Читать книгу The Souls of Animals - Gary Kowalski - Страница 12
ОглавлениеLife is filled with grief. Death and loss are unavoidable companions of the flesh. But are we the only animals who grieve? Do other creatures have thoughts and feelings about the end of life or wonder what lies beyond? The consciousness of our own mortality is part of what makes us human—it is one of the elements that makes us a spiritual animal—but it may be an aspect of life we share with many other species.
It’s always hard to say good-bye. As a parish minister, part of my job is caring for the dying and bereaved, but finding the right words doesn’t get any easier with practice. What do you say to the parents whose one-day-old daughter—their first child—died because she was born with part of her heart missing? What do you say at a memorial service for a middle-aged man, a cancer victim, that will give solace and support to his widow and two teenagers? Words aren’t adequate to address the shock and desolation we feel when a loved one dies.
The only thing that seems to help is a caring presence. So we gather with our families. Our friends come around. We assemble in our spiritual communities. We light a candle, share a hug, or join in a moment of silence. And although we don’t stop grieving, we know that we don’t grieve alone. Others, who have also borne tragedy in their lives, understand the pain we feel. And out of that shared suffering we somehow gather strength to endure the loss.
Do other animals feel grief? We know that people grieve for their pets, of course. People in my congregation have come to me many times for counseling when their animal companions die. The loss of a beloved dog or cat can be very upsetting and naturally makes us sad. But I was stunned the first time I heard about Koko, the gorilla who grieved for her pet kitten. Koko’s story convinced me that animals, like people, also have strong feelings about the end of life.
Koko is a female lowland gorilla who for more than two decades has been the focus of the world’s longest ongoing ape language study.1 Instead of using spoken words, Koko communicates in Ameslan, or American Sign Language. Her teacher, Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson of the California Gorilla Foundation, has helped the ape master a vocabulary of more than five hundred words. That’s how Koko told Penny she wanted a cat for her birthday. She signs the word cat by drawing two fingers across her cheeks to indicate whiskers.
One day a litter of three kittens was brought to the rural compound in Woodside, California, where Koko lives. The kittens had been abandoned at birth. Their “foster mother” was a terrier, who suckled them through the first month of life. Handling them with the gentle behavior typical of gorillas, Koko chose her pet, a tailless kitten with grey fur. She named her young friend “All Ball.”
Koko enjoyed her new kitten, sniffing it and stroking it tenderly. She carried All Ball tucked against her upper leg and attempted to nurse it as if it were a baby gorilla. Koko was surprised to learn that kittens bite. When All Ball bit her on the finger, she made the signs for “dirty” and “toilet,” her usual expressions of disapproval. It wasn’t long, though, before Koko was signing the cat to tickle her—one of the gorilla’s favorite games. “Koko seems to think that cats can do most things that she can do,” said Penny.
“Soft/good/cat,” said Koko.
One night All Ball escaped from the Gorilla Foundation and was accidentally killed by a car. When Koko was told about the accident, she at first acted as if she didn’t hear or understand. Then a few minutes later she started to cry with high-pitched sobs. “Sad/frown” and “Sleep/cat” were her responses when the kitten was mentioned later. For nearly a week after the loss Koko cried whenever the subject of cats came up.
The gorilla clearly missed her feline companion. But how much did she understand about what had happened? Fortunately, it was possible to ask Koko directly. Maureen Sheehan, a staff member at the Gorilla Foundation, interviewed Koko about her thoughts on death.
“Where do gorillas go when they die?” Maureen asked.
Koko replied, “Comfortable/hole/bye [the sign for kissing a person good-bye].”
“When do gorillas die?” she asked.
Koko replied with the signs “Trouble/old.”
“How do gorillas feel when they die: happy, sad, afraid?”
“Sleep,” answered Koko.2
Gorillas not only mourn. Like human beings, they seem able to reflect on their own demise and struggle with the same sorts of questions that haunt us when a loved one dies.
All living things die, but it has long been assumed that only humans have any consciousness of this. It is a commonplace among philosophers that humankind is the only animal for whom death is an intellectual and emotional “problem.” In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, philosopher Ernest Becker draws the distinction between all other creatures, who “live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neurochemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else,” and Homo sapiens, “an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience.”3
Our power of memory and foresight, according to Becker and other philosophers, gives human beings a position in the universe that is both exalted and tragic. Our superior intellect enables us to look beyond the present moment to contemplate endless vistas of times past and eons to come. We gaze through telescopes and witness the birth of stars; we study fossils that tell of drifting continents and life forms long extinct. From this elevated vantage, however, we foresee the inevitability of death and ask what meaning our brief lives have in the vast panorama of existence.
The awareness of death is what makes human life so bittersweet and poignant, and it is this awareness, say those like Becker, that sets us apart from all other creatures. Knowledge of our own mortality is what makes us a spiritual animal. Where do we find faith and strength to live, knowing that death awaits us? What gives meaning and purpose to our days, knowing that our days so soon come to an end? Our answers may differ, but no one can ignore such questions. They are religious questions, and they are an inescapable part of being human.
But is Homo sapiens the only species that possesses the consciousness of death? There is much evidence that we are not alone in this regard.
Not only gorillas but also elephants may share in this awareness. Cynthia Moss, Director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, has for more than a dozen years studied the lives of African elephants. While uprooting the time-worn myth of the “elephants’ graveyard,” her research suggests that these animals do appear to have some awareness of death, feelings of grief, and perhaps what might even be construed as funerary rituals.4
The legend of the elephants’ graveyard probably arose because elephants that are sick or wounded tend to congregate in areas where there is water, shade, and good vegetation. Such a site might contain an unusually large number of elephant carcasses, Moss explains, giving rise to the graveyard fable. But while they don’t have a graveyard, elephants do seem to have some notion of death.
Unlike most other animals, elephants recognize the dead bodies or skeletons of their own kind. When an elephant encounters another’s corpse, he or she explores the body carefully and inquisitively with feet and trunk, smelling it and feeling the shape of the skull and tusks, perhaps in an effort to recognize the individual that has died. Even a bare and sun-bleached skeleton will elicit the interest of other elephants, who inevitably stop to inspect the bones, turning them with their trunks, picking them up and carrying them from one place to another, as though trying to find a proper “resting place” for the remains.
Even more striking is the elephant’s response when a family member dies. Because elephants live almost as long as people (the oldest elephant in captivity died at the age of seventy-one), the bonds they form are lasting. In 1977 one of the family groups Moss studied was attacked by hunters. An animal that Moss named Tina, a young female about fifteen years old, was shot in the chest, the bullet penetrating her right lung. With the larger herd in panicky flight, Tina’s immediate family slowed to help her, crowding about her as the blood poured from her mouth. As the groaning elephant began to slump to the ground, her mother, Teresia, and Trista, another older female, positioned themselves on each side, leaning inward to support her weight and hold her upright. But their efforts were to no avail. With a great shudder Tina collapsed and died.
Teresia and Trista tried frantically to resuscitate the dead animal, kicking and tusking her and attempting to raise her body from the earth. Tallulah, another member of the family, even tried stuffing a trunkful of grass into Tina’s mouth. Tina’s mother, with great difficulty, lifted the limp body with her mighty tusks. Then, with a sharp crack, Teresia’s tusk broke under the strain, leaving a jagged stub of ivory and bloody tissue.
The elephants refused to leave the body, however. They began to dig in the rocky dirt and, with their trunks, sprinkled soil over Tina’s lifeless form. Some went into the brush and broke branches, which they brought back and placed on the carcass. By nightfall the body was nearly covered with branches and earth. Throughout the night members of the family stood in vigil over their fallen friend. Only as dawn began to break did they leave, heading back to the safety of the Amboseli reserve. Teresia, Tina’s mother, was the last to go.
I have often watched people linger at the graveside after the ceremony of committal. The body has been returned to earth and the spirit commended to the keeping of God. The prayers have all been said and the last “Amen” has been uttered. Yet the family members remain by the grave, saying their final farewells. Perhaps elephants feel a similar reluctance to say goodbye to their loved ones. One mother elephant whose calf was stillborn stayed with the body four days, according to Moss, protecting it from lions and scavengers that lay in wait. Mothers who lose their calves can be lethargic for days afterward, she discovered, and the loss of a family matriarch can disrupt the social organization for long periods, sometimes permanently. It is not unscientific to suppose that elephants may experience shock and depression comparable to what human beings feel when a loved one dies.
Other eyewitnesses agree with that assessment. D.J. Schubert, who became well-acquainted with elephants while working in the Peace Corps in West Africa, once chanced upon a family of elephants surrounding a fallen infant. After long hours of trying to help the baby to its feet, the elders finally buried the corpse with dirt, grass, and leaves. Family members then continued to stand watch, slowly rocking their great bodies and comforting each other, intertwining their trunks and using that sensuous appendage to gently touch each other’s mouthparts, seemingly in a kiss. “I had just witnessed an elephant funeral,” Schubert says.5 The Peace Corps volunteer was sleepless later that night, feeling bereft and alone, remembering the screams that had been exchanged between the mother and her sick, dying child. Who could doubt that the elephants themselves were also troubled and uneasy? As evening descended, the family with a baby missing must have known something of what religious people call “the dark night of the soul.”
I feel a sense of compassion for Teresia and also for Koko, pained and at the same time comforted to realize that in thinking and wondering about death I am not alone. Koko’s answers to the question “Where do gorillas go when they die?” are probably as good as yours or mine. None of us really knows what happens to people or primates or other living things when they die. One thing seems certain, however. All of us face the end of life with some of the same primary emotions. It is wrenching. It makes us sad. Although of different species we are not so separate as we seem.
I feel richer knowing that gorillas love—not just like human beings, but in their own meaningful way—and that elephants also share feelings of tenderness and grief—not just like ours, but not so different, either. Such knowledge reminds me that my own private loads of anguish and my own private moments of intimacy and joy are not so private after all. The realization that we share tears and affection tells me that you and I and Tina and All Ball are interconnected. We are part of a larger world: not an inert or unfeeling world but a world full of pain, healing, passion, and hope.
In such a world we find the consolation of companionship. As Helen Keller writes, “We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world—the company of those who have known suffering.” The company of the bereaved may be much larger than we once imagined. It may include not only gorillas and elephants but many others in the nonhuman realm whose thoughts and emotions about the end of life are similar to our own. A friend of mine who raised cattle on a small farm in Central America told me how one day a calf was slaughtered by a band of campesinos, who roasted the flesh for an impromptu fiesta. For weeks afterward, until the onset of the rainy season, the remainder of the herd gathered each afternoon and stood lowing in a circle around the spot where the young one had been butchered. How can we heedlessly take the life of another animal? How can we kill without wondering what agony that creature feels, or what heartbreak besets its mate and offspring? Knowing that our pain is shared might make us more careful, less callous, in our dealings with other creatures.
Concern for the distress of animals is a time-honored precept of many religious traditions. Accounts of elephants shedding tears can be traced all the way back to the Ramayana, one of the ancient scriptures of India, and ahimsa, the principle of non-injury toward other living things, has been a part of Hindu philosophy for thousands of years. Buddhists, similarly, vow to free all sentient beings from suffering. Jains refuse to kill even the smallest organism. Western religions have not always been so attuned to the plight of other creatures. Yet the prophet Mohammed is said to have awakened from his nap one afternoon to find a small, sick kitten sleeping on the edge of his cloak; he cut off his garment rather than disturb the pathetic creature. Hebrew scriptures contain numerous admonitions to care for creation, as in Deuteronomy, where the law forbids harnessing a bull and-a donkey together, since “the weaker would suffer in trying to keep up with the stronger.” In the New Testament, the apostle Paul tells us in characteristically mythic language that “the whole created universe groans in all its parts” under the burdens of suffering and death. Perhaps if we listen intently we can hear the groaning of the animals, who beg for our mercy and forbearance.
