A Small Furry Prayer (19 page)

37

Scientists have spent the past two centuries trying to find these same answers. The earliest attempt was
totemism
, an idea that began when two late nineteenth-century philosophers, Herbert Spencer and Rudolf Otto, tried to define religion. Both decided that religion was fundamentally about the notion of the supernatural. “This means any order of things beyond our understanding,” later wrote the father of sociobiology, Emile Durkheim, in his 1912
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
, “the supernatural is the world of mystery, the unknowable, the incomprehensible. Religion would then be a kind of speculation on all that escapes science and clear thinking in general.”

Durkheim disagreed with their ideas. He felt the supernatural presupposed a natural, an array of “natural laws” that exist in opposition to this mysterious realm. Anything that violates those natural laws is thus beyond nature and, according to Otto and Spencer, the basis for religion. But religion is rarely about the miraculous; it's mostly about the mundane. God showed Moses a burning bush not so he could learn how to start fires with his mind but so he could pass along the Ten Commandments and provide rules for daily living. Moreover, these miraculous events are geographically specific, so the rules that emerge vary across cultures—in India the cow is a sacred animal, while in America it's our lunch. Therefore religion can't actually be about the nouns—the persons, places and things labeled as supernatural or, as Durkheim prefers, “sacred.” Instead, he says, “religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.”

He came to see the essential component of religion as the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, but this doesn't explain why we consider animals to be sacred. Durkheim felt that the best way to solve that problem was to simplify it. He decided to strip away Western culture and modernity and start with the most “primitive” religion he could find, so based his answer on the beliefs of Australian Aborigines. Essential to the Aborigines are totems—sacred emblems of the clan's spiritual connection to their world and worlds beyond. The Aborigines were hunter-gathers, and most of their outside-the-clan social life revolved around animals. Because animal behavior so frequently falls into that ambiguous category Otto and Spencer called “supernatural,” the animals became symbols for the supernatural—and critically important, Durkheim thought, for the cohesion of hunter-gather society.

Shared sacred symbols serve a purpose, according to Durkheim. The sacred is a psychic glue holding a community together. By bonding the collective, religion makes individuals feel connected and protected and thus fulfills significant psychosocial needs. Totems, then, are a way of extending that glue's bond beyond the clan and into the environment, which essentially contained a bunch of inexplicable phenomena that had long proved dangerous. Totems connected humans to a wider unknown—the idea again being with connection came protection—and this made those clans feel safer. Thus, Durkheim concluded, animals are sacred because we need them to help us feel safe in the world.

But this raised a different question: why are some animals more sacred than others? Why worship the eagle and ignore the beetle? If the goal is security, why even make these divisions? It was anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who unraveled this puzzle by examining those divisions as they pertained to food restrictions. Some foods are forbidden, aka sacred, others are not—but why? Lévi-Strauss discovered that people are neither hunting protein nor avoiding poisons, that it's neither dietary nor gastronomic criteria that makes certain foods taboo. “Animals which are tabooed are chosen,” explained anthropologist Mary Douglas in
The World of Goods
, “because they are good to think, not because they are good to eat.”

So what does this mean and why is it true? As John Berger famously explained in
About Looking
: “The essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms—man and animal—shared in common revealed what differentiated them.” This was important to Lévi-Strauss because he held a different belief than his predecessors about his study subjects: he didn't believe primitive people were stupid just because they were “primitive.” He figured they were just like us, just as preoccupied with the question of what it means to be human. And Lévi-Strauss believed that animals are good to think because that was how these peoples answered the question. Animals were what we thought with about ourselves. They were our first grounds for comparison, and became our first way to define our species: we are like animals this way, we are unlike them this way, that is what it means to be human. And the more we used a particular animal to think with in our daily lives, the more taboo it became come dinnertime.

This “thinking in animals” was no small step. It was the beginning of symbolic thought, an amazing leap forward. Aldous Huxley explains why:

Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds—the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols. In our thinking we make use of a great variety of symbol-systems—linguistic, mathematical, pictorial, musical, ritualistic. Without such symbol-systems we should have no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, not so much as the rudiments of civilization: in other words, we should be animals.

But Huxley also points out that our transformation was less a metamorphosis than a magnification:

The result is that we have been able to commit, in cold blood and over long periods of time, acts of which the brutes are capable only for brief moments and at the frantic height of rage, desire or fear. Because they use and worship symbols, men can become idealists; and, being idealists, they can transform the animal's intermittent greed into the grandiose imperialism of a Rhodes or a J. P. Morgan; the animal's intermittent love of bullying into Stalinism or the Spanish Inquisition; the animal's intermittent attachment to its territory into the calculated frenzies of nationalism.

This same process of magnification helped turn the surreal into the supernatural. We don't always understand animal behavior, but because we were hunter-gathers, understanding that behavior was critical to finding dinner, so we spent a lot of time thinking about it. Since symbolic magnification is our habit, one abstract idea led to another, and the profane became the sacred. And perhaps, we hoped, this same chain of abstraction applied to us. Because we're unlike animals, animals are linked to the supernatural. But we're also like animals, so maybe we too are linked to the supernatural. Thus the animals are sacred because they make us feel sacred too.

Why is this a good thing? Because we know we're going to die, and this is a problem for most. Many thinkers considered this knowledge the main differences between humans and animals, which is why the problem is called the
human condition
. A long line of scientists have proven the need to cure this condition—to control our mortal terror—which is among our most powerful biological urges. In 1973, Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for arguing that death denial is the basic motivation for all human behavior—both the foundation of society and the reason we created society in the first place. A long line of scientists have also pointed out that there is only one way to cure the condition: attach the finite self to an infinite other. This, many believe, is the origin and purpose of religion—a way to cure our fear of death.

The Judeo-Christian cure works by adhering the mortal now to the immortal next via the medium of the soul. Eastern religions come the other way round: death is the illusion; we are instead infinite beings taste-testing a finite experience. There are older strategies as well. Archaic peoples didn't quite understand animals and so viewed them as liminal, hovering between the explainable and the unexplainable, serving as “an aid to bridge the natural and the supernatural, awakening the realities of both within the environs of … [our] own lives,” as Ted Andrews put it in his quirky compendium on the subject,
Animals Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small
. Because animals are like humans in a number of ways, maybe humans too are hovering between worlds, immortal as well as mortal. Animals, then, are an effective strategy for denying death, our first such strategy: archaic, almost forgotten, almost but not quite. And perhaps this is the reason we still think animals are sacred; perhaps a part of us remembers.

PART  EIGHT

It is slightly galling to think that we live in a universe that, for the most part, we can't even see, but there you are.

—Bill Bryson

38

Beyond pondering the sacred, I also spent a lot of that second autumn trying to exhaust the big dogs—which eventually amounted to the same thing, but that took a while to figure out. In the beginning, it was mostly about stamina. Once Igor discovered how to bank turns up and down the walls of the riverbed, he didn't want to stop. He soon mastered the gradual curve and moved on to the dead vertical, trying to learn how to run straight up the sides of the arroyo. If the sides got too steep to run, he'd attempt to cat-leap to the top. Igor, like most bull terriers, cat-leaped about as well as he did long division. Bella, on the other hand, could do almost anything she tried—and this drove Igor crazy.

Often when Bella pulled some stunt Igor couldn't duplicate, he'd just disappear from sight. There were days when I would call and call and he wouldn't come. One morning, I decided to stop calling and instead tried to find out what he was doing. I found him hard at work on a different cliff, practicing Bella's moves. That day, Bella had used a climbing method straight out of a Spider-Man. She'd run up the side of the arroyo and onto a protruding boulder. She used the boulder like a springboard, launching herself across the arroyo, executing a neat half-twist in mid-flight to land paws first on the other side.

Igor was giving it his best, but his best wasn't Spider-Man. He went up the wall and flew sideways and missed and smashed and a few times hard before he got it one time right. There's some basic science to explain why Igor would want to hide these practice sessions, much of it having to do with any show of weakness being a great way to get demoted in pack order—something you often see when dogs injure a paw and try to mask the limp—but in this case I think it was pure embarrassment. Igor was a klutz. He took some bad falls. That he wanted to take them privately seemed perfectly reasonable.

His embarrassment faded when Bucket got hip to the cause and started trying to run up the walls too. Bucket is small and squat and about as aerodynamic as a wheelbarrow. For a little while there the Five-Dog Workout became the Cirque du Soleil Reject Hour. And when Igor realized he wasn't the only klutz out there, he stopped trying to hide his efforts. Bella would pull some acrobatic feat, and Igor and Bucket would spend the rest of the hike falling all over the place trying to learn the trick.

In 1976, a chimpanzee researcher named M. J. A. Simpson witnessed something similar in rhesus monkeys. He noticed them practicing difficult leaps between tree branches, varying branch size, leap distance, and acrobatics often enough that Simpson took to describing these sessions as “projects.” Marine biologist Karen Pryor observed the same in dolphins: “I have seen a dolphin, striving to master an aesthetically difficult trick, actually refuse to eat its ‘reward fish' until it got the stunt right.” But what I saw was more than stunt mastery. It was, as the behaviorist Patricia McConnell told me when I rang her up, “a fairly high level of imitative behavior.”

I was also told to make a videotape of it, “just so someone might believe you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked McConnell.

“What you're describing, a lot of people just don't think it's possible.”

The reason most people believe imitation impossible for dogs begins with domestication. Since this is a process of neurological contraction—brain size shrinks in domesticated animals—the thinking has been that domesticated animals are dumber than they used to be. Because dogs were once wolves, we assumed they were dumber than wolves. Dumber how has been a matter of some debate, but most researchers put imitative behavior high up on the list of things that were lost in the process of domestication.

In the 1980s, assumption turned to conviction when scientists found wolves could open a latched gate after watching a human do it once, while dogs remained confused after repeated exposures. Yet something about this experiment always bothered Hungarian ethologist Vilmos Csányi. Csányi had dogs. His seemed smart enough for the job. He began to wonder if the dogs in that experiment weren't just being polite—they weren't opening the gate because they were waiting for their owner's permission to open the gate.

In 1997, with a team at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, he tried to find out. In their first experiment, a group of dogs had to pull long handles to get at plates full of food. During the initial trial, dogs that were allowed inside their owner's house fared worse than dogs that were always kept outside. But during the second trial, when all the owners first gave their dogs permission to get the food, the gap vanished. Maybe, Csányi thought, dogs aren't dumber than wolves, only more attuned to human desires.

Over the next few years, Csányi looked at other kinds of imitative behavior. He discovered that dogs, with little training, can copy humans bowing, moving around a room, running in circles, waving their hands (paws) in the air, finding the shortest distance between two points, or even operating a ball-dispensing machine. He also discovered that dogs can understand pointing, nodding, and staring—three things chimpanzees have a very hard time doing. More recently, he retried a variation of that first wolf experiment. Dog puppies and wolf cubs were raised in identical environments for three months, then, with handlers in the room, were given a chance to remove a chunk of meat from a cage by pulling on a rope. Both dogs and wolves solved this pretty quickly. Then the rope was tied down, so pulling it to get the meat became impossible. The dogs gave it a few tries, failed, and looked at the humans for help. The wolves ignored the humans and pulled until they were exhausted.

Csányi believes this proof that unlike wolves, dogs have an innate ability to pay attention to people, an ability sculpted by millennia of cross-species cooperation and communication. “This idea,” says UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences Marco Iacoboni, “is slightly revolutionary. In the nineteenth century, every good naturalist believed animals learned by imitation, but it's hard to get real imitative behavior in a lab. So in the behaviorist-dominated twentieth century, there was a backlash. Scientists dismissed the possibility almost outright.”

They stopped dismissing it outright when researchers found the portion of the brain responsible for imitation. This happened in 1995, when a neuroscientist named Giacomo Rizzolatti and a team at the University of Parma in Italy were studying grasping, an action that, as Iacoboni once told reporters, “doesn't sound like much until you try to leave the house without turning the doorknob.” Rizzolatti had wired the frontal lobe of a macaque so that whenever the monkey reached out to grab an object a monitor would record his brain's firing pattern. Then a graduate student carrying an ice cream cone stopped by the lab. The macaque stared at the ice cream. The student lifted the cone to take a lick, and the monitor went crazy, as if the monkey had lifted the cone. But the monkey hadn't moved—he'd only thought about moving.

Rizzolatti discovered a new breed of neuron that fires both when an animal performs an action and when an animal sees another perform the same action. These neurons mirror the behavior of the other animal, thus earning them the name “mirror neurons.” Shortly thereafter, scientists discovered mirror neurons in humans, only ours are smarter, more flexible and more highly evolved than those in monkeys. Since then, they've shown up in other primates, elephants, dolphins, dogs, and songbirds, and are now theorized to exist in all mammals.

According to V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, knowledge of mirror neurons provides the basis for understanding far more than mimicry. “ ‘Mind reading,' empathy, imitation, learning, and even the evolution of language,” he wrote in an article for Edge.com, can all be explained by mirror neurons. “Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to ‘read' and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated ‘theory of other minds.' ” The ability to read another's mind, to put ourselves in that person's place, is the basic requirement for empathy. Because mirror neurons seem to be the brain's empathy facilitator Ramachandran calls them “Dalai Lama neurons” or “Gandhi neurons,” his reasoning being, as he recently told the
New Yorker,
“they're dissolving the barrier between you and me.”

We also know that the bridge between species can be crossed in the same fashion. In August 2009, Annika Paukner, a researcher at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, gave humans and capuchin monkeys—chosen because of their highly social nature—wiffle balls to play with. When the monkeys got the balls they began poking them with their fingers, pounding them against hard surfaces, and putting them in their mouths. Two human researchers were sitting with the monkeys at the time. One would mimic their actions, poking or mouthing or pounding a ball of their own whenever the monkey did so, while the second would intentionally do the opposite—if the monkey pounded the ball, the researcher would mouth it instead. Afterward, the monkeys wanted to spend time with the researcher who imitated them, while spending none with the researchers whose behaviors were opposite of their own. In a second task, the monkeys were given a token they could exchange for a food treat. Both researchers had treats, but the monkeys consistently choose to exchange their token with the researcher who had been imitating their behavior, while ignoring the other. All of this means that, just like in humans, animals match behaviors as a way of bonding.

How sophisticated are the mirror neurons in dogs is an ongoing mystery, but like everything else, the more exercise they get, the stronger they become. As my dogs imitated each other, their mirror neuron systems got stronger, and their legs as well—stronger, faster, and more able to run straight up those canyon walls. Afterward, they were significantly less inclined to stay in the river beds. When I got tired of arguing, I started practicing.

Our runs became a giant game of follow the leader, only considerably more retarded. When Bucket had point he preferred the low curves of gentle arroyos, Igor the skate park of the canyon walls, while Bella went straight no matter what was in her path. I fell down a lot. The soft dirt made it possible. It was soft, sticky, and carvable, which thankfully meant sharp turns were possible. Those turns were needed because the dogs ran like wolves, as a tight pack. Trying to stay upright while paying attention to where they were was impossible, but ignoring them was dangerous. “Part of the pleasure of being around dogs is a sense that we are participating in rituals that go back to atavistic pack behavior,” wrote Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason in
Dogs Never Lie About Love
. Absolutely. One day as we were coming down a steep cliff, Igor cut me off. I tripped, he crashed, and Bella came down with us. Together we cartwheeled over a boulder and into a cactus. Pleasure was had by all.

But after a little while, no one tripped. No one fell. We moved completely in synch with one another, less individual entities than one elegant hybrid. Maybe this was our mirror neurons working; maybe even older habits were surfacing. Psychologist Carl Jung used the phrase
collective unconscious
to describe “the storehouse of latent trace memories from man's ancestral past,” then later broadened the definition beyond the borders of species, including our “pre-human or animal ancestry as well.” And while I've never been exactly certain where to find the collective unconscious, there were more than a few times when the dogs sure seemed to know the way.

There was a day we were running a ridge above a series of fluted cliffs, Bella leading, Bucket next, then me, with Igor bringing up the rear. Bella dropped over a three-foot rock ledge and shot down a steep flute. About thirty feet down, the flute bottomed out in a riverbed. Bucket followed her down, and I followed Bucket. When I hit the bottom, dirt and rock started raining down on my head. I looked up and realized that Igor had chosen a different line, one that was way too steep. He had slipped and was trying to arrest his fall by stretching out, forepaws wedged into one side of a flute, back paws against the other. But the flute spread farther apart the lower it dropped. Right about the point I looked up, it had become too wide from Igor to stem. He was about fifteen feet off the deck and falling straight down. Somehow, without missing a beat, I put out both my arms and caught him in stride. Which is something I've learned from dogs: sometimes the lessons are deep ecology, sometimes they're Laurel and Hardy.