Читать книгу The Spiritual Nature of Animals - Karlene Stange - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe Beginning: Creation and the Garden Paradise
In the beginning, that is, in mythical times, man lived at peace with the animals and understood their speech. It was not until after a primordial catastrophe, comparable to the “Fall” of Biblical tradition, that man became what he is today — mortal, sexed, obliged to work to feed himself, and at enmity with the animals.
— MIRCEA ELIADE1
In countless cultures, ancient stories tell of a golden age, in the beginning of time, when people lived in peace with one another and with the animals in a garden paradise that provided abundant vegetation as food for all. The animals communicated with the people, and they understood one another. Then something happened that changed everything.
Even though the stories of humans and animals communicating seem like fables, their ubiquitous presence lends credence to the possibility that, at one time, people did indeed believe understanding was shared. Although many consider paradise myths fiction, they also have historical bases and may reflect ongoing truths about our world and our relationship with animals.
Richard Heinberg, in his book Memories and Visions of Paradise, concludes that the two — historical fact and symbolic metaphor — are intertwined. History, as a discipline, originated in myth; both are stories of our past. History exists in myth as surely as myth persists in history. Myth functions through symbolic expression belonging to the realm of the mystical rather than to that of reason.2 Myths are ways to convey universal truths, and they serve to connect the visible and the invisible, earth and heaven.3 Mythical stories invoke images we understand on a psycho-spiritual level about a nonphysical existence we lack words to describe.
Having said that, I want to make a disclaimer that applies to all the stories, religious teachings, and myths in this book. I examine these stories looking for the shared, universal Truths they contain. In fact, I find over and over again that the main difference among the world’s spiritual teachings is the vocabulary. We fear and fight each other over semantics. I too had fear of the new teachings I encountered during my investigation for this book until I opened my heart to understanding them. Then I discovered such beauty and love in the countless similarities between myth and science and religious teachings. Focusing on the common Truth is joyful and fascinating, whereas when we focus on the differences, we find reasons for fear and hate. I have no interest in convincing anyone of any particular religious belief, nor am I evaluating different myths to decide which are true and which are not. I want to explore all these stories, both to enjoy them and to learn what we can from them. To put this another way, I suggest that all these myths and teachings may share some universal Truths and may even reflect some accurate historical information, and yet none may be literally true in every respect, and I simply care not whether anyone believes any of it. There is enough drama in my job, and the study of spiritual teachings about animals has provided relief and entertainment for me. I hope you will join me in that spirit.
Once we open ourselves to the language of different stories, we understand why mythologist Joseph Campbell says that all myths are true; the psychic unity of humanity is expressed through mythology. He explains in his video The Power of Myth that myth brings us into the consciousness of the spiritual — precisely where I choose to explore. Creation stories are simply metaphorical descriptions of the indescribable. They are both metaphorical and true for the people who tell them.
Many beautiful, interesting teachings come from the past, when people used symbols of their ancient cultures. We can look at these symbolic stories and understand the Truth they convey without abandoning our religions or adopting those of others. Furthermore, we gain understanding and lose fear of other beliefs, which is what happened for me. I feel quite comfortable now entering the religious buildings and ceremonies of many different groups to share in the celebration of divine love and life because I no longer fear the unknown.
I believe it is important to say this because I am often shocked by the number of people who express intense anger about spiritual teachings they do not share or agree with, including what seems to me to be a benign paradise myth. Strong opinions and emotions are common with any discussion of religious ideas. This is one reason I want to emphasize that I am not asking readers to believe any particular story. I invite everyone to decide for themselves what to believe.
Regarding paradise myths, some people dislike them because they are often patriarchal narratives that portray a male creator. Indeed, according to L. Robert Keck in Sacred Quest, the skill of writing emerged on the human scene about the same time as did patriarchy, so perhaps it is not surprising that our first recorded creation stories reflect a patriarchal worldview.4 In this book, I use inclusive language as much as possible, but I also tell religious stories in the ways they were originally told, even when that includes male-biased language and conceptions.
Another concern people sometimes have with religious myths is that they spread what might be considered wrong, inappropriate, or even “evil” teachings. Again, my goal is not to judge whether certain spiritual beliefs are right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, but to examine them for what they might tell us about our spiritual beliefs about animals. I searched far and wide, seeking a broad range of geographic and cultural perspectives. What I offer are the results of my journey of exploration, and I invite readers to draw independent conclusions. I urge you to evaluate what you agree with for yourself and to scrap the rest. Creation stories and paradise myths are important to understand because they are the foundation for modern religious beliefs. Human spiritual practices today build upon our shared ancient history.
And so, in this chapter, I examine four ancient myths from four very different cultures and areas of the world: the Native American Hopi, the Australian Aborigines, the ancient Hebrews, and several African tribes.
These creation myths share the common theme of people living at peace with animals and communicating with them before being expelled from a garden paradise. There are five other themes to notice: 1) Sound is an important vibrational substance of creation; 2) human and animal forms are made from the earth and given names; 3) the spirit or power of the creator is within everything, including animals; 4) specific creatures usually play roles in the stories, such as the spider and the snake; and 5) creation is destroyed and animals are saved.
The Native American Hopi tribe lives in northern Arizona. The word Hopi means “peace.” Here, I paraphrase the Hopi creation story found in Book of the Hopi by Frank Waters.5
As the story goes, in the beginning, there was only an immeasurable void that lived in the mind of Taiowa, the Creator. Taiowa created So’tuknang, who became the creator of life. So’tuknang molded forms and made the universe half solid and half water.
This was the first of four worlds described in Hopi mythology, and each new world followed the destruction of the previous one. In the First World, So’tuknang created Spider Woman to be his helper. Spider Woman mixed earth with saliva and molded it into two beings. She sang the creation song over them, and they came to life. “All sound echoes the Creator,” said Spider Woman, and the world was made an instrument of sound. She sent these twins to opposite poles of the earth to keep the world rotating properly. According to anthropologist Jeremy Narby, twin creator beings are another extremely common theme in world mythologies.
The earth vibrated with the energy of the Creator. From the earth, Spider Woman created trees, bushes, plants, flowers, all kinds of seed and nut bearers, giving each life and name. In the same manner, she created all kinds of birds and animals, and the power worked through them all.
Spider Woman made four male human beings, then four female partners, each of four different colors: yellow, red, white, and black. She granted them pristine wisdom, and they understood that the earth was a living entity like themselves. As Waters describes it, the bodies of humans and the earth were constructed in the same way, with vibratory centers along an axis, and this mirrors Hindu and Tibetan mysticism. The channeled material of Edgar Cayce also refers to God creating five colored humans at once.
The first people multiplied and were happy, although they were of different colors and spoke different languages. All humans, birds, and animals felt as one and understood one another without talking.
Waters writes, “They all suckled at the breast of their Mother Earth, who gave them her milk of grass, seeds, fruit and corn, and they all felt as one, people and animals.”6
Then entered Lavai’hoya, the Talker; he came in the form of a bird called Mochni, which was similar to a mockingbird. The more Mochni talked, the more he convinced everyone of the differences between them: the differences between people and animals and the differences between people themselves, due to the colors of their skins, their speech, and their belief in the plan of the Creator.7 The animals drew away from people.
Also among them was the handsome Ka’to’ya, who took the form of a snake with a big head.8 He led the people still farther away from one another and their pristine wisdom. The people became fierce and warlike; there was no peace. The Creator and So’tuknang decided to destroy the world and start over.
Those who remembered the plan of the Creator were led to a big mound where the Ant people lived, and there they were kept safe when So’tuknang destroyed the First World by fire.
Today, a number of excavated underground ancient cities have been discovered in Turkey. One, called Derinkuyu, is several stories deep and could have held as many as twenty thousand people, along with livestock and food storage. Perhaps the “Ant people” were people who lived underground like ants. Sometimes ideas in myth seem so strange we think they must be fiction. Then archaeologists discover something like these ancient underground cities, which had wineries, stables, and up to five hundred–kilogram round doors to close off the outside world — an ideal home for “ant” people.
When the First World cooled off, So’tuknang created the Second World. He changed its form completely, putting land where the water had been, and water where the land had been. This description concurs with what we know of geology. The movement of the continents caused dramatic shifts in landscape, so that in the southwestern United States today, what was once tropical forest with dinosaurs grazing along the ocean is now the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau, the regions where the Hopi reside.
So’tuknang thanked the Ant people for saving his people and told them to go into the Second World and take their place as ants. In the Second World, the people were close in spirit and communicated from the center at the top of the head, and they sang joyful praises to the Creator. They did not have the privilege of living with the animals; the animals were wild and kept apart. Being separated from the animals, the people tended to their own affairs. When they began to trade and barter, trouble started.
The more the people had, the more they wanted; they began to fight, and wars occurred. Again, the world was destroyed; and again, the Ant people protected the chosen people by allowing them into their underground world. This time the twins were told to leave the poles, and the earth spun crazily and froze into solid ice.
Many years passed and the people lived happily underground. Then the Third World was created. The people advanced rapidly, creating cities, but again, they eventually became wicked, killing each other. This time, the world was destroyed by water. Continents broke apart and sank to the bottom of the seas.
In the Hopi story, the current world is the Fourth World.
By one count, 272 cultures describe a great flood destroying the world, including the Hopi story of the end of the Third World.9 In many of these stories, the creator instructs people to save animals, as in the story of Noah’s Ark, and in others, animals are involved in saving humans, just as the Ant people saved the Hopi. Other examples include the birds in the Bible story searching for land and a great fish warning the first Hindu man, Manu, of the impending flood. The pervasive nature of the great flood myth, and of our cooperation with the animals to survive, supports the notion that this story represents a global Truth.
Numerous cultures also describe other times of destruction, such as fire and polar shifts, in which most of life perished. Modern science concurs with fossil evidence that indicates there have been at least five distinct mass-extinction events. During these periods, a significant fraction of all the species on earth became extinct in what was essentially a geological instant.10
These mass extinctions occurred before the time we currently believe the first humans inhabited the earth, so it is even more striking that human stories seem to contain a “memory” of them. Might there also be truth to memories of a time when humans and animals communicated easily and lived in peace? Some spiritual teachings believe humans existed on earth long before our current geological records show. Who knows what lies buried below, in depths where we have yet to dig? Archaeologists find new fossilized remains on a regular basis, opening up the possibility that some fantasy-like stories may contain more truths than we currently recognize.
The following creation and paradise story of the Australian Aborigines comes from Robert Lawlor’s book Voices of the First Day.11 The Australian Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on earth, beginning about fifty to sixty-five thousand years ago. As with all ancient tales, Lawlor’s version is just one version of their creation story.
Australian Aboriginal writer Goobalathaldin (Dick Roughsey) explains that creation on earth began when the first human beings arrived from the stars. They possessed supernatural powers and created the land and sea. Everything was good until floods, volcanoes, droughts, and earthquakes rocked the land. Out of fear, the first ancestors sought refuge in a most remarkable way. They transformed into animals, plants, insects, and rocks. As this Dreamtime creation commenced, the earth became populated with a multitude of life-forms.
The Creative Ancestors were vast, unbounded, vibratory fields of energy. They created with their breath by naming. Just as one creates sounds or songs with the vibration of breath, the Aborigines describe the Dreamtime creation as the world being “sung” into existence.12
As the Ancestors traveled across the barren countryside, their travels shaped the landscape. When they slept, they dreamed of adventures for the next day. They dreamed of things and created them: ants, wallabies, emus, crows, lizards, snakes, grasshoppers, plants, and humans. The Ancestors created all these things simultaneously, and each could transform from one to the other. Lawlor writes, “A plant could become an animal, an animal a landform, a landform a man or woman. An Ancestor could be both human and animal.” The Ancestors eventually retired into the earth, the sky, the clouds, and the creatures, to reverberate within all they had created. “All creatures — from stars to humans to insects — shared the consciousness of the primary creative force, and each, in its own way, mirrors a form of that consciousness.”13
The ancestral energy that shaped the earth was referred to symbolically as the “Rainbow Serpent.” It resonated in the shapes and lives of the earth as a usable force and nourishing spirit. The Rainbow Serpent represents the electromagnetic spectrum of light, a profound metaphor for the unity between the tangible and the invisible worlds.14 It connects the earth and celestial realms. Over vast periods of time, the Rainbow Serpent, like the earth’s magnetic field, alternately extinguished and re-created life over the whole earth.
The Aborigines believe the Ancestors created the world perfectly, and it stayed that way so long as humans adhered to the universal law. Abandoning the Dreaming Law forced humankind to leave the garden. Everything changed. The myth of the Southern Cross tells of the first death and how people faced a moral dilemma — whether to kill to survive or die.
The myth relates how drought caused a lack of vegetation, so a man killed a kangaroo rat, which he and a woman ate. A third man refused to eat it and died. A black figure with huge fiery eyes lifted the man into a hollow tree and raised the tree into the southern sky; following it were two yellow-crested cockatoos.
The tree planted itself near the Warrambool, or Milky Way, which leads to where the sky gods live. The tree gradually disappeared from their sight until all that remained were four eyes: two were the eyes of Yowi, the spirit of death; the others were the eyes of the first man to die. The pointers were the cockatoos. These stars make up the constellation of the Southern Cross, a reminder of the first death.15
“The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth,” writes Lawlor. Every meaningful life process or event that occurs leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, just as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. A seed vanishes the moment it germinates, becoming a plant. At this moment, the seed’s latent power springs into action. The seed dies in order to physically manifest, whereas the plant manifests and then dies, leaving seeds. The “seed of the archaic” is maintained in the universal myth of the Golden Age.16
The spiritual nature of animals remains today as it was in the beginning, a representation of the Creative Ancestors. The vibratory serpent energy that created the many forms lives on as platypus, plant, and person. The seed power and Rainbow Serpent correlate to a description of DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid emits photons at the visible spectrum of light. This double-spiral, serpent-like, molecule carries the genetic information or seed power present in every cell of every living thing, including bacteria, broccoli, and bison.
Perhaps these ancient tales describe something we understand today with modern science. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby calls DNA the ancient energy of the creator.17 Indeed, the art and stories from many ancient cultures relate the same idea. Images of twin creator snakes appear in art from a Mesopotamian seal dated circa 2200 BCE. Aztec art from 400–600 BCE depicts DNA-like, double-helix serpents, and the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl translates as “serpent” and “twin.” Ancient Greek stories describe Zeus as a serpent; Scandinavian rock art depicts serpents with a cross; and in ancient Egypt, a serpent crown found on a mummified pharaoh depicts two conjoined serpents, and the serpent symbolized the beginning and end of time. Paintings from Peruvian shamans depict images that resemble snakes containing chromosomes. All appear synonymous to rock paintings of the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent from six to eight thousand years ago. Perhaps Narby, the Peruvian shamans, and Australian stories are true: The creator “God” vibrates in every living thing, actively creating through the physical wisdom embodied in DNA.
Chapter 7 discusses the Hebrew and Christian beliefs about the spiritual nature of animals in more detail. Here, I briefly discuss the biblical creation stories.
As in the Hopi and Aboriginal stories, creation begins with sound as the “word” of God. According to the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Two different versions of the creation story appear in the Book of Genesis, chapters 1 to 3. In Genesis 1:20–21, the animals are made first: “And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens.’ So, God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, and with which the waters swarm.” Then God created a human male and female in his own image, and gave them dominion, or control, over the fish, the birds, and every living thing on earth.
In Genesis 2, man is made first from the dust of the earth and then the animals are made in the same way. The word comes in the form of naming. As Genesis 2:19 says: “So, out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to man to see what he would call them.”
Regarding food, in Genesis 1:30, God said, “And to every beast of the earth, and every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”
Please note the description of living creatures having the “breath of life.” Biblical scholars consider this breath to refer to the eternal spirit of a being. Some people believe that animals have lower souls but not eternal spirits, because only Adam received the “breath of life” from God, according to the Bible. However, animals breathe and are alive, and as this verse indicates, every beast, bird, and creeping creature has the breath of life. The website Bible Hub provides twenty-one biblical translations of Genesis 1:30, and about half clearly support the notion that animals have the breath of life; three of them replace the phrase “breath of life” with “living soul.” Others use wording such as “wherein there is life.” Debate arises as to whether animals received the “breath of life,” the omnipresent, eternal, transcendent spirit of God, and I discuss this debate in chapter 7.
To continue the creation story, although the human male and female were both naked, like the animals, they were not ashamed. However, God warned, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:16–17).
Later, the serpent appeared — a being more “subtle” than the other wild creatures — and he said to the woman, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4–5). So Eve ate the fruit and shared it with Adam. Then they realized that they were naked; they became ashamed and covered themselves.
This is a powerful description of the birth of duality, of the concept of right versus wrong, of good and evil, and of humanity’s first moral judgment and the pain of shame.
As Genesis 3:22 says: “Then God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.’ ” Genesis 3:23: “therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.”
Before they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, humans were innocent and one with nature. Humans left paradise when they gained moral judgment. Before that, Adam and Eve only knew life — they experienced monism, or a sense of oneness with existence. After eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil, they gained dualistic thinking — they distinguished right from wrong, and humans separated from nature, just as when the Talker in the Hopi story convinced people of the differences between themselves and the animals. The birth of duality created ego-centered shame, which leads to death. According to psychiatrist and teacher of enlightenment David Hawkins, shame “is perilously proximate to death.”18 With shame comes blame, guilt, and vindictive hate. It causes such agony that violence or neglect follow, either to self or others, including suicide and murder. Once humans gained dualistic thinking from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, humanity began to experience death.
The forbidden fruit is another common theme across cultural myths. Humans and animals know only life in the garden until the first death or the consumption of some forbidden food associated with the threat of death. The first Burmese man consumed a particular kind of rice and became so gross and heavy that he was unable to ascend to heaven. Fruit was the offending substance for the Kalmucks of central Asia, for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as for the Masai of Tanzania. In Greek mythology, the forbidden fruit is comparable to Pandora’s box, which contained all the evils of the world.19
Richard Heinberg writes, “In nearly all languages, the word fruit is used metaphorically to refer to the result of a creative process.”20 People are meant to tend to creation, but they give up the stewardship of the garden with an obsessive desire for their own creations in manifested form — forbidden fruit. The physical world also traps people. In the case of Indo-Iranian mysticism, it says that the pure, untainted self — Adam — fell from perfection because of his attraction to earth, the physical.21
The first experience of violence also results in our eviction from paradise, as the following African myths show.
African Myths: Barotse, Bantu, and Yao
Here, I review two African paradise stories taken from Memories and Visions of Paradise by Richard Heinberg.22 The first myth comes from the Barotse floodplain of the upper Zambezi River in Zambia.
As the story goes, the creator, Nyambi, lived on earth with his wife, Nasilele. Nyambi created fishes, birds, and animals. But one of Nyambi’s creatures was different from all the rest, Kamonu, the first man. Heinberg writes, “Kamonu was special because he imitated everything Nyambi did. If Nyambi made something out of wood, Kamonu would do the same; if Nyambi created in iron, Kamonu would work in iron, too.”
Kamonu served as Nyambi’s apprentice, until one day Kamonu forged a spear and killed an antelope. Despite Nyambi’s protest, Kamonu continued killing. Nyambi realized that he had lost control of his creature and grew angry. “Man, you are acting badly,” said Nyambi to Kamonu. “These are your brothers. Do not kill them.”
And so, Heinberg says, “Nyambi drove Kamonu out of Litoma, his sacred realm, but Kamonu pleaded to be allowed to return. Nyambi gave the man a garden to tend, hoping thereby to keep him happy and out of mischief. But when a buffalo wandered into Kamonu’s garden at night, he speared it, and when other animals came close, he killed them, too.
“But after a while, Kamonu discovered that the things he loved were all leaving him: his child, his dog, and his pot (his only possession) all disappeared. He went to Nyambi’s sacred realm to report what had happened, and there he found his child, dog, and pot. They had fled Kamonu and returned to their real home.”
Kamonu asked Nyambi for the power to keep his things — with no intention of changing his murderous behavior, the real cause of his losses, but Nyambi refused.
Meanwhile, Kamonu’s descendants spread over the earth, killing animals. So Nyambi decided to move away from the earth altogether, and he ordered a spider to weave a web to reach an abode in the sky for Nyambi and his court.
The second African myth is from the Bantu and Yao of equatorial southern Africa.
In the story, the animals watch the people rub two sticks together and make fire. Here’s one description of what happens next:
The fire caught in the bush, roaring through the forest, and the animals had to run to escape the flames.
The people caught a buffalo, killed it, roasted it in the fire, and ate it. Then the next day, they did the same thing. Every day they set fires and killed some animal and ate it.
“They are burning up everything!” said Mulungu, the creator. “They are killing my people!”
All the beasts ran into the forest as far away from humankind as they could get. “I’m leaving!” said Mulungu.23
Humans tend to be more creative than other animals. Beavers make dams and birds make nests, but humans make hydroelectric plants and airplanes. These African myths highlight the creative nature of the human being. Humans take after the creator; we love to make things, and we become very attached to our creations. The ego is our personal identity. This idea that we are separate individuals lies in contrast to the monism of the garden paradise. Creativity relates to the ego; it drives us to create things and identify with them.
The first death and killing play prominently in many creation myths; inevitably, the first violent act means the end of paradise. Richard Heinberg explains that in nearly all African myths, God leaves humankind because of our cruelty, quarrelsomeness, and insensitivity to nature.
Theologian L. Robert Keck describes the beginning of violence as an evolution of the human soul. He sees the garden paradise as “Epoch I” of soul development. Humanity’s childhood is characterized by unity with nature, respect for animal powers, a nonviolent relationship among people and animals, and a focus on the feminine.
As the soul of humanity developed, humans acted like adolescents. They separated from the creator and gained immature notions of power and control. The social structure became patriarchal, and violence began. Dualism and reductionism were born during Epoch II; humans separated wholes into parts and binged on analysis.24
According to Keck, Epoch III is the less-violent future we are gradually entering.
Several animals play prominent roles in creation stories. Consider the symbolic meaning of the snake. According to the Native American Black Elk, “Any man, who is attached to the senses and to the things of this world, is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed by the snakes, which represent his own passions.”25 According to the Hopi, the snake is the symbol of Mother Earth; similarly, the Sumerians believed the serpent represents the power of the Great Mother.
Other native teachings give the snake the power of creation, sexuality, and transmutation. The skin-shedding snake is considered a symbol of rebirth and transformation. For the Hindu, Kundalini energy is envisioned as a serpent that symbolizes sexual, creative energy. The Rainbow Serpent is the Australian Aboriginal symbol of the earth-uterus, or “universal energy.” Perhaps the twins mentioned in the Hopi myth represent the double-helix molecule DNA, which exists in all creatures from ants to zebras. In Greece, among other places, the snake symbolizes healing. The depiction of the snake in medical emblems comes from the biblical story in Numbers 21:8–9: God tells Moses to put a serpent on a pole so that anyone who is bitten by a snake can look at it and live. In Egypt and China, the snake is the symbol of inner knowing and clairvoyance — a subtler being, indeed.
Perhaps the wounded snake I saw in Dawn’s driveway symbolized my own passions, my obsession with healing and an immature notion of control, as well as my own needed transformation.
The spider also appears commonly in creation stories as another symbol of creativity and as the weaver of fate. To Native Americans, she is the grandmother, the benevolent Earth Goddess, the link to the past and future. She spins her web to catch her prey, much as humans are caught in the web of illusion (that is, the physical realm). The spider remains entangled in its web for food and survival as humans remain involved in their earthly affairs. To become enlightened, humans must detach themselves, as Hindus and Buddhists believe. The process of death is sometimes described as a veil or web being removed.
According to the myths, when paradise was lost to humanity, we gained dualistic thinking, moral judgment, and shame, but what about the animals? Are they still innocent, or do they have moral judgment? Although animals fight over territory, I wonder if nonhuman animals possess the same dualistic ego as human beings. Science has no way of telling us; we can only observe them and ponder their behavior.
Mid-June, in La Plata County, is all about foals. The snow melts off the fields, and baby horses sleep in the sun next to their grazing dams. Horse doctors drive from one ranch to another attending to sick neonates and helping mares get pregnant again.
It was a day in mid-June when I met a foal that I later named Iris. I was in the truck, as usual, when a client of fifteen years, Carmen Sherman, called.
“Silver just had her foal, and, well, I don’t know what to think. It looks like she doesn’t have any eyes. It’s just red where the eyes should be. Something’s wrong with her eyes. Can you come see her?”
I was en route to another ranch, but I detoured immediately and drove directly there. As I approached the chocolate-colored filly, I could see that Carmen was right. “Let’s tie Silver up so I can get a closer look.”
Carmen haltered Silver and tied her to the rail. The mare roared in frustration, calling to her foal, throwing her rear from side to side, stomping and stirring up the dust. Her tail wrung as she grunted and squealed, kicking out in frustration like a good mother being violently protective.
I grabbed the foal around the chest and rump, being careful not to get between her and Silver. Carmen stepped over to hold the neonate, one arm around the chest and one around the rump, while I looked at the orbits. They were much smaller than normal, with no ocular tissue at all in the right socket, just pink conjunctiva. The left opening contained a small amount of something that looked like a lens, smaller than a marble.
“Anophthalmia, no eyes,” I said. “I’ve never seen this before.” My mood sank to a quiet sorrow. I knew I would have to kill her. My emotions stirred memories of other deformed babies. Carmen started asking questions, but I was somewhere else, remembering a similar situation with another genetically imperfect neonate I once had to kill.
A baby llama was born with choanal atresia, no opening between the nose and throat. She was beautiful and lively but unable to breathe when she nursed — a condition that would eventually cause her to die slowly by starvation. Another unfortunate factor on commercial breeding farms is that they cannot afford to keep animals with genetic defects around that might deter potential buyers. In animal husbandry, one culls the unhealthy as nature would.
The llama owner could not bear to participate in the killing. So I had to steal the baby, called a cria, from her mother, restrain her myself, and inject a fatal solution into her vein as she struggled against me. I hated myself.
Now, the thought of killing this neonatal foal, as her mother screamed, was too much for me to concentrate on Carmen’s questions.
“You can untie Silver; let’s get out of here and leave them alone. Has she nursed yet?”
“No, she’s having trouble finding the nipples.”
This was Silver’s first foal, and she obviously liked her baby. She constantly nickered to her, sniffed and nuzzled her, playing interference between the filly and any human who dared to get near. Silver’s mother, Goldie, and her sister, Copper, were watching from the neighboring stalls with their healthy foals at their sides.
“Goldie has been really upset about this filly,” said Carmen. “She acts like she knows something’s wrong.”
As Carmen tried to explain about her old mare’s behavior, her words set my mind wandering again, this time about Goldie. She had delivered six foals, including Silver and Copper. She had lost one at birth. Carmen and her husband, Ben, had driven into the barnyard on a spring afternoon to find the entire herd of horses racing around, calling out in distress, upset about something. They walked into the paddock to see what all the fuss was about and found a placenta. Goldie must have had her foal earlier than expected, but there was no foal. Ben searched outside the paddock and found the neonate along the irrigation ditch. It had fallen in the ditch, been swept downstream, and drowned.
Afterward, Goldie would not get pregnant the rest of that year. Every year before, she had given birth and conceived again on her first breeding. But not that year; we tried everything medically possible. The vet at the stallion’s barn and I both appeared incompetent. My diagnosis — her heart was not in it. We waited a year, and she conceived without difficulty, and she had every year since.
Now, I wondered how this foal’s death would affect Silver.
Carmen asked, “What do we do?”
We both knew that foals get most of their protective antibodies from the colostrum, the first milk. Without suckling, this foal would soon get weak, hypoglycemic, and hypothermic. “She’ll probably die tonight. It’s been cold, and she is having trouble finding the teat. Let’s let nature take its course.”
Carmen agreed. As I explained to her, no one knows what causes anophthalmia. It may be genetic, inherited, or it may be congenital, developmental, from a virus or toxic plant. It’s extremely rare. In case it is genetic, it’s best not to rebreed the same mare to the same stallion.
The next day I called, hoping to hear the filly had died, but Carmen said, “She’s doing great. She’s nursing and running around. Now what do we do?”
We discussed the options of letting her live, who might want her, and such. That gave me another day to avoid the inevitable. In a way, it felt cruel to leave the blind baby stumbling about a rough environment, injuring herself. There was also the fact that Carmen and Ben bred horses for sale, and nobody wanted to see a foal with a genetic defect. We eventually came to the same conclusion.
The day came. The thought of killing Silver’s foal made me sick to my stomach. My only consolation was the thought that Silver was a happy mother for a few days. On my way over, I stated out loud, “I want this to happen as gracefully as possible.”
Ben was waiting for me, seated at the barn door. The big, black mustache covering his lips did not conceal his frown. “This sucks,” said Ben. “She’s healthy and beautiful in every other way.”
I looked to see an active filly bouncing around her mother, nudging and nursing from her. The mare seemed peaceful and happy, watching her baby and nickering softly.
“What’s that?” I asked about a big red welt on the filly’s chest.
“Oh, that’s one of the places where she’s banged herself bumping into things.”
Carmen joined us. “Are we doing the right thing?”
I shook my head and sighed. “I don’t know.”
We silently went about the task. Carmen held Silver by the lead and offered her a large tub of grain. Ben grabbed the filly — which I named “Iris” because of her lack of ocular irises, and because it is a pretty flower that doesn’t bloom for very long. The mare gave a concerned nicker, looking to follow the foal. Carmen shoved the grain in her face, and she ate eagerly. Ben carried the filly into the adjoining stall, where I waited, and closed the gate.
Iris squirmed once against the injection and then died without the mare ever noticing. We laid her on the ground and walked out of the paddock, leaving the gate open. The mare finished her oats and came searching for her baby. She sniffed at her and seemed content to find her sleeping, then went over to eat hay.
I took a deep breath, gazing off toward the river, and caught Goldie staring at me. She was in a pen down the hill, watching me with her neck stretched up high and resting her jaw on top of a five-foot-tall panel fence. All the other horses were busy nibbling. But Goldie was staring at me. “Hi, Goldie,” I said. Her eyelids slowly closed then reopened with her eyes focused on me.
Goldie knew exactly who I was and what I did, and I knew her. I had floated her teeth, flushed the lacrimal ducts of her eyes, and been inside her orifices at the other end many times. I had cared for this mare both when she was well and when injured and in pain. She knew my touch and I knew hers. As we stared into each other’s eyes, we felt connected. We sensed each other’s thoughts. She was not upset, anxious, or angry. Her glare was the calm, stern, but approving look of a matriarch supervising chores. In the wild, I thought, the duty of culling the unfit might have been hers before wild animals intervened and ate the filly alive. It would have been safest for the herd to leave that foal behind.
Carmen had mentioned how Goldie acted as if she knew something was wrong with Iris. Maybe Goldie had an opinion or judgment about the foal. Animal behaviorists might call her behavior “instinctual,” which can be defined as an inner guidance or intuitive power, though not necessarily associated with mental evaluation. Instinctual acts are more like my self-defense moves in karate, without thought. Still, I wondered what motivated her behavior.
Carmen told me later that Silver nudged and pawed at her foal many times during the night. By morning, when they opened the gate, she ran out to the pasture to eat grass. She whinnied to the stallion and trotted around with her tail up, then went on grazing.
Other horses have grieved longer, as much as a week or more. Maybe grief had an effect on Goldie and her inability to conceive after her foal drowned. But Silver moved on with her life. She did not act depressed or exhibit shame about her inability to create a healthy baby; she appeared to hold no guilt for not protecting it. She showed no hatred toward people.
Do horses and other animals make moral judgments that include blame, shame, and guilt? We know they have feelings and care about one another; they have emotions and opinions. Mostly they are focused in the present, but they also remember and anticipate. They have instincts and guidance that directs them for migration, or awareness of impending weather. They make decisions based on preference, but perhaps they do not dwell in moral agony over what is good or evil. However, after considering Goldie’s emotional response to losing her foal and to the birth of Iris, I wonder. Events may not feel right, and animals may sense when something is wrong.
Historically, some animal behavioral scientists state that animals are amoral because they are not self-aware. Self-awareness means knowing that you are separate or different from another — that every individual has unique mental states and emotional experiences — and that you can assess the future or reflect on the past. I suspect animals have self-awareness, yet perhaps they have some other awareness, a sensation of oneness. If animals are not aware that they are separate, then maybe they are not. Perhaps they still live in monism in the garden and know we are all one. Only humans assume separation.
Some people say that having morals makes us superior to animals. But we are too often stuck in grief, reflecting on the past, trying to find something to blame. We feel bad while the horse is enjoying life. The animal’s way seems more paradisal. But what do I know? I may be as blind as Iris. As David Pugh, another large-animal veterinarian from the University of Georgia, often says — “I don’t know. I drive a truck for a living.”
