Haunting Questions
In June 2013, Jane Goodall released Wounda to join other rescued chimps on the Tchimpounga Sanctuary island of Tchindzoulou, after her Institute had spent years nursing Wounda back from near death. Now she is safe from poachers, disease transmission and wild chimps. Before going off into the brush, she stopped and hugged Goodall, a gesture that has recently gone viral.
This scene brought to mind the photo of a caged chimp in Edward Steichen’s 1955 book, The Family of Man. The caption read: “The question is not whether they can think but if they can feel.” For too long, far too many of us have doubted - or cared - that our relatives in the animal kingdom could think and feel, a behavior itself devoid of thought and empathy.
Wounda is one of thousands of examples science has revealed that should force a deeper understanding of the capacities of other mammals and a more moral and robust reckoning of our responsibilities to them.
Credit: Associated Press
According to a recent study in Current Biology, evidence such as the one shown in this photo, reveals that chimpanzees have learned to catch a bug, squeeze it, and place it on the wound of another chimp (some insects are known to have medicinal properties). This demonstrates not only an understanding of what may help another but the empathy to do so.
Such behavior, as Frans De Waal chronicled in The Age of Empathy, sometimes crosses species. Kuni, a bonobo, found a bird stunned after hitting the window of the zoo’s enclosure. She picked it up, went to the top of a tree, spread its wings and launched it into the air. Some researchers argue that the human ability to understand and feel from another’s perspective is facilitated by mirror neurons in the brain. Thus, if we see someone else cry after a tragic event, we are more cry since the same neurons are activated in our brain. But why should this ability be the sole province of humans?
Dolphins as well as apes are known to recognize their own image in a mirror; most other mammals think they are looking at another mammal. This level of self-awareness has been shown in elephants too. That should not be surprising since they also show what appears to be gentleness and maternal care over dead companions, even returning bones to a “grave site” after other elephants have carried them off.
If we acknowledge that others animals may possess such levels of thought and feeling, it raises some haunting questions. What else are we ignorant about concerning them? How should our growing knowledge impact our actions toward them? What rights should they have? For the religious among us, how should God’s admonition to “have dominion over” life and “subdue” the earth (Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 28) be balanced with God’s directive regarding the garden of Eden to “dress it and to keep it” (Chapter 2, verse 15)?
“Happy” in the Bronx Zoo, Credit: exposingthebiggame.wordpress.com
Such questions are entering the courtroom. Happy is a 50-year-old Asian elephant confined in a one-acre Bronx Zoo exhibit. Elephants are herd animals, but Happy is alone. The New York State Court of Appeals, responding to a petition of the Nonhuman Rights Project, has agreed to hear a habeas corpus petition that claims Happy is a “person” who is unlawfully imprisoned and should be moved to a preserve with other elephants. In a detailed account about Happy author Jill Lepore notes that “person” already includes corporations and recalls the dissenting opinion of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglass in Sierra Club vs. Morton in 1972 that supported legal personhood for the environment: “So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air.”
Nine amicus briefs have been filed on Happy’s behalf, including one from Harvard law school Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe and colleagues, who argue that:
“Happy remains in solitary confinement, unable to lead a physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially complex life despite her capacity to do so. By imprisoning Happy every day for over forty years, the Bronx Zoo has deprived her of the life to which free-living elephants are adapted.”
Clearly, a ruling in Happy’s favor would have wide-ranging implications, which would raise a host of other questions. Among these are: What other animals have similar rights? Do animals have legal rights that go beyond this case? What are the responsibilities of humans with regard to animals as persons? How must we adjust our moral thinking and behavior?
I have no answers. If wisdom is supposed to come with age, I find instead that the years just exponentially multiply the questions I face. Questions, however, are important. Without them, there would have been no environmental movement, no cruelty to animals legislation, no understanding of the fragility of our planet and no acceptance of how mutually interdependent we are with all the life that surrounds us. I don’t know that answers will come in time to help Happy, but we owe her the honor of asking the questions. She can think and feel. We must do the same.
Photo Credit for Wounda: Indian Forest Services
