Jessica Pierce, Ph.D.
August 2018
Despite the openness with which the media has talked about the orca Taulequah’s grief as she carried her baby, skepticism about animal grief and other emotions is alive and well, even among scientists... I have witnessed, first with curiosity and then with a growing sense of alarm, how the scientific data on animal feelings have failed to translate into action on behalf of animals. We are two-faced: What we say with our science we refute with our behavior.
The world has been transfixed over the past several weeks by the
spectacle of a mother orca whale carrying her dead infant through the icy
waters of the Salish Sea, keeping the infant afloat as best she could, and
persisting for more than 17 days in one of the most protracted displays of
cetacean grieving ever recorded by marine scientists.
Despite the openness with which the media has talked about Taulequah’s
grief, skepticism about animal grief and other emotions is alive and well,
even among scientists. Many of the reports about grieving behavior will use
scare quotes around "grief" to suggest that animals like Taulequah only look
as if they are grieving. Zoologist Jules Howard, for example, wrote in The
Guardian a couple of days ago, “if you believe J35 was displaying evidence
of mourning or grief, you are making a case that rests on faith not on
scientific endeavor.” I find myself increasingly impatient with this kind of
response to animal suffering.
There is a long-standing prejudice against the idea that animals feel deep,
complex, or “human-like” emotions such as grief, and this part of a larger
assumption that animals don’t think about or care about or even have much
awareness of death. Some might admit that animals engage in behaviors that
seem to suggest underlying emotional states, that animals have the
neurophysiological architecture for emotional experiences, that they are
built very much like we are, that they act as if they are grieving. But,
they will say, we need to remain skeptical. We don’t know for sure, because
we can’t get inside an animal’s mind and see what’s really going on.
At first glance, such skepticism seems like a healthy scientific attitude:
Let’s be cautious, let’s wait until we have adequate data to support our
hypotheses. But this isn’t how skepticism functions in the conversation
about animal emotions; it plays a much more insidious role.
The animal grief skeptics are correct about one thing: We don’t know all
that much about death-related behaviors such as grief in nonhuman animals.
We know very little about how the multitude of creatures with whom we share
the planet think and feel about death, either their own dying or the dying
of those with whom they live. But we don’t know because we haven’t looked.
Scientists haven’t yet turned serious attention to the study of what you
might call “comparative thanatology”—perhaps because awareness of mortality
has remained a bastion of human-perceived uniqueness.
Nevertheless, we are now poised to begin asking the right questions. We have
a growing database of anecdotal reports of grieving and other death-related
behaviors in elephants, dolphins, peccaries, magpies, dolphins, orcas,
chimpanzees, crows, dogs, donkeys, and many more. Serious, tenure-desiring
academics are beginning to study death-related behaviors in a broad range of
species, beginning naturally with work on primates, but extending now into a
broad taxonomic range of creatures, including cetaceans.
We don’t really know how to talk about what we are observing. For now, we
have our human concepts such as “grieving” and “mourning ritual.” Given
evolutionary continuity, these terms are scientifically compelling. But the
experience of animals at the end of life—their own lives and the lives of
those they know and to whom they feel emotionally attached—is an open book
at this point. We are just now beginning to realize that there may be a
whole suite of death-related behaviors, from mourning to burials and other
mortuary practices to death vigils to corpse cleaning and corpse carrying.
The question is not “do animals grieve?” but “how and why do animals
grieve?” We have a great deal to learn, and this is exciting, to be on the
vanguard of a new appreciation of who animals are, what their subjective
experiences might be like, and how different they might be from our own.
A large degree of caution is appropriate when it comes to ascribing emotions
such as grief to animals—but not because there is any doubt that animals
feel, that they grieve, that a mother’s anguish over the loss of her infant
isn’t terribly, painfully real. There is an important difference between
being careful and being “skeptical,” where skepticism is used as an excuse
to put off or even stand in the way of advocacy for animals.
The admonition against “anthropomorphizing” is also critically important if
understood as a nuanced call for careful science and careful reporting. But
in the hands of the skeptics, the “we can’t call it grief without scare
quotes” refrain simply becomes a blunt tool used to bludgeon away a creeping
sense that the shallowness of our empathic response to other animals is
shameful. If animals feel what we feel, then how we treat them is deeply
wrong.
Being as right as possible—being scientifically accurate—about what animals
are experiencing is our ethical responsibility. This is true most obviously
for animals directly under our care, such as companion dogs and cats,
animals in zoos, and, perhaps most critically, for those animals caught in
the wheels of agribusiness. (An orca grieves for her calf, but a cow
doesn’t? What kind of skepticism is at work here?) But getting it right is
just as important when it comes to wild animals: The better our
understanding of animals, the more we can shape our interactions in ways
that reduce harm we cause them, even inadvertently.
As a bioethicist I’ve been studying the interplay between science and ethics
for over two decades. During this time, I have witnessed, first with
curiosity and then with a growing sense of alarm, how the scientific data on
animal feelings have failed to translate into action on behalf of animals.
We are two-faced: What we say with our science we refute with our behavior.
We know that animals feel emotions such as fear, anxiety, depression, and
grief, yet when animal advocates try to press for changes to policies or
cultural practices that impose these “negative affective states” on animals,
the scientific skeptic (in the service of industry) jumps up and says “Wait,
we can’t be quite sure animals feel these things.” This is why the story of
Taulequah and her “grief” is about so much more. We have an opportunity to
call out the skeptics and get down to the important business of trying to
treat other animals with kindness and respect.
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