Empathy and Altruism

Donkeys at the Ezelshoeve sanctuary in Baarle-Nassau, in the Netherlands.

"Donkeys are no more 'human-like' in their expressions of grief than we are 'donkey-like' in ours. The limbic system, the part of our brains responsible for our emotions and behavior, consisting chiefly of the amygdala and hippocampus, is among the oldest regions of the proto-mammalian brain, dating back some 150 million years. Long before the earliest hominids, other species were living emotionally vivid lives. We are thus latecomers to empathy."
-- The Omnivore's Deception, p. 173

At a train station in the Indian city of Kanpur, a macaque reviving another monkey after he had been shocked into unconsciousness by an electrified rail.

"Animals don't merely 'act from instinct,' but respond in often creative and intelligent ways to the urgent situations presented by others in distress.  The very existence of such a capacity in evidence of highly sophisticated cognition in other species, suggesting an ability to grasp meaning, context, and the perspectives and needs of others."
-- The Omnivore's Deception, p. 184.

Elephants rescuing a baby elephant who had fallen into a pool.

Note how the adult moves away from the distressed infant in order to access the ramp into the water, using reason rather than "instinct" to effect the rescue.  The frantic adult in the background, meanwhile, though penned in and unable to help, is clearly distressed by the crisis.

"Love gives meaning to our existence, providing the ground for all true knowing and being. Every living being has limitless value, participating in the infinite, yet it is only in the relation of love that we can perceive that value.  Only in relating to the animal other as a unique Thou, in a relation of mutual trust and vulnerability, is this particular being’s 'irreplaceable and unexchangeable' nature revealed to us. And through that relation, we discover a richer sense of our own existential and spiritual possibilities."
-- The Omnivore's Deception, p. 266.

"Harry Lime Disease": How We Treat Animals

This is a five-minute introduction to our treatment of animals in American agriculture (Meet Your Meat, by PETA).  Humans globally kill up to 80,000,000,000 land animals and up to 2,700,000,000,000 marine animals each year, despite the fact that we can thrive and flourish on an entirely plant-based vegan diet.  See also the film Earthlings narrated by Joaquin Phoenix.

Decades after "enlightened" omnivores began promising consumers so-called "humane" animal products--itself a contradiction in terms--99% of meat, eggs, and dairy come from animals manipulated in the ways you see here.

One of the myths of the "enlightened" omnivore is that we can commodify and exploit other species in a "humane" and "respectful" way.  As these undercover videos of sheep in the Australia and UK wool industries show, however, animals caught up in the machinery of the capitalist food system are often brutalized.  Workers, too, are ruthlessly exploited in the animal food economy. Here, the workers' frustration at the ugly labor process gets taken out in masculine aggression against the animals.

"It is a man’s interest, we know, to use his cattle well, and to take care that those who work them treat them properly; but, notwithstanding this, does not the brute creation groan under the cruelties of man? How many are injured through mere wantonness! How many through thoughtlessness! and how many a noble animal has been shamefully abused in a moment of passion! Besides, the owners of cattle are not always with them, and may even never see many of them; and men who have no interest in them may have the care and the working of them."
-- Abolitionist Benjamin Godwin, Lectures on Slavery (Boston 1836), quoted in The Omnivore's Deception, p. 124.

Nonhuman Intelligence and Cognition

Cognitive Ethology:  The study of animal minds.  This montage of videos (most taken from the PBS documentary series, Inside the Animal Mind) offers a window into the discipline of cognitive ethology.  If other species are capable of such sophisticated thought and feeling, how can we justify continuing to hold them prisoners within our laboratories to conduct experiments on then?  Notes on bird footage:  Clark's Nutcracker can store and remember the locations of thousands of food caches hidden over dozens of square miles; Alex, an African Grey parrot subjected to the cognitive experiments of Dr. Irene Pepperberg, could answer questions asked him in English; parrots have been taught to distinguish between the styles of different French Impressionist painters, and have been shown to understand such concepts as "chair" and "tree."

Memory and intelligence.  Memory is one measure of intelligence--and human memory is not the best on the planet.  "At the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, a chimpanzee named Ayumu is able to recall the order and spatial location of the numbers one through nine when flashed for 210 milliseconds on a computer screen. Ayumu is able to get the right numbers, in the right order, nearly every time, with 80% accuracy—“something no human has managed so far."
-- The Omnivore's Deception, p. 236.

Cognition in fish.  Many people think of fish as brainless and without emotions.  Not so.  As mammals, we are simply ill-equipped to "read" fish thoughts and feelings in their faces and behavior.  But there is overwhelming scientific evidence of high-level cognition in fishes.  (Note the residual Cartesianism in the show's script, which reduces consciousness to the brain's "mechanisms.") 

Tool-using and foresight in birds.  
Here, a Green heron employs a complex strategy to catch fish, showing not only foresight but a remarkable understanding of fish psychology.  The heron first wins the fish's trust, allowing the fish to nibble a piece of bread into smaller and smaller pieces.  By patiently repeating the process, the bird coaxes the fish closer and closer to shore. Eventually, the bread has been so diminished in size that the fish's body is vulnerable to swift attack. Note that the heron could simply have eaten the bread, yet instead delays his/her gratification in the hopes of landing something better.  (Unlike the bird in this video, humans do not need to kill or inflict suffering on fish to survive.  Our fishing of aquatic and marine animals is a cultural choice we make.)

"I and Thou":  Alfie and Sasha

"It is the quotidian rather than the extraordinary that makes up the substance of our lives, and this was true of the four of us, a family of interspecies intimates whose shared habits formed the ground of a domestic existence...."
            -- The Omnivore's Deception, p. 268.
 
Montage sequence from my unfinished film, The Unbearable Catness of Being, about my cats Alfie and Sasha (described in my chapter "Two Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"). In the footage of Alfie lying in the grass, we can see the "intentionality" or directedness of his consciousness, as his attention turns first from one phenomenon to another, each time bringing meaning to his subjective experience of being-in-the-world.  Filmed in Oak Park, Illinois, in 2001.  Music by Nina Violet, "Everything Comes Apart" (used with artist's permission).