Carl Safina - Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

ALSO BY CARL SAFINA

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A Sea in Flames

Nina Delmar; The Great Whale Rescue (for children)

Voyage of the Turtle

Eye of the Albatross

Song for the Blue Ocean

Beyond Words

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

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New York, New York 10010

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Copyright 2015 by Carl Safina

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Book Distribution Limited

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Safina, Carl, 1955.

Beyond words: what animals think and feel / Carl Safina.First edition.

pages cm

A John Macrae Book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8050-9888-4 (hardcover)ISBN 978-0-8050-9889-1 (electronic book)

1. Animal psychology. 2. Animal behavior. 3. ElephantsPsychology. 4. WolvesPsychology. 5. WhalesPsychology. 6. Psychology, Comparative. I. Title.

QL785.S14 2015 591.56dc23

2014045385

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First Edition 2015

Designed by Kelly Too

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

For the people in these pages who watch and truly listen, who tell us what they are hearing in other voices that share our air, and in the silence

I thought of the long ages of the past during which the successive generations of these things of beauty had run their course with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness, to all appearances such a wanton waste of beauty. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone.

Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 1869

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

CONTENTS

Into the Mind Field

PART ONE: TRUMPETS OF ELEPHANTS

The Big Question

The Same Basic Brain

Distinctly Human?

Deep and Ancient Circuits

We Are Family

Motherhood Happens

Do Elephants Love Their Babies?

Elephant Empathy

Good Grief

I Dont Know How You Say Good-bye

I Say Hello

Holding Back, Letting Go

Troubled Minds

Ebony and Ivory

Where Baby Elephants Come From

PART TWO: HOWLS OF WOLVES

Into the Pleistocene

A Perfect Wolf

Packing and Unpacking

The Wolf Named Six

A Shattering of Promises

In a Time of Truce

Magnificent Outcasts

Where the Wolf Birds Lead Us

Wolf Music

The Hunter Is a Lonely Heart

A Will to Live

Domestic Servants

Two Ends of the Same Leash

PART THREE: WHINES AND PET PEEVES

Never Mind Theory

Sex, Lies, and Humiliated Seabirds

Conceit, Deceit

Chuckles and Wacky Ideas

Mirror, Mirror

And Speaking of Neurons

People of an Ancient Nation

PART FOUR: KILLER WAILS

Sea Rex

A More Complex Killer

Just Very Sexual

Inner Visions

Diverse Minds

Intelligent in What Way?

The Social Brain

Woo-Woo

Helping in Mind

Do Not Disturb

To Have and to Hold

Expect Personality

A Vision True and Mighty

EPILOGUE: Final Scratch

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Beyond Words

Into the Mind Field

Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.

Job 12:78, King James Version

Another big group of dolphins had just surfaced alongside our moving vesselleaping and splashing and calling mysteriously back and forth in their squeally, whistly way, with many babies swift alongside their mothers. And this time, confined to just the surface of such deep and lovely lives, I was becoming unsatisfied. I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling and so close . This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist is forbidden fruit: Who are you? Scientists usually steer firmly from questions about the inner lives of animals. Surely they have inner lives of some sort. But like a child who is admonished that what they really want to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mindif there is suchis unknowable. Permissible questions are it questions: about where it lives, what it eats, what it does when danger threatens, how it breeds. But always forbidden always forbiddenis the one question that might open the door to the interior: Who?

There are good reasons to avoid so fraught an inquiry and the cans of worms such a door could open. But the barrier between humans and animals is artificial, because humans are animals. And now, watching these dolphins, I was tired of being so artificially polite; I wanted more intimacy. I felt time slipping for both of us, and I did not want to risk having to say good-bye and realizing that Id never really said hello. During the cruise Id been reading about elephants, and elephant minds were on my own mind as I wondered about the dolphins and watched them pacing fluidly and freely in their ocean realm. When a poacher kills an elephant, he doesnt just kill the elephant who dies. The family may lose the crucial memory of their elder matriarch, who knew where to travel during the very toughest years of drought to reach the food and water that would allow them to continue living. Thus one bullet may, years later, bring more deaths. Watching dolphins while thinking of elephants, what I realized is: when others recognize and depend on certain individuals, when a death makes the difference for individuals who survive, when relationships define us, we have traveled across a certain blurry boundary in the history of life on Earthit has become who.

Who animals know who they are; they know who their family and friends are. They know their enemies. They make strategic alliances and cope with chronic rivalries. They aspire to higher rank and wait for their chance to challenge the existing order. Their status affects their offsprings prospects. Their life follows the arc of a career. Personal relationships define them. Sound familiar? Of course. They includes us. But a vivid, familiar life is not the domain of humans alone.

We look at the world through our own eyes, naturally. But by looking from the inside out, we see an inside-out world. This book takes the perspective of the world outside usa world in which humans are not the measure of all things, a human race among other races. To understand anything, really, one must go deep, to the roots. In our estrangement from nature we have severed our sense of the community of life and lost touch with the experience of other animals. So while I went in search of particular who animals, I delved into new findings about thought, emotion, and consciousness that apply to many animals. And because everything about life occurs along a sliding scale, understanding the human animal becomes easier in context, seeing our human thread woven into the living web among the strands of so many others.