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2006-05-17 - 11:14 p.m.
My earlier entry about the thankful whale touched me. The story of the whale touched me, that is. And on my last foray into the library I began to search for books on animal behavior. I've looked before and found an interesting video about cat behavior. So I thought I'd look some more. Initially about cats, because those are the animals I'm the most familiar with, and even after more than forty years of living with cats, I still think there is more to learn about them.
What I found, though, was When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy.
This is, I think, more apropos. My entry, a very big thank you was in response to behavior. But I was touched by, and I think I was advocating the notion that animals do experience emotion. Or that I'd at least like to believe that. But I think I equivocated, not wanting to appear to be too sappy.
But this book is addressing specifically the emotions of animals. I'm only about six pages into the prologue, and already I'm of two minds. One is excitement, because unlike Masson's "Hungry to learn more systematically about animal emotions, I found that the book I wanted to read was yet to be written." Here, indeed, is the book, already written. The other turn of mind, no, there are two more turns of mind.
My second is to not be sucked in by some patchouli wearing, crystal gazing, anti-science hippie. To quote Sawyer from Lost, "And after that we can sing Kumbaya and do 'trust falls.'" This guy is the author of Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing. While I understand that psychology is not exactly hard science, and psychotherapy has its limitations, I'm distrustful of those who dismiss it outright. Especially someone who, as Masson does, says they experience stronger emotions in dreams than in waking life. Repressed much, dude?
Whatever limitations psychology has, it is at least a fledgling attempt to understand and treat very serious problems that affect many millions of humans worldwide. And if it's not very successful so far, in terms of science, to which I disagree, it probably will be in the future.
My third thought is that I also don't want to buy into the hard-line scientist stance if it doesn't make sense. Masson says, "I learned that there was almost no investigation of the emotional lives of animals in the modern scientific literature.
Why should this be so? One reason is that scientists, animal behaviorists, zoologists, and ethologists are fearful of being accused of anthropomorphism, a form of scientific blasphemy. Not only are the emotions of animals not a respectable field of study, the words associated with emotions are not supposed to be applied to them."
And he quotes Jane Goodall, "When, in the early 1960s, I brazenly used such words as 'childhood,' 'adolescence,''motivation,''excitement,' and 'mood,' I was much criticized. Even worse was my crime of suggesting that chimpanzees had 'personalities.' I was ascribing human characteristics to nonhuman animals and was thus guilty of that worst of ethological sins--anthropomorphism"
Here I find the scientific community too rigid, too lacking in imagination, and well, fucking tight-assed. Really absurd, actually. As I said before, we are mammals. Dogs, cats, elephants, and chimpanzees are mammals. We are more alike physiologically than we are not. To deny the possibility that animals have emotion is akin to branding Africans "savages", and "subhuman" in the 19th century. Just what justifies calling emotional characteristics "human"? Because they happen to humans? That because we are able to point them out, talk and write about them with one another, that makes them unique to humans? We among all God's creatures are blessed with reason, and emotion. What utter garbage! Ridiculous! What a very 19th century, Christian European point of view.
Binny and Noodle are cackling derisively over on the bed as I read this aloud to them.
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So, how do you like them apples?