Читать книгу The Inner Life of Animals - Peter Wohlleben - Страница 6

INTRODUCTION

ROOSTERS THAT DECEIVE their hens? Mother deer that grieve? Horses that feel shame? Up until just a few years ago, such ideas would have sounded absurd, mere wishful thinking on the part of animal lovers who wanted to feel closer to their charges. I’ve been around animals all my life and I was one of those dreamers. Whether it was the chick in my parents’ garden that picked me out as its mom, the goat at our forest lodge that brightened our days with her contented bleating, or the animals I met on my daily rounds of the woodland I manage, I often wondered what was going on inside their heads. Is it really true, as scientists have long maintained, that people are the only animals capable of enjoying a full range of emotions? Has creation really engineered a unique biological path for us? Are we the only ones guaranteed a life of self-awareness and satisfaction?

If that were the case, this book would be over right now. If human beings were the result of some special biological design, we wouldn’t be able to compare ourselves to other animals. It would make no sense to talk about empathy with them, because we would not be able to even begin to imagine how they felt. Luckily, Nature opted for the economy plan. Evolution “only” modifies and builds on whatever is already available, much like a computer system. And so, just as code from earlier operating systems is integrated into the latest Windows, the genetic programming of our ancient ancestors still works in us—and in all the other species whose family trees branched off from our lineage in the past few million years. And so, as I see it, there is only one kind of grief, pain, or love. It might sound presumptuous to say that a pig feels things just as we do, but there is a vanishingly small chance that an injury hurts a pig less than it hurts us. “Aha,” the scientists might interject at this point, “but we have no proof.” That’s true, but there never will be any proof. I can’t even prove that you feel the same way as I do. No one can look inside another person and prove that, say, a prick of a pin triggers the same sensation in each one of the seven billion people on this planet. But we are able to express our feelings in words, and this ability to share increases the probability that people operate on roughly the same level when it comes to feelings.

So when our dog Maxi polished off a bowl of dumplings in the kitchen and then looked up at us with an innocent expression on her face, she was not behaving like a biological eating machine; she was behaving like the shrewd and endearing little rascal she was. The more often and the more closely I paid attention, the more I noticed our pets and their wild woodland relatives displaying what are supposed to be exclusively human emotions. And I am not alone in this. More and more researchers are realizing that humans and many animals share things in common. True love among ravens? No question. Squirrels who know the names of their close relatives? That’s been documented for a long time. Wherever you look, animals are out there, loving each other, feeling each other’s pain, and enjoying each other’s company.

Currently, there’s a great deal of scientific research on the inner lives of animals, although it’s usually so narrowly focused and written in such dry, academic language that it hardly makes for gripping reading and, more importantly, rarely leads to a better understanding of the subject. And that is why I would like to act as your interpreter and translate fascinating scientific research into everyday language for you, assemble the individual pieces of the puzzle so you can see the big picture, and sprinkle in a few observations of my own to bring it all to life. I hope this will help you see the animal world around you and the species described in this book, not as mindless automatons driven by an inflexible genetic code, but as stalwart souls and lovable rascals. And that is just what they are, as you will discover for yourself when you take a walk in my neighborhood with my goats, horses, and rabbits, or in the parks and woods where you live. Come on. I’ll show you what I mean.