Scientists are animals though some don’t know it
Animals have emotions too—and may sometimes act on higher moral plane than many scientists
Plenty of material tonight (April 18) for anyone who suspects that scientists are just as clueless as anyone else when it comes to their own untested general beliefs and perceptions. Is AIDS any different?
PBS 13 in NYC is showing the documentary Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry # 102 about non-human animals having—shock, horror!—emotions. Lot of cute segments of animals getting excited in various social scenes—elephants grouping to rescue an infant from quicksand mud, chimps comforting a friend who got the worst of a fight, paying respects to a dead leader, choosing a civil leader instead of a tyrant, showing gratitude, grief etc. Dogs which search for human bodies after earthquakes get so depresssed if they don’t find anyone live that at the end of an unsuccessful day the trainers set up an artificial rescue, just to stop them feeling so bad.
Very heartening to those like yours truly who never had any difficulty understanding that our fellow animals feel emotions. What is surprising is evidence that some animals feel moral ie self sacrificial emotions more strongly than most humans.
All in all, I would say, a depressing comment on how utterly obtuse most scientists are and have always been, since it is clear that even today many are “backward” as the documentary puts it in understanding this simple fact of life, which is no more than we are animals and animals are us.
Surely the motivation behind this distortion of vision is misplaced human pride in fantasizing that somehow we are supra-animals, better than the others, is the familiar motivation that makes knuckleheads resist Darwinian evolution. The fact that any scientists still subscribe to this nonsense thatt animals don’t feel emotion is a disgrace to the profession as a vocation, but it seems clear from the treatment of lab animals that many do. It reminds one of those who claim that newborn babies don’t feel the end of the skin of the penis being chopped off.
The documentary shows that in fact animals can be better in terms of social sacrifice than many human beings. One moving incident recounted is where a dog raced alongside a truck trying to get it to stop, and the unbelievably dumb (ie typical human) driver didn’t understand him until too late. The dog finally ran under the truck and was killed, when the “superior” form of animal stopped the truck and finally understood. Just beyond a rise lay the driver’s brother, who had fallen off a bike and was immobile—and in the path of the truck, which would have hit and probably killed him instead of the dog.
The documentary ended with the very nice quote as follows:
We need another and wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. 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 splendor and travail of the earth.”
It’s from The Outermost House:A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod, a book by Henry Beston about Cape Cod which some call the best book on nature ever written.