When I attended university thirty years ago with an interest in science, the curriculum’s focus was both the subject matter and how to view the world objectively. It was an education for worlds unknown to me — the social lives of insects, the intricacies of human anatomy, the evolution of hominins — and a re-education for how to interpret what I was perceiving. I was taught to avoid projecting my beliefs and circumstances on other cultures as well as to resist projecting human ways of being on other species, thus anthropomorphizing their motivations and behaviors.
Although I have forgotten as much as I remember about the “facts” of life I once learned, the struggle with objectivity has stayed with me. In many ways, it has become the basis of my humanity. I continue to work at suspending judgment and discerning my unconscious biases. It’s not always easy. Yet grappling with this aspect of objectivity has been a solid foundation for living in a democratic society in which different worldviews must find common ground if society is to reach consensus and thrive. However, scientific objectivity has also felt tedious and unnatural when it comes to my relationship with the birds, mammals, fishes, and insects with which we share Earth.
To avoid anthropomorphizing feels like denying obvious similarities that I spent my childhood assuming were foregone conclusions, as certain to me as the school year ending when summer began. My childhood was filled with the sorts of life I crossed paths with on neighborhood wanderings and what my parents would tolerate in our home: dogs, cats, frogs, garter snakes, horned toads, lizards, and the occasional pet store hamster or guinea pig. For me, being surrounded by other life forms was childhood and how I came to understand being human, a weaving of commonalities and differences that made life perpetually interesting. My pets were my friends, my companions, and perhaps most importantly, my educators about the wonderous variety I could expect from life. They were also my source for discovering many of the universals that bind us, especially through the emotions they called forth in me, such as feelings of care, unconditional love, and the grief and panic of loss. They revealed to me emotions that as a child were too overwhelming to acknowledge, like the rage of hunger, the fear of entrapment, and the lust of mating. By identifying with animals, I like to believe I became a more well-rounded human.
In college, I turned my back on biology despite my love of animals once I learned that as an antivivisectionist I likely wouldn’t progress very far. Instead, I majored in physics and gained inspiration from planets and stars. My destiny might have been different had there been the many inspiring scientist today—such as Carl Safina, Franz de Waal, Jennifer Ackerman, Jonathan Balcombe, Lars Chittka, Lucy Cooke, and Jak Panksepp among many others—who have looked for our similarities with other species as much as our differences, especially regarding our shared emotional worlds. I imagine civilization would also have been profoundly different had the quest for objectivity been more temperate in its pursuit of absolute truths at the expense of emotional connection.
If we retrace the steps that led to our present environmental catastrophe, one of the gravest choices was basing human cleverness on the denial of other species’ intelligence and emotions. This human chauvinism was buttressed by Enlightenment ideology that emerged almost four hundred years ago. Many in the West are still under its spell. The story of the order of things propagated during the past several centuries has portrayed Homo sapiens as standing atop the evolutionary pyramid. However, not all humans have been considered as the pinnacle species. Primarily white men took the mantle, supposedly distinguished by their superior capacity for reason (and I would add, muted emotions). One giant step down the pyramid stood the white woman, and below her were her children. Another large step down the pyramid sat all the other races and below them, at the bottom, resided animals, plants, fish, and insects. Each step down marked a distance away from reason and a step closer to emotions. But at the very bottom, there were no thoughts or emotions at all; just a body increasingly envisioned as a machine filled with parts and empty space.
To assert this order of things, René Descartes once repeatedly kicked a dog and claimed its cries were no different than the ticks of a clock. “Kick a dog, or vivisect a dog, and it yelped not out of pain but like the spring in a clock being struck.” For Descartes, his imaginings of the dog as lacking the equivalent of human feelings confirmed his divine ordering of the world. Although his actions were extreme and brutal, such beliefs as Descartes’ have inspired notions of maturity and intelligence that encourage discarding (or I would assert, dissociating) emotional truths that arise during childhood through the bonds so many of us instinctively forge with other species. To “grow up,” and perceive the world objectively, has often meant abandoning our childhood connections with the natural world.
In the current wave of mass extinctions, the Enlightenment view of the ordering of life haunts us. If we are to save the majority of species inhabiting our planet, including many of our own kind, we have no choice but to retell the story of the nature of life, which includes pushing back on ideas like Descartes’ that have undeniably led to the justification of profound cruelty and abuses to fellow humans and other species.
In the early twentieth century anthropologist Paul Radin rejected such barbarism, reflecting in The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology,
“viewed psychologically, it might be contended that the history of civilization is largely the account of the attempts of man to forget his transformation from an animal into a human being.”
Perhaps if we balance how we feel — that emotional life so much research today confirms we share with other life forms — with our awesome power for imagination and critical thinking, we can forge a new ordering of the world. We might also discover within ourselves the compassion necessary for averting the worst effects of climate catastrophe, namely inhumanity to each other as well as to other species.
When I read the latest research on a multitude of species and their emotional lives, I sometimes feel like I am waking from a fugue, that I must once again re-educate myself for objectivity, although this time the quest is to identify similarities as much as differences. Recent studies show insects feel pain, likely as much as we do. Bees can recognize specific human faces and have inner worlds in which they reflect on their environments. Fish collaborate with other species. Birds are multilingual and understand not only the languages of other birds, but the meanings made by the sounds of other species. Dolphins and chimpanzees engage in symbolic behavior. And the vast majority of species make raising their young the sine qua non of existence, suggesting it is care, rather than ruthless competition, that is life’s guiding principle.
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Last summer, while sick with the flu, I discovered the most absorbing distraction: watching livestreams from cameras perched high near birds’ nests. I spent hours observing the rearing of chicks — Ospreys in Poland and Wales, Goshawks in Scotland, Bald Eagles in Northern California, a Royal Albatross in New Zealand, and a California Condor in Tom’s Canyon, CA. After reading many books and articles by the scientists mentioned above, I didn’t feel the need to police my thoughts and feelings for evidence of anthropomorphizing. I let myself return to anticipating an education from these wild creatures and a kinship too, much as the botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass, “we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.”
To my surprise, one of my favorites to watch has been the California Condor. Although, on my first viewing, I was stunned by the sheer ugliness of this bird and its chick. Their heads and necks are devoid of feathers and look like uncooked, fleshy drumsticks covered in dimples where feathers have been plucked. The parents walk as if hunchbacked and lurch with each step. When young, the chick’s feet appeared almost as long as its gray-downed body, which was like a bulbous growth without much form. When the chick slept in the hot afternoon sun, it would collapse to the ground, its legs protruding behind it as if passed out drunk. (Later I would learn this is called splooting and is how they release heat from their bodies.) Compared to the other birds I watched, the condors seemed clumsy and disarrayed in their small cave strewn with feathers and debris. I began to wonder, too, if other species balk at our hairless skin and if some might need help learning how to love us again. Perhaps some see us like the condor, a scavenger species pursuing dead objects, like our cars and cement streets.
My appreciation of the condors grew when I watched the parent with its chick. There was so much affection — much more than I had witnessed between other birds and their young. In their quest for a meal, condors may travel up to 160 miles a day, and even then, there is no guarantee they will find the carrion they need to survive. This means the chick is often left alone, waiting for its parents to return.
Watching mother or father reuniting with chick — the chick’s vocal delight, the way their long necks encircle one another like a swan dance, how they lay together after feeding — I felt I was once again learning from another species how to be a better human. Observing their precious moments, I found myself reflecting on how central longing is for maintaining connections. Surely condors have memories of their chicks that stir such feelings, much like human parents who yearn to return to their child after a long day away earning a paycheck. Yet the condors’ lives seemed unencumbered by the multitude of distractions that can keep us humans from feeling our emotions with distinctness and clarity.
The longing was especially obvious when the chick was left alone. It would pick up the loose feathers left behind by its parents and arrange them in piles or sometimes just carry one to another location. I thought of the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s observation of the significance of transitional objects for human toddlers as they learn to be on their own without mother. This might be a blanket or a doll that “stands in” for the caregiver, an object that keeps them connected to feelings of love and warmth and soothes their longing. Yet to suggest that condors also have transitional objects is to entertain the possibility that they too have symbolic minds, and like us, can imagine worlds different than the ones they inhabit. Yet we humans often rely too much on our imaginations, using our symbolic minds to build worlds that separate us from feelings rather than bring us closer to our simple, yet profound desire for connection.
If condors feel longing, I wonder if it is the outcome of their unique evolution for a diet of death. They are not predators, but rather are the morticians of the sky whose survival requires patiently waiting the completion of the cycle of life. Sometimes they go weeks without eating. All those early lessons in longing likely prepares them for a life lacking instant gratification. I wonder how their minds fill those vast empty spaces of longing. Watching the condor chick waiting for its parents to return and its body to fully mature, I often wondered, Is this Buddha nature?
Who might we become if the condor were a model for how to live? Our early hominin ancestors were also scavengers, surviving off scraps left from the kills of more skilled predators. Perhaps the condor can remind us how to be more comfortable with uncertainty in these chaotic times and to foster the habit of creatively tolerating periods of longing. When we anthropomorphize, we might lose objectivity, but we also gain a new perspective on ourselves, perhaps becoming smarter too and more compassionate in a world so desperately in need of our companionship.
