The kindness of beasts

The kindness of beasts

'Dogs rescue their friends and elephants care for injured kin – humans have no monopoly on moral behaviour'

Mark Rowlands

During the year or so that their old lives overlapped with that of my son, I was alternately touched, shocked, amazed, and dumbfounded by the kindness and patience they exhibited towards him. They would follow him from room to room, everywhere he went in the house, and lie down next to him while he slept. Crawled on, dribbled on, kicked, elbowed and kneed: these occurrences were all treated with a resigned fatalism. The fingers in the eye they received on a daily basis would be shrugged off with an almost Zen-like calm. In many respects, they were better parents than me. If my son so much as squeaked during the night, I would instantly feel two cold noses pressed in my face: get up, you negligent father — your son needs you.

Grace is not unusual among elephants. Take another series of events: a young female elephant suffered from a withered leg, and could put little weight upon it. A young male from another herd charged the crippled female. A large female elephant chased him away and then, revealingly, returned to the young female and gently touched her withered leg with her trunk. Joyce Poole, the ethologist and elephant conservationist who described this event, concluded that the adult female was showing empathy.

Binti Jua, a gorilla residing at Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, had her 15 minutes of fame in 1996 when she came to the aid of a three-year-old boy who had climbed on to the wall of the gorilla enclosure and fallen five metres onto the concrete floor below. Binti Jua lifted the unconscious boy, gently cradled him in her arms, and growled warnings at other gorillas that tried to get close. Then, while her own infant clung to her back, she carried the boy to the zoo staff waiting at an access gate.

[Laird]

What a perverse world we live in: one in which the idea that animals - like humans - are kind, compassionate, and moral is seen as so non-obvious as to warrant an article in its defence.

This, from the article, encapsulates my own reasoning:

We know that animals are like us in many ways — in terms of their evolution, their genetic structure, the structure of their brains, and their behaviour. Given these known similarities, when we see animals behaving in ways that seem to be similar to the ways we behave, then do not assume a difference in motivation unless there is some evidence that supports this difference. When a chimpanzee gives what appears to be a consoling hug to its fellow who has just received a savage beating from the alpha male then, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the working hypothesis should be that the chimpanzee is motivated by the same sorts of emotions as a human would be in the same sort of situation. If, in the human case, we take this to be an expression of sympathy, then we should assume the same for the ape unless there is positive evidence to suppose otherwise.

It seems pretty obvious to me. No need even to be charitable, just to recognise sense.

It is a pity that the otherwise vigorous defence in the article trailed off towards the end into a concession that animals might not be - as we are - responsible for their own (moral) choices. There is no need to make this false concession.

It is a pity that the otherwise vigorous defence in the article trailed off towards the end into a concession that animals might not be - as we are - responsible for their own (moral) choices. There is no need to make this false concession.

[it] has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow "debunks" the account given from the inside. "All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from the inside," says the wiseacre, "are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos."

And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, "If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature."
 ~ C.S. Lewis