Beauty is the Beast

Whilst working on an essay for Prospect on bullfighting, I heard a Natural History programme on BBC Radio 4 devoted to the issue of whaling which has recently returned to the news as Japan has increased both the numbers of whales it is hunting and the number of species, including the ultra-charismatic humpback. One of the many that struck me whilst writing the bullfighting piece was how so many of our views of, and dealings with, animals (and this goes for both sides of the arguments in this area) are based on an almost incoherent mix of raw emotion, flawed logical steps, ignorance of the facts and a lack of direct experience. However, what struck me even more during the programme’s discussion (by an impressive array of international scientists, conservationists, diplomats and politicians) was that whilst it is easy to point out some of the logical inconsistencies, become aware of some of the facts, there is an impossibility – a metaphysical one I think – in removing emotion and the need for direct experience of the animals in question in order to formulate a better position in this ethical debate. I thought I’d say a few words here, since I had no space in the main essay.

By way of preamble: in 1982 the International Whaling Commission decided to reduce the whaling quotas of the signatory nations to zero – they could neither agree to an outright ban nor even the use of the term “moratorium” – to allow the populations to return to a sustainable level and to review the whaling industry in general to improve its methods so that it would not again put this small but important area of biodiversity in jeopardy. However, the motivating force in this policy shift was the post-1960s rise in profile of both animal welfare and conservation.

Public attention was focused on whales by welfare and conservation groups by pointing out that whales were not fish but “mammals like us” (of course, fish are ‘animals like us’, but let’s leave the emotive, but biologically vacuous nature of this phrasing to one side). It was also pointed out, with better justification, that the intelligence and sociability of these animals was being ignored in our attribution of ‘prey-status’ to them. This was particularly brought home, quite deliberately, with the use of the beautiful and haunting sounds of the humpback whale by the biologists who had first classified them as ’songs’, Roger Payne and Scott McVay. As Roger Payne says in the programmes, this provided a suitable “audio-reinforcement” to the images of Greenpeace’s small, semi-dirigible boats blocking the path of the comparatively vast whaling vessels (Jonah and the Whale in reverse).

The most important question which is almost never head on in this debate is by what criteria do we, and by we I mean the non-vegetarian/vegan majority, decide that a fellow member of the animal kingdom is fit to be treated in the way we do. In general, the unspoken consensus used to be, and remains for the vast majority of the developing world, that if it is isn’t human, we can do what we want with an animal. Undoubtedly in the Christian tradition this thinking had a neat theological echo in the division of those beings with souls – i.e. us – and those beings without, although that position has since been mediated. I can’t claim any great expertise on Muslim theology, but in my travels in Morocco where the treatment of, for example, donkeys is so visibly cruel, I was often confronted with the opinion that not only did Allah give us the right to treat animals as we wish, but that the “Western” habits of keeping animals as pets, allowing them to sleep in our beds (something often brought up) and other attributions of what one might calls traits of ‘personhood’ to animals was a form of idolatory – a rational enough stance, given their views on animals, if you consider how we might view a people who made a bed for their vacuum cleaners, took them for walks, stroked them etc. However, with the withering of religion in’the West, especially in the sphere of policy, our ethics have latched onto other criteria of moral importance, such as sentience and consciousness.

Of course, it was not science that told us that some animals are sentient, e.g. can feel pain. Anyone who has had dealings with dogs or cats, which is most people, is well aware that they are capable of feeling pain. The anatomical discovery that dogs have a central nervous system not wildly different to our own may have helped confirm this in a scientific sense but only in the same pedantic way that knowledge of atomic structure confirms that diamond is hard. However, our knowledge of animals was genuinely increased when the more troublesome question of consciousness, more specifically self-consciousness, was approached by Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., et al (1970), who designed various ‘mirror tests’. The simplest of these involved anaesthetising a subject, placing a dot of coloured, odourless dye somewhere invisible to the animal, e.g. its forehead, and then using this marker as a way to gauge whether the subject could recognise itself in the mirror. Dogs and cats cannot; they are at first disturbed by mirrors, suspecting another animal’s presence, but soon learn to ignore them. Great apes such as the chimpanzee immediately use the mirror to perceive where the dot is on their bodies and then use their hands to try to remove it. Of course, anyone who has spent any time with chimpanzees, as I did at the Language Research Centre of Georgia State University in 2001 (which I have written about for the Financial Times which can be found here), knows that you just have to give a chimp lipstick and a mirror to prove with less rigorous but more humorous results.

It should be noted that the same has been shown for dolphins, although in a less dramatic, and perhaps consequently more disputed manner (see, e.g. the psychologist Clive Wynne’s essay in Nature in 2004). Lacking the necessary limbs, the significant behavioural change is how long they spend in front of a mirror showing the marked portion of their bodies rather than other mirrors in the same array which do not. I think that a very important point can be taken out from this. Scientific results can be so dry as to have little effect on our views and most especially what philosophers would call our moral intuitions. Seeing an animal hover motionless in the water in front of one mirror rather than another does little to effect my views of it, whereas seeing one putting on makeup, and being as visibly amused by the results as the observers, is an entirely different matter. For science, although it can be used to confirm our rougher, readier but essentially fuller and more human interactions with animals, cannot override nor replace them. One area in particular that this strikes me is in how animals treat their dead. There is something that happened within me with regards to my view of lions when I observed a lion eating another lion that I had seen it lick in greeting a few days before. Just as there was something in the opposite direction when I read the following passage in In the Kingdom of Gorillas (2001), by the social scientist Bill Weber and the biologist Amy Vedder: 

“The day of Quince’s death . . . [the group] made a 180-degree turn and headed rapidly in a direct line toward where they had last seen Quince . . . [we were then] rewarded with an exceptional sight. First Icarus, then Puck, went straight to her nest and placed their faces on the exact spot where Quince had breathed her last. Each then sat back and stared off into space. The two sat side by side as others passed near the nest site. Then the entire family moved off silently into the surrounding forest.”

There can be no denying that the choice of language is unscientific, emotive even, and yet evocative of the sorts of truths which fuel the engine of our ethical judgements which simply will not turn over on cold scientific truths unless they are suitably dramatic. It is the description, as fact-based and unclouded, as is possible, of an emotional being living an experience with these animals – things which are utterly intrinsic to how we judge how we will treat an animal, and it is only in the acceptance of that that any sort of clarity can be brought to the argument of whether or not we should be hunting whales.

Although I have not set out to write a piece on whaling, rather a piece going over some of the sources of our moral stance with regards to it, it would be remiss of me not to briefly state my own views.I have spent far too little time with cetacean species to claim sufficient amounts of the sort of direct contact I regard as so necessary – with the one exception of endless, joyful (for me) hours spent as a child entertaining a very bored captive bottlenose dolphin during a week’s stay on an island off the Great Barrier Reef. However, I have picked up more from that surrogate for direct contact: the well-made and honest nature documentary, which is not as easy to find as one might think (I have written on this in a lighter vein in Freize magazine, which can be found here). In theory, these could provide the population at large with the sort of experience in the fuller sense which I regard as a sine qua non for moral judgement – an absolute necessity - especially when this is backed up by the (apparently) morally-neutral, but scrupulously honest scientific data (I highly recommend Cetacean Societies, edited by Janet Mann et al [1999] – although it is a little out of date now missing such recent research as the 2005 discovery of the transmission of tool-use across generations in dolphins from mother to child [see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]).In the light of this, it would seem to me that the intrinsic cruelty of the practice of commercial whaling – the means of death for an animal of that size killed in the high seas whilst leaving a commercially viable carcass is necessarily prolonged and agonising – and the clear intelligence, sociability, and sensitivity of the animals in question simply outweighs whatever miniscule benefit to humanity in terms of whale-meat or other products there may be in the modern world, although this may not always have been the case.

Two caveats: I am aware that many of the examples of intelligence above actually refer specifically to bottlenose dolphins, and that these decisions should be made on a species-by-species basis. Also, arguments from the point of view of sustainable populations and that great engine of conservation, aesthetics (phrases like “majestic” and “largest mammal ever to have lived” spring to mind) are entirely independent of this.

P.S. Joshua Plotnik’s team at Emory showed elephants pass the mirror test late last year (in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), whilst the year before Karen McComb’s team observed (in Biology Letters) that elephants not only pay strange and touching attention to their dead but even to the clean skeletons of dead elephants – although the elephants’ graveyard is undeniably a myth. It is worth adding that an excellent description of what these facts translate as in our actual dealings with actual animals is, paradoxically, to be found Ernest Hemingway’s Big Game hunting short fiction, ‘An African Story.’
 
Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s latest researches into the world of bullfighting can be found at The Last Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight.