ANIMAL WELLNESS
Do Animals Feel Things More Intensely Than We Do?
has not proved anything about birds. But he has revealed a good deal about himself.” With regard to the “desolation” to which Krutch referred, I clearly recall a lion my daughter and I once saw confined within a rather small chain-link fence: it was pacing back and forth monotonously and with an evident degree of frustration. An animal denied the use of its nat - ural abilities — to hunt, to soar, to climb, to dash — is almost surely forced into a pathos made worse by its inability, through language, to explain its predicament to itself. The flip side, as Masson provocatively suggests, is that “language sets [feeling] at a distance…the very act of saying ‘I am sad’ with all the connotations that the words have, pushes the feeling away a little, perhaps making it less searing and less personal.” For all these rea- sons, he concludes that animals may well feel things more intensely than we do. Extract taken from Sensitive Soul by Michael A. Jawer © 2020 Park Street Press. The author can be reached at mike.jawer@gmail. com. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. www.InnerTraditions.com
BY MICHAEL JAWER
If you’re a pet owner — especially if your companion is a dog or cat — then you know without question that these animals have feel- ings. They can exhibit surprise, jealousy, happiness (consider a dog who hasn’t seen you for a while), affection, contentment (think of a cat purring on one’s lap), fear, agitation, annoyance (cats particularly), perhaps even guilt or shame (dogs at least). While animals don’t have language akin to humans, with words and symbols infused with particular meanings, they can certainly gather what’s going on at a feeling level. Here’s an illustration, cour - tesy of Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, concerning his late dog Harry: My wife… acts in community theater. One day, she was in the house rehearsing a monologue for an upcoming audition. The lines were from Marsha Norman’s two-person play “Night, Mother,” about a housewife who is attempting to talk her adult daughter out of sui- cide. Thelma is a weak and bewildered woman trying to change her daughter’s mind while coming to terms with her own failings as a mother and with her paralyzing fear of being left alone. Her lines are excruciating. My wife had to stop in mid-monologue. Harry was too distraught. He could understand not one word she was saying, but he figured out that Mom was as sad as he’d ever seen her. He was whimper - ing, pawing at her knee, licking her hand, trying as best he could to make things better.
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“You don’t need a brain to have a heart,” Weingarten concludes.
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Neurologically speaking, Weingarten was selling Harry short. The parts of the human brain that process feeling — collectively known as the limbic system — have their counterparts in other animals’ cra - niums and nervous systems. The late, esteemed neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, best known for his research into emotion, declared that “the evidence is now inescapable: at the basic emotional level, all mammals are remarkably similar.” One might even argue that other mammals are more aware of feel- ings than are human beings, because they possess a “primary” form of consciousness. They are aware of themselves and their environment but less burdened by complexities such as reflection and rumination that typify human consciousness. They live closer to the bone, one might say, than we do. One animal behaviouralist, Jeffrey Masson, has remarked that an - imals possess feelings of “undiluted purity and clarity” — at least at times — compared to the “seeming opacity and inaccessibility of hu- man feelings.” A former psychoanalyst, he wonders if the human ego doesn’t get in the way of our experiencing feelings as directly and un - distilled as other creatures do. Masson draws attention, for instance, to the capacity of some animals to express pure, unbridled joy. Take birdsong. Anyone who has awoken to hear birds twittering on a spring day catches a sense of what feeling might be present in them beyond any fundamental communications function or territori- al pronouncement. Naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch conjectured that “Perhaps certain animals can be both more joyful and more utterly desolate than any man ever was.” He also opined that “Whoever lis- tens to a bird song and says, ‘I do not believe there is any joy in it,’
PATHWAYS—Summer 23—49
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