Watching a dog’s excitement at taking a walk or seeing pigeons gather every day at the same time at a park bench where an old man tosses them bits of bread, we may wonder how animals perceive the world. What do they know? Do they think? Do they feel as we do?
By the turn of the century men like John Burroughs, Ernest Thompson Seton, and William J. Long were making small fortunes writing best-sellers that proclaimed the virtues of nature and of wild animals. Then in 1903 they had a falling out. Burroughs attacked Seton and Long, claiming that some of the things they described–such as a porcupine that curled into a ball and rolled downhill for fun–were simply tall tales. Burroughs wrote in the Atlantic that animals were “almost as much under the dominion of absolute nature, or what we call instinct, innate tendency, as are the plants and trees.”
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Their reluctance also stems from the institutional structure of biology. Studies and publications are refereed largely according to what can be proved or turned into statistics. It’s not too difficult to apply that standard to animal behavior–when presented with stimulus A, the chimpanzee responded with a particular behavior x percent of the time–but researchers have understandably had trouble applying it to what the animals think or feel while engaging in that behavior. It’s difficult enough to explicate what other people are thinking or feeling; how are we to come to terms with what goes on in the minds of animals?
All these stories are haunting, if occasionally tedious, though some of the authors’ speculations about them will make biologists roll their eyes. Masson and McCarthy suggest, for example, that animals may feel “counterphobia,” a condition in which people seek out the very things they most fear, albeit unconsciously. In defense of this idea they quote a biologist who reported that “deer have a marked objection to allowing any person or object out of their sight which they may think to be a source of danger.” But biologists wouldn’t call this counterphobia; they’d call it a basic evolutionary adaptation to the animal’s ecological role–the deer that loses track of a wolf’s whereabouts is more likely to be caught and eaten.
It would be a callous reader who didn’t feel those hints inciting a slow burn of anger at the examples of cruelty to animals cited here. This book follows in the wake of other tracts, such as Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, that argue for an end to human abuse of animals. When Elephants Weep barely touches on the issue of meat eating and is somewhat ambivalent about keeping animals in zoos, but it serves up an unsparing critique of animal experimentation. Masson and McCarthy cite several horrific examples of laboratory tests, among them an experiment detailing the degree to which monkeys become antisocial when they’re raised in an isolation chamber. Such an experiment serves to “prove” what simple common sense would tell most people.
When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, Delacorte Press, $23.95.
