants, wolves and killer whales. If he pulls a bit of bait and switch, for long stretches abandoning his supposed theme of animal consciousness to focus instead on simple appreciation and advocacy, it’s hard to object because he brings his subjects so vividly to life.

Here he is, for instance, describing killer whales as they forage for salmon off Vancouver Island in British Columbia: “Several whales bow their backs and dive steeply. Below, the fish have their attention. A couple of other whales slice rapidly through the surface, quickly switching directions.”

“The closest whale, right behind us, is L-92. This big one over here with the high, wavy dorsal fin is K-25. He begins a series of high-arcing lunges, with lots of splashing and commotion. He’s after one large, isolated fish. He dives away. When he suddenly bursts through the surface, his mass and momentum startle me wide-eyed.”

The effect — and surely the intention — of such lively, physical description is to make Dr. Safina’s readers feel as strong a connection to these animals as he does. Again and again he follows the same formula, familiar from nature documentaries: Draw close to the animals, explain their habits and family structures and personalities until we perceive them as individual characters, then detail the ways human culture is destroying their way of life.

For elephants, that means ivory poaching; for wolves, the threat of hunters and trappers; for killer whales, everything from overfishing to underwater military explosions to the continued practice, in some places, of capturing young whales for use in aquarium shows.

The strategy of making us see animals as individuals is undeniably effective, as anybody who has followed the story of Cecil the lion can attest. And Dr. Safina draws out haunting resonances between animal lives and our own. “What I had not imagined,” he writes of a Yellowstone wolf pack that fractured after hunters killed its alpha member, “was the politics involved, the personalities, the vendettas and coalitions, the family turmoil following tragedy, the loyalties and disloyalties.” Dr. Safina describes the drama as “all too human.”

In the same section, he describes a legendary wolf from Yellowstone, the “superwolf” known by his tracking number 21, who never lost a fight and never killed an opponent.

“Can a wolf be magnanimous?” Dr. Safina asks. “And if so, why?”

But of course the nobility of animals is all a matter of perspective: Ask harbor seals how they feel about killer whales. And as persuasive as Dr. Safina is in calling for humans to tread more humanely on the earth — his desire for ecological harmony sometimes carries pleasing echoes of the poet Gary Snyder — “Beyond Words” remains most interesting when it focuses on the core question of nonhuman consciousness.

That question also leads him to the most scientifically grounded sections of the book, discussing for example the chemical and neurological bases of emotions: “Oxytocin drives bonding,” he reminds readers, “and it makes elephants and many other species act social or sexual. Block the hormone; many mammals and birds lose interest in socializing, pairing, nesting and contact.” Elsewhere he writes about brain size relative to body size, and the role of neuron density in determining mental dexterity.

Throughout, he demonstrates a keen grasp of the scientific literature across a range of disciplines and a refreshing skepticism about the terms of debate. “Only humans have human minds,” he concedes. “But believing that only humans have minds is like believing that because only humans have human skeletons, only humans have skeletons.”

Finally, though, you get the feeling that for Dr. Safina, human consciousness is at least as pressing a concern as animal consciousness, and possibly more in doubt. “The work,” he writes near the end of this captivating book, “is beautiful, and urgent, an almost holy quest for deeper intimacy. Not just with the whales. With the world.”