The Animal Manifesto (2 page)

These polls confirm a society-wide trend that I’ve noticed in my own life with the strangers I meet. Often when I’m flying, or waiting in an airport, someone will strike up a conversation, and I’m always amazed and pleased at how interested they invariably are in animals and our impact on them. On one flight I happened to be sitting next to a woman who worked for a major software company. I was writing and spell-checking a manuscript, and she asked what program I used. I told her and said I was working on a book on animal emotions and that I wished that word-processing software would stop asking me to change the words “who” and “whom” to “that” or “which” when I refer to animals — because animals aren’t objects but subjects. At first she didn’t get it, but eventually she did, and she said she’d talk to the people at her company about changing their software. Whether she followed through or not, I was glad that she was open to seeing animals differently and that she recognized that the language we use affects our attitudes. Perhaps the next generation of spell-checking software will reverse its presumptions, prompting writers to refer to animals as “he” or “she,” not “it.”

Indeed, most people are simply accustomed to thinking and doing things the way they always have, without considering the
effects of their actions, but when you call attention to them, and explain the facts in a nice, polite way, people often listen. Quite frequently, people are astounded to learn what really happens on the way to, and at, slaughterhouses; they simply don’t know. Likewise, many people don’t know what happens behind closed doors at laboratories and at sporting events. When what is hidden is exposed, it can become headline news. In May 2008, I was flying home from the World Forum for Animals in Barcelona when the story about the racehorse Eight Belles appeared in newspapers worldwide. Eight Belles broke her front ankles while running during the 134th Kentucky Derby, and this abused filly had to be euthanized — or killed — right in front of spectators on the racetrack at Churchill Downs, not off in some private stable. In the name of money, racehorses are often mistreated and pushed beyond their limits until they are injured, sometimes to the point that they must be killed, but the mistreatment and death of Eight Belles was so disturbingly public it couldn’t be ignored. On the plane, the guy sitting next to me agreed how horrible this was, and we had a great chat about animal sentience and animal abuse of all kinds. The man didn’t know the facts about racehorses, or much about animal abuse in general, but he said he wanted to raise his children in a kind and compassionate world, and the incident and our conversation led him to feel he needed to change some of his ways. Good for him.

Perhaps because I live at high altitude in what some people call “The People’s Republic of Boulder” — twenty-five square miles in Colorado surrounded by reality — some people regard my embrace of the compassionate and caring side of human nature as merely “wishful thinking fluff.” But as we’ll see, solid science backs my belief. In
Wild Justice: The Moral
Lives of Animals,
Jessica Pierce and I argue that the same is true for animals — they have the cognitive and emotional capacities to make moral decisions and show kindness, compassion, and empathy — and we can learn a lot about ourselves by studying how animals negotiate their challenging and changing social worlds.
The Animal Manifesto
is a natural descendant of my books
Wild Justice
and
The Emotional Lives of Animals,
where I also discuss the “nice” side of animals. This “manifesto” takes what we’ve learned about the amazing animals with whom we share Earth and asks: What does that mean for us? And what should we do?

Like any good manifesto,
The Animal Manifesto
is a call for action. I take the facts that have been established about animal sentience and emotions and look at how they affect our society’s current value system. In other words, I freely mix science with ethics, morality, and emotion. This call to action addresses a variety of groups, ranging from the general public to policy makers to those who live in ivory towers, from humane and conservation organizations to grassroots groups and individuals, and from those who make their living studying, displaying, raising, or processing animals to those working to make their lives better. We all need to raise our consciousness about the lives of our fellow animals and change the current paradigm, in which those who work on behalf of animals and the environment are seen as “radicals” or “extremists.” No one should be an apologist for passion and no one should be shamed for feeling.

Do we know everything there is to know about the minds and emotions of other animals? Certainly not, but we know
enough to change our ways. Some scientists remain skeptical about the emotional lives of animals — but this view, which was once predominant, is dwindling rapidly. As we will see, it’s simply impossible to ignore the growing amount of solid science concerning animal sentience. We need to take the skeptics to task and switch the burden of proof, so that skeptics have to “prove” that animals don’t have rich emotional lives rather than others having to prove that they do. This is also part of the paradigm shift I argue for, in which the most “radical” stance becomes doubt.

Nevertheless, it’s important to address these doubts head on. Some say life is too short to mess with skeptics, but I feel that life is too long for the misleading skeptical view of animal sentience to continue because it allows for far too much animal suffering and abuse. Often the skeptics raise the ante so high that most
humans
wouldn’t qualify as feeling beings. For instance, some scientists dismiss anecdotes as valid proof (in any context), but I agree with my close friend philosopher Dale Jamieson that the plural of anecdote is data. Narrative ethology (a term coined by my colleague Jessica Pierce) is a perfectly good way to learn about the lives of animals. After I published my own observations of a magpie funeral ceremony — in which individual magpies paid tribute to their dead friend by standing silently around her, touching the corpse lightly, and flying off and bringing back grass that was laid down by the body — I had a slew of emails from people who had seen the same type of ritual in other birds in the corvid family: magpies, crows, and ravens. These stories, even from nonresearchers, are indeed data, and they challenge science to prove or disprove them. More than ever, controlled scientific studies are validating what our eyes clearly see.

Is it radical, then, to draw ethical conclusions from these facts? In 2009, when President Barack Obama nominated Harvard University law professor Cass Sunstein to run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (which oversees the implementation of consumer, health, and environmental regulation), this was considered by some to be a radical move. As described in a January 2009 article in
Mother Jones
magazine, the Center for Consumer Freedom claimed that Sunstein is “an extremist” because, among other reasons, he once wrote, “There should be extensive regulation of the use of animals in entertainment, scientific experiments, and agriculture.” Sunstein also believes that “hunting for ‘sport and fun’ — not for food — should be ‘against the law’ and that greyhound racing, cosmetic testing on animals, and the eating of meat raised in inhumane conditions ought to be eliminated.” However, while Sunstein argues for extensive regulation of animal use and against sport hunting, he also “eats meat and has no secret plan to force vegetarianism on the American people,” and he has written that “it is excessive to ban experiments that impose a degree of suffering on rats or mice if the consequence of those experiments is to produce significant medical advances for human beings.” Is this a truly radical overall approach, to try to protect animals and their homes from unnecessary harm while not unduly burdening or endangering humans in the process?

More to the point, if animals can think and feel, what do they think and feel about the ways humans treat them? What would they say to us, and what would they
ask
of us, if they could speak a human language? Here is what I believe their manifesto would consist of:

1. All animals share the Earth and we must coexist.
   
2. Animals think and feel.
   
3. Animals have and deserve compassion.
   
4. Connection breeds caring, alienation breeds disre spect.
   
5. Our world is not compassionate to animals.
   
6. Acting compassionately helps all beings and our world.
   

Is such a manifesto radical? I think it’s common sense. These six items are also the six “reasons” we can use to expand our compassion footprint; they are an extension of the ideas about which Jane Goodall and I wrote in our book
The Ten Trusts.
Yet, even though these ideas reflect common sense, I think that they are often denied or resisted because people intuitively understand that following them — respecting what we see before our own eyes — would lead to radical changes in how we live and what we do. This is hard, but it’s not impossible, and we’ve done it before. It’s important to remember that people who are at first considered “on the fringe” and radical aren’t always wrong, nor is taking nature seriously sentimental, fluffy thinking. At first, hardcore scientists ridiculed Rachel Carson after she published
Silent Spring,
but her evidence and predictions about the horrible effects of pesticides and environmental toxins unfortunately proved to be true; since then, we’ve made major changes in our lives to help protect our environment. Many researchers criticized Jane Goodall when she first named the chimpanzees she studied; they didn’t believe she’d seen David Graybeard use a blade of grass as a tool for fishing out termites until she showed them a video of this groundbreaking discovery. In the early 1960s, the ideas that an animal had an individual personality (warranting a
name) and could make and use a tool (which only humans were thought capable of) were heretical, crazy. Both are now commonplace, self-evident.

I have good company in arguing that animals, humans included, are basically good. University of California at Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner (who also lives in a city frequently associated with fluffy thinking), in his book
Born to Be Good,
also shows that the competitive, survival-of-thefittest mentality is not who we really are or have to be to have a good life. It’s not really a dog-eat-dog world because dogs don’t eat other dogs. Being kind and good includes embracing cultural pluralism, which is a necessity in the diverse and often tough world in which we live.

We also know that we are influenced by the actions of others. If we see compassion, we are more likely to adopt it —compassion begets compassion, virtuous acts beget virtuous acts. Further, we receive what we give. If we employ compassionate proactive activism using humility, heart, and love, it can spread contagiously, and we will have a good chance of pulling ourselves out of the deep holes we’ve been digging for our fellow animals, ourselves, and Earth’s highly compromised ecosystems.

We also know that it feels good to be nice. We’re often filled with warm feelings when we cooperate. Recent neural imaging research on humans by James Rilling and his colleagues shows that mutual cooperation is associated with activation of the brain’s reward processing centers, the dopamine system. Our brain releases dopamine when we cooperate, giving us instant pleasurable feedback and reinforcing the behavior. This is significant research, for it posits that being nice is rewarding in social interactions and might in itself be a stimulus fostering cooperation and fairness.

Surely, humans and other animals can be mean to one another. Nonetheless, cooperation and compassion are central to our own existence and to coexistence with other beings. It is for this reason that I remain optimistic that with hard work and patience we will be able to make the lives of other animals better as we expand our compassion footprint. Dacher Keltner uses the Confucian concept of
jen,
which refers to “kindness, humanity, and reverence” to discuss our “good nature,” and he offers the concept of the
jen
ratio to “look at the relative balance of good and uplifting versus bad and cynical in life.” This ratio is one way to measure our compassion footprint.

I hope academics, activists, and people interested in making the world a more peaceful and compassionate place will find this book to be of interest and inspire them to go out and do more for animals and Earth. I hope you find that my agenda isn’t radical. To this end I weave in the latest science from academic journals with anecdotes taken from the popular media, the people I’ve met, and my own life to make the case that we all need to do more to care for animals and the habitats in which they live. In the three years since my book
The Emotional Lives of Animals
was published, we’ve learned an incredible amount about animal sentience and emotions, and I want to share that. I also want to appeal to people who don’t agree with me, rather than preach to the converted, because that is where change occurs. Yet for all of us, the real challenge is living and realizing our beliefs in our actions; every day, we must try to do so, even in small ways, and even when it forces us to move outside of our comfort zone.

I’ve been thinking about animal minds — what they’re like and what’s in them — for many years, and I’ve really been writing this manifesto for decades. I have conducted a lot of research and engaged in a good deal of on-the-ground activism. My parents tell me that I’ve “minded” animals since I was about three years old. I intuitively knew as a child that animals are smart and passionate; it took decades of laborious scientific inquiry to learn how correct I was. Science is still trying to catch up with what so many of us already understand. It turns out that our intuitions are disarmingly correct, and we ought to give ourselves credit for this.

It’s also a matter of simply paying better attention. I well remember waking up one morning and deciding to put a window in my office that looked straight out at a tree. Now, twenty years later, I’m so happy I did this. At the time, my friend Tim, who put the window in for me, thought I was nuts. But my window doesn’t just look on a gorgeous tree. As I type, small lizards often walk up the bark, staring at me and doing pushup displays as if to say “this is my territory,” while beautiful blue Steller’s jays squawk telling me that this also is their home. Red foxes come by and pee on the tree, saying this is theirs. And chipmunks scamper up, stop, peer in, and continue on their merry way. What a gift to see them all.