I’ve gotten addicted to the television show “Breaking Bad” over the last few months, watching old episodes back to back on Netflix. At one part in Season 3, Gus, a civilized methamphetamine dealer, surveys the carnage left in the wake of a cartel beheading, wrinkles his nose, and says: “animals.”
Gus’s line of thinking – that there’s a gap between an enlightened human mind and a brutish animal one – probably goes back as far as the Stone Age, but it really took hold in the last 2,000 years. As author Robert Bly once pointed out, Descartes didn’t mean to disrespect his dogs when he wrote “I think, therefore I am” in 1619, but this idea summed up what was to become conventional wisdom: that consciousness is uniquely human and involves reason; that animals are to be watched, pitied, and taken care of if they behave.
The idea has had such staying power because there’s an element of truth to it: humans do have unique cognitive abilities when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the closer you look, the smaller the gap gets.
One of the ways we fancy ourselves uniquely human is in our capacity for compassion. And yet there are certainly equivalent behaviors in the animal kingdom. I heard Ben Kilham speak recently –he’s a wildlife rehabilitator who raises orphan bear cubs in New Hampshire – and he told of watching a grandmother bear help an overwhelmed mother bear raise a cub. Elephant funerals were the focus of a recent National Geographic piece, but you don’t need to go to Africa to see this. Crows, famously, mourn their dead. I could make an anecdotal case that coyotes do, too.
Sometimes animal behavior is evoked as the ideal, and humans are slagged off for straying too far from it. We name our sports teams after animals (The Lions,as opposed to The Stockbrokers) as a way of evoking animal strength and power. We go the gym to build our muscles or tone our hindquarters to live up to a carnal, animal ideal. We judge the fifth grader who still asks his mother to tie his shoe, seeing the whole exchange as a sign that someday the human race will become too coddled to survive.
But the truth is that animal societies aren’t dictated by strength, either. As the big, strong, loud peepers sing their fool heads off in a vernal pool, there are smaller, weaker males on the fringes waiting to mate with females who are drawn in by the stronger frogs’ song.The most successful animal species are usually not the apex hunter types but the resourceful carrion eaters, which is to say that the helpless fifth grader will probably be fine. He’ll grow up to invent the next generation of Velcro shoes and make enough money to eat out every meal.
Think about all this long enough and you’ll start to get really self-conscious – maybe the gap between the enlightened human mind and the brutish animal one is not that vast. At the very least you may look at your dog a little differently. In Breaking Bad, Gus looked down at a headless body, wrinkled his nose and says: “animals.” Then a few episodes later we saw him slit someone’s throat with a boxcutter.
As the poet Iron Mike Tyson said recently, channeling Mark Twain: “We’re all animals trying to be people.” Something to think about Sunday on your way to church.
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