Harper and Kohl were best friends. They’d been through serious trauma together and made
it out on the other side, not without significant injury, but bonded cmore than ever. The pair
were inseparable. Then came the day that Kohl could no longer walk. The pain was too great.
And he passed away. Harper laid beside him for hours. In the following weeks, he kept
himself isolated from others, just sitting near the pond he and Kohl used to frequent.
Two months later, Harper, grief-stricken, passed away as well. Kohl and Harper, these
loyal friends, were ducks.
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. Something that we
humans have long used to distinguish ourselves from other animals is our ability to experience
complex and profound emotions. But is this ability really isolated to our species? And
if animals do have the capacity to emote, what does that say about how we treat them?
Strangely, he tend to place emotional capacity on some animals and not others, as evidenced by how
we pathologically anthropomorphize of our “pets.” The same person who will tell
you that chickens surely can’t grieve will in the next breath give a full psychoanalysis
of their dog’s emotional state.
So between our callous writing-off of certain animals’ emotional capacities and our own
emotional projections upon others, where does science fit? Though Darwin believed that,
given the evolutionary connection between humans and other animals, emotions must be
similar across species, this concept fell out of favor in the scientific community by
the early 20th century. Attribution of what were seen as human emotions to animals was,
and often still is, viewed as anthropomorphic and subjective. But slowly, this stance
has begun to relax as data from within the animal behavior scientific community has repeatedly
challenged the assertion that non-human animals lack the capacity for complex emotions.
It started with two of the mammals that we humans tend to value more: chimpanzees and
elephants. Anthropologist Jane Goodall observed and documented and observed the heart breaking account
of the young chimpanzee Flint’s decline and death from grief only weeks after his
mother passed away. In her book Through A Window, Goodall recounts, “Flint became
increasingly lethargic, refused food and, with his immune system thus weakened, fell
sick. The last time I saw him alive, he was hollow-eyed, gaunt and utterly depressed,
huddled in the vegetation close to where Flo had died. The last short journey he made,
pausing to rest every few feet, was to the very place where Flo's body had lain. There
he stayed for several hours, sometimes staring into the water. He struggled on a little further,
then curled up – and never moved again."
Elephants are something of the poster children for animal grieving as they have been observed
on many occasions visiting the bodies of fallen members of their species, even outside of
their family, and caressing the bodies or even bones with their trunks.
A particularly compelling example of elephant mourning comes from Iain Douglas-Hamilton
of Save the Elephants.
When Eleanor, the dying matriarch of an elephant family, collapsed, a matriarch named Grace
from another family immediately came to her aid, using her tusks to support Eleanor back
onto her feet. When Eleanor fell again, Grace stayed with her, pushing on her body, for
at least an hour, even though her own family moved on. Then Eleanor died. During the course
of the week that followed, females from five elephant families, including Eleanor’s own,
showed keen interest in her body. Some individuals appeared upset, pulling at and nudging ther
body with trunk and feet or rocking back and forth while standing over her.
It’s easier for us to recognize emotions in larger-brained mammals, particularly ones
we traditionally have romantic notions about like elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, and
dolphins. We can look at the account from Fabian Ritter of Mammal Encounters Education
Research of a rough-toothed dolphin mother alternatively pushing and carrying her dead
calf’s body for miles, or Gana, the captive gorilla who carried the body of her dead infant
around and recognize profound loss, even grief.
We hear accounts of dogs holding vigil over their owners’ bodies or graves, and passing
away soon after and don’t even question whether they are mourning.
But what about those species we don’t feel so connected to, like birds or fish or, even
more troubling, what about those species we enslave, kill and consume?
We see elephants’ recognition and mourning of their fallen brethren as the remarkable
practice of an intelligent and emotional species. But what do we say about the sorrowful bellowing
of this bull as he encounters his own slaughtered kin on a public street display of cow meat
and skin? Here is a species we consume on mass and widely portray as unintelligent and
unemotional. But what is this if not agonizing grief?
We’ve already heard of Harper and Kohl, the two ducks with the inseparable bond. The
trauma they had both endured was life and near death on a foie gras farm where they
were violently force-fed, resulting in hepatic lipidosis, a liver disease. Harper also lost
sight in one eye and Kohl was left with deformed legs, a disability which eventually ended
his life and, subsequently due to immense grief, Harper’s as well.
These two ducks had a profound friendship and Harper experienced the loss of his dear
friend in a manner that, if expressed in a dog, cat, elephant, great ape, or other more
relatable species, would unquestioningly be seen as deep mourning.
We simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss this capacity in our food animals. In 2013,
residents of Newburry Massachusetts called into the police regarding strange and disturbing,
inhuman sounds near the Sunshine Dairy Farm. The police sergeant put out a statement assuring
citizens that the noises wear coming from mother cows lamenting the separation from
their calves. She explained it was a yearly occurrence and is a normal function of a working
dairy farm and that the cows were not in distress.
How can we on the one hand recognize mothers crying out in agony for their babies, so loudly
and desperately that people in the town can hear them, yet on the other hand say they
are not in distress? And, more importantly, how do we continue to justify this treatment
as a normal part of our practices?
Is kidnapping the newborn children of other beings so that we can steal their milk really
normal? And is it really worth all that heartache and loss?
These are the questions we have to ask ourselves when confronting the emotional lives of non-human
animals.
We may want to chalk it all up to evolutionary instinct. Western scrub jays, for example,
hold what we would call funerals when they encounter a dead member of their species.
Teresa Iglesias and colleagues from the University of California at Davis noted that jays, on
seeing a dead bird, gather around and cry out. This is seen to be a tactic to warn others
of a danger and thus evolutionarily beneficial.
But most aspects of grief are not advantageous at all. So why, then, do animals, us included,
have this emotion? In her article When Animals Mourn, anthropologist Barbara King proposes
that “What is adaptive, then, may not be grief itself but instead the strong positive
emotions experienced before grief comes into the picture, shared between two or more living
animals whose level of cooperation in nurturing or resource-acquisition tasks is enhanced
by these feelings.”
Science-y words aside, if there is grief, there must have been love. King goes on to
state that “Love in the animal world often entwines with grief in an acute mutuality.
Perhaps even more than the degree of social cohesion within a species, it is love between
individuals that predicts when grief will be expressed.”
Strangely enough, we are consistently astounded by non-human animals’ emotional capacities.
Every now and again there’s a new article or study expounding upon the amazing possibility
that animals may feel x, y, or z emotion, or be far more intelligent than we once thought.
Yet somehow we don’t take these revelations to their ultimate conclusion: animals obviously
possess complex inner lives that we are not entirely privy to- and is it really ethical
to treat them as inferior, unemotional, unintelligent creatures until we decide we have enough evidence
to the contrary?
As to why animal emotions are not studied more, King makes the apt observation that
“To plumb the depths of animal thinking and feeling means to reassess how we, collectively
as a society and individually as persons, treat other animals.”
Confronting other animals’ capacity for emotion means confronting our behavior towards
and treatment of them. And relegating them to an inferior status is certainly easier
and far more comfortable…for us.
Whether it’s the story of a group of horses holding vigil at their friend Storm Warning’s
grave or Tarra the elephants’ grieving of her canine friend Bella, or the anguished
cries of sea lions when their babies are taken by predators, or even the heart wrenching
grief of a mother dairy cow whose child has been ripped from her, it’s undeniable that
non-human animals are emotional beings
They may grieve differently from us, and from one another, but their loss is no less profound
and their heartbreak no less tragic. And they deserve our respect and compassion.
If you want more information about the research and case studies I mentioned, please see the
blog post for this video linked in the description below. Now I’d love to hear your thoughts
on this subject. Do you have an experience with non-human animal grief? Do you believe
in their emotional capacity? Let me know in the comments!
If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up and share it around to give a well-deserved
voice to these animals’ grief. If you want to help support Bite Size Vegan so that I
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If anyone really wonders if animals can grieve, they just need to see when you're done eating
and there's no more food. It's a very sad time. It's a very sad time.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community