1.1: The Lives of Animals
The following is a series of excerpts from an essay due out this fall/winter. Please enjoy, comment, and share with your friends and neighbors. More soon!
All animals that belong to the same species are identical in respect of action and feeling; and thus they can know the actions and feelings of others by knowing their own. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia
For all men born of flesh, what are they but worms? Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John
A few months ago, my wife and I were walking down a gravel driveway that led to an old tobacco barn on our farm. We were on our way to say goodbye to our kids. My wife had been offered a job on the other side of the country, and while it was difficult to imagine leaving the farm we tend and the community we love, it was an enticing enough offer for the parents to go and check it out.
I am tugging two overstuffed suitcases behind me. Their wheels grumble and snag on the rocks that lie in our path. It is an unexpectedly awkward task. We stop for a moment by the pond, which is still and choked with autumn leaves, but the air around it is clear, placid, and unseasonably warm. We had planned to duck inside to see our kids, but we don’t need to: they are outside, distracted with Legos, and hardly notice us. As we exchange hugs, we hear a sharp, unsettling chatter in the distance behind the barn. Bursting around the corner, a huge kingfisher arcs high in the air and then skims along the edge of the pond closest to us in long, looping curves. With another burst of chittering, it swoops over to us and grabs onto a limb of a pin oak tree. It stares at us from one eye, intent and unafraid, and cries out in short staccato bursts. It sits for what feels like a full minute–long enough for me to drop the suitcase, pull each kid over, and show them. They see it too, and then it is off again, swooping down to the surface of the water where it hovers for a moment, then slips away and into a thin stand of willow trees that rim the far edge of the water.
Kingfishers aren’t rare where we live. They are frequent visitors to our pond, which carves out a gash between the two gently rising slopes that make up our farm. Our house sits at the top of the southern slope, and from our back door, you could almost throw a rock and hit water. But the pond is sheltered by a thin band of pine, willow, maple and oak trees. And so, despite its proximity to us, the pond feels secluded and remote to many species of wild animal. Otters, beavers, green and great blue herons, migratory birds, and kingfishers frequent its banks. Lucky for us, the pond is still close enough to observe the traffic of its itinerant visitors. Sometimes they stay for a while. (This fall and winter, we got to watch a pair of river otters rear their young until one morning they disappeared. They have not been seen again.) But more often than not an animal–like the kingfisher–will visit for a day, an hour, a few minutes, and then be on its way.
We’ve experienced kingfishers to be a wary species. Every time we see or hear one (and they are nearly always alone), we try to move in quietly for a closer look. When we approach, the bird will usually scold us with its strange, rattling call before disappearing through the trees. But on the day that the kingfisher visited us–when it interrogated us, I want to say–the boundary between the hidden life of the pond and the family of humans who bore witness to it suddenly became porous. It was as if an actor in a play suddenly stopped speaking his lines and turned to address the audience. And so the bird sat on a branch, like a totem, chittering away at my family, as two parents prepared to leave home and consider a move someplace else.
Is it possible for non-human creatures to speak? What sense does it make to say that they speak to each other, or to us? Recent discoveries in fields like environmental biology and cognitive ethology have made these questions less naive than they may once have seemed. Popular science writing abounds with examples of non-human creatures doing things once thought to be distinctly human. For example, humpback whales have been observed not only to make very elaborate forms of communication over long distances, but they even “mark the passage of time by changing their songs from year to year.” Researchers have long argued that another marine mammal, the bottlenose dolphin, can have beliefs, feelings, and reasons for performing certain actions. And they have astonishingly sharp memories: in a pod of dolphins, a dolphin’s whistle can function like a name, and one study suggests that dolphins can recognize the whistle of other dolphins from whom they have been separated for twenty years.
Animals need not have large brains to perform complex forms of communication, perception, and decision making. Some researchers have argued that the decision making of bees resembles a central nervous system whose parts have been scattered among individual members of a whole group. When bees decide to swarm and make a new colony, they will send out scouts to find new locations. When the scouts return, they perform dances before the rest of the hive. The more complex the dance, the more favorable the location. If convinced, other bees leave and see the new location for themselves. If enough bees return and perform the same dance–if, that is, they share enough consensus about the promise of the new location of a hive–the hive will split and form a new colony.
Forms of articulacy and perception extend to the plant world, too. It is now well known that trees communicate with each other through hyphae, the weblike, subterranean fungal networks that can stretch several miles in different directions. When a tree is under attack from a pest, it can send signals through these networks to its neighbors and call for help. Some species can exchange minerals and carbon with each other in response to their own needs and the needs of others. Mathematical models have shown that a tree’s roots move in patterns that resemble the swarming of bees or the collective movement of a flock of birds. Root development consists in the countless responses to felt changes in the environment, which in turn build and cascade down through the millions of individual cells of a single organism. Other plants, like the Boquila trifoliolata (a vine native to Chile), possess some form of perception or sight. Scientists have observed the vine mimicking the leaf shape of an artificial plant made of plastic. In the absence of pheromone signals, how else would the vine know what shape to imitate, unless it could somehow perceive them? Scientists have observed clusters of cells on the surface of the vine’s leaves that look remarkably like ocelli, or rudimentary eyes.
Examples like this (and there are many) suggest that the boundaries between plant, animal, and human are less fixed than they have been thought to be in the past. Rationality and communication, once considered the special province of humans, appear more like a continuum to which all living things belong rather than a boundary marker between humans and everything else.
But what about the kingfisher? Examples of non-humans doing human-like things do little more than intensify the question that has dogged me since we first encountered the bird on that strange day. How could a wild bird have spoken to us? A neuro-chemical or evolutionary account of the kingfisher’s behavior could only go so far in answering this question. Ludwig Wittgenstein quipped that if lions could speak, we would not be able to understand them. Despite the inauspicious circumstances of the event–the thought of leaving our farm and our homeplace, of ending our stewardship of this land, of saying goodbye to children, if only for a time–I don’t think I could ever say with any certainty what the kingfisher meant. This is because I don’t understand the extent to which I share a world in common with the kingfisher. And yet, no matter how hard I try, I cannot shake the conviction that, in a moment of vulnerability and sadness, our family was being interrogated by this non-human creature.
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In her book on animals in ancient Christian thought, Patricia Cox Miller describes a tension between early Christian doctrines of dominion and the way that theologians wrote about the relationship between humans and other animals. For theologians like Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine, human beings stood at the top of a hierarchy of value in creation, having received a command from God to till and to keep the garden of Eden. Non-human animals and plants are irrational creatures: they cannot speak, and they have no share in contemplating the divine logos. In spite of this anthropocentric teaching, Miller points to a remarkably varied theology of trans-species encounters that undermine the simplistic dichotomies of human and animal, rational and irrational. Although Augustine is quick to remind his congregants that humans are exceptional among non-angelic creation, there are countercurrents in his thought that push in surprising directions. Consider his exposition of Psalm 22:6, “But I am a worm, not a man”:
“I am a worm, and no man. In what sense ‘no man’? Because he is God. Why then did he so demean himself as to say ‘worm’? Perhaps because a worm is born from flesh without intercourse, as Christ was born from the Virgin Mary? A worm, and yet no man. Why a worm? Because he was mortal, because he was born from flesh, because he was born without intercourse. Why ‘no man’? Because in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and he was God (John 1:1).”
As Miller points out, “Christ is both animal and God” in this passage. Taking the Psalm’s metaphor of worms seriously (worms were thought to spontaneously appear from decaying matter, not through any sort of copulation), Augustine places Christ below the human in order to draw out the Psalm’s implicitly Incarnational logic. In virtue of taking on flesh, Christ is a part of creation as much as the lowly worm is. And yet Christ is also the Word through whom creation was spoken into existence. Augustine, Miller remarks, “goes further than the new materialists: he attenuates the divisions among human, animal, and divine.” “The human/animal binary,” Miller concludes, “simply doesn’t hold when humans and animals can reflect each other in a shared creatureliness that is both emotional and ethical.”
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Perhaps the pertinent question is not whether non-human creatures can speak and act, but rather, as the novelist Amitav Ghosh has asked, “when and how did a small group of humans come to believe that other beings, including the majority of their own species, were incapable of articulation and agency? How were they able to establish the idea that nonhumans are mute, and without minds, as the dominant wisdom of the time?” Theological hierarchies of the cosmos may have played a role. But as Ghosh implies, the question of articulacy–who or what gets to speak, and who or what does not or perhaps cannot–has its roots in the colonialism and global imperial expansion of the early modern period. When large swathes of creation are no longer able to speak–when creatures, human or non-human, are reduced to brute matter–they become the raw, inert material of our manufacture. And so the question of who or what can speak “lie(s) at the core of the planetary crisis” (195) the world is currently enduring. There is no more urgent moral task, Ghosh writes, than restoring non-human voices to our stories and our lives.