Sermon Archive
Do animals think? Do they have feelings?
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Matins on 18 September 2005
Jeremiah 5:1-19 ; Mark 12:18-44
Do animals think? Do they have feelings? To many people who live or work with animals, the answer may seem obvious. Of course they do! But not everyone has always agreed with that. Descartes, one of the most influential modern philosophers, claimed that animals were automata, mere machines. Many modern scientists also have denied that animals have intelligence or emotions. And of course that was and is a convenient view for scientists and the rest of us. There are now countless ways in which animals can be used to benefit humans: not only to feed and clothe us, but also in scientific experiments to develop new medicines and vaccines, and in safety tests which protect us from being poisoned by the chemicals in our foodstuffs or household goods. If animals really don't think or feel, sympathising with them is just sentimentality, and so we don't need to feel guilty about using them in all the ways that now help us to live longer, healthier and safer lives.
Until relatively recently, quite a number of philosophers, psychologists and scientists took the view that because animals don't have emotions or intelligence we can do pretty much what we want to them, as long as we are not being deliberately cruel to no purpose. But views are changing. Many scientists who work with animals nowadays recognise that they do have intelligence and emotions, and they say that the welfare and good husbandry of experimental animals is important not only morally but also scientifically. It's a bit like the old advertisement about getting the best milk from contented cows.
But there's a problem about this. How can you tell that cows really are contented, or indeed that any animal is happy? It's not just that animals come in many shapes and sizes, from chimpanzees to fruit flies - and so presumably differ greatly among themselves in their capacity for thinking and feeling. It's also that they cannot tell us, at least in a language that we can easily understand, what they are thinking and feeling. When they are in pain, for example, animals do not necessarily show it in the way humans do. Many animals in fact hide their pain, perhaps because in their natural state - in the wild - to show it could have shown that they were injured, and so made them more vulnerable to predators.
Now some people, of course, are very good at knowing what animals are feeling and thinking. Vets, for example, and many people who work with and care for animals on a daily basis, on farms, in zoos, or in research, can become very skilful in interpreting the behaviour of particular kinds of animal and understanding how best to treat them when they are in pain, or afraid, or aggressive, or refusing to cooperate. One of the most skilful of these interpreters today is a woman called Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, who is widely sought after in the USA as a consultant on the behaviour particularly of cattle, horses and dogs. You may have heard about her on the radio perhaps, or seen her latest book on the subject, called Animals in Translation, in bookshops.
How did Temple Grandin become an expert on animal behaviour? Largely, she says, because she is autistic. As a child, she felt cut off from other people, had difficulty communicating with them and often reacted in aggressive or highly emotional ways. Fortunately, her education and medical care helped her to overcome these problems and to understand her own autism and how it makes her different from what she calls 'normal people'. Differences in the way their brains work, mean that autistic people experience the world differently. The world comes rushing at them, as it were, as lots and lots of detailed and specific pictures, sights and sounds, which at times threaten to overwhelm them. Unlike 'normal people' who make sense of their experiences by converting them into words, abstractions, theories, or stories about the world, autistic people find it difficult to see the wood for the trees. So they have to try to find their own ways of making sense of their experiences, not always successfully. But sometimes, because autistic people are often of above average intelligence, they manage brilliantly. Some autistic people, for example, can work out the most complicated mathematical calculations in their heads, without ever being taught to.
How Grandin became an expert in animal behaviour, she says, also came from her childhood love of horses. Gradually it dawned on her that many of the ways in which animals saw the world were similar to her own autistic ways. 'Normal people', who see the wood rather than the trees, did not see the specific 'tree' that was causing an animal's aberrant or troublesome behaviour. But Grandin, using her own autistic experience to try to see the world through the animal's eyes, was often able to pinpoint the particular sight or sound in the animal's environment, or the specific aspect of how they were treated, that was unsettling them and causing the problem; and as her experience and scientific education grew, she became increasingly good at doing this. 'Normal people', Grandin says, often see the wood, but fail to see significant trees. An example she gives of this is a famous psychological experiment in which 'normal people' are shown a videotape of a basketball game and asked to count how many times the players scored. When the videotape is running for a time and the viewers are busy counting, 'a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the screen, stops, turns, faces the camera, and beats her fists on her chest'. But the strange thing is that half of all the normal people who are shown this video actually 'don't see the gorilla'. Even when they are asked afterwards if they noticed it, they say they didn't.
What Grandin is drawing to our attention here is not only some interesting information about autistic and animal thinking. The point she is making is that 'normal people' - that is, most of us - often can only make sense of the world by ignoring or 'editing out' what is actually staring us in the face. This may be because, like the people in the gorilla experiment, we are concentrating on an immediate task which demands all our attention. But it is also because if we really saw the world as it is, in all its specific and sometimes alarming details, we might be overwhelmed by it, as some autistic people are.
To make life bearable, to function as 'normal people', we often 'edit out' of our awareness many aspects of the real world which it would disturb or distress us to have to think about. Often it is only when we are forced to think about them - when a tragedy occurs in our own family for example, or when the scale of tragedies elsewhere becomes too great to ignore, as in last year's tsunami or the hurricane in New Orleans - often it is only then that we really begin to understand how fragile and fleeting is what we think of as 'the normal life of normal people'. And even then, to prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by that thought, and because life must go on, we all too soon begin to forget what has happened, and resume 'the normal life of normal people', as if that really were normal.
Now this, I think, is related to what we heard in our two Scripture readings this morning. In his great diatribe to the people of Jerusalem, who say 'no evil will come upon us, nor shall we see sword or famine', the prophet Jeremiah warns his countrymen against assuming that they are safe and secure in what they think of as 'the normal life of normal people'. And a similar assumption is questioned by Jesus in his exchange with the Sadducees in this morning's gospel reading. The Sadducees, who did not believe in a resurrection, try to ridicule the idea by suggesting that a woman who had married seven brothers each in succession after the last one's death, which was lawful, in the resurrection would have seven husbands, which was unlawful. In his reply, Jesus tells the Sadducees that they have got it all wrong: they are assuming that if there is a resurrection, it must be some kind of continuation of 'the normal life of normal people' as they knew it, and so something they can decide to believe in or not by the yardstick of their own everyday experience. But the resurrection is nothing of that kind: it is beyond the horizon of ordinary human understanding; and apart from saying that there is no marriage in heaven, Jesus does not even attempt to explain it.
Part of what Jesus is saying here is that reality is much greater than our minds can ever take in. If we attempt to make sense of reality by the yardstick of our own everyday experience and understanding, at best we come up with only a very partial picture of reality, from which many inconvenient details have been 'edited out' for the picture to make any sense to us at all. This insight challenges both those religious authorities who claim to tell us the mind of God on many matters, and those secular spokesmen who claim there is no God: each has 'edited out' important aspects of reality in their attempt to understand it by the yardstick of their own experience and understanding. Over against such attempts to reduce reality to what our understanding can cope with, Jesus asks us to open ourselves up to the reality beyond our understanding; and where our knowledge ends, to go into the dark trusting God, whose ways are not our ways, but whose name, Jesus assures us, is Love.
In her fascinating book, which I discussed earlier, Temple Grandin repeatedly argues that what most effectively prevents us from understanding how animals think and communicate is our ingrained prejudice that they don't have language or self-awareness. We should be prepared, she says, to give animals more of the benefit of the doubt, and above all to listen to what they are saying, which we begin to understand only when we try to see the world and ourselves through their eyes. Perhaps what Grandin says about animals is also a parable about God. Like so many of his creatures, God does not communicate with us in a human language we readily understand. But by patient listening, through prayer and practice, and by responding not just with our lips but with our lives to the two great commandments of Jesus, to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves, we are sometimes privileged to hear and share the assurance given us by the Word made flesh: "Love is my meaning."
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