Ipseom

Archive for January, 2010

The conventional assumption of our culture is still that animals do not have any of the higher feelings of which we are capable, such as compassion and love and reverence for life. It can be difficult for us to see how tainted we might be by the culturally sanctioned misunderstanding that animals are only mechanical bundles of instincts and reflexes, with no hearts or souls. Few of us have had the opportunity to learn to respect them for what they are—creatures of marvelous complexity, beauty, and mystery.
The idea of animals as machines without feeling has held sway in the collective psyche for so long that it has acquired a momentum of its own. We have gotten stuck in a very deep mental rut, a habit, from which it is not easy to uproot ourselves.
And habit, as Laurence Peter put it, is often “simply the easiest way to be wrong again.”
We have seen this mental habit given credence by the church and philosophical expression through thinkers such as Descartes. To him, the body and soul were completely separate; thinking and feeling were attributes of the soul, not the body; and the body itself was simply a machine.” Since animals could not speak, it followed for Descartes that they had no soul, and so could not feel. According to Descartes’ point of view, which still permeates the psychic atmosphere of our times, all the non-human animals, from the ants up to what he called the “ape-machines,” have no capacity for ideas, freedom of action, choice, knowledge of any kind, or feeling. They are merely robots, driven by instincts. He likened animals to watches and clocks, with wheels, springs, gears and weights. Marvelously contrived though they might be, they are, said Descartes, “mere automatons.””
Descartes would sometimes kick his dog, lust to “hear the machine creak.”

All animals—including those we have been taught to fear—can respond to love and give it. Nowhere has this been proven more profoundly than by Ralph Heifer and his wife Toni, two of Hollywood’s foremost wild animal trainers. Heifer operates an animal park and training center in Buena Vista, California, where he handles and trains the fiercest of animals. Conventional wisdom has it that training these wild animals for show business requires instilling fear in the creatures, and breaking their wills. But Heifer is successfiui with a radically different approach. He says the idea first came to him in a hospital bed:
“Violence begets violence; I mused, as I lay in my hospital bed 25 years ago after being mauled by a 500-pound lion The big cat had been ‘fear-trained,’ with whips, chairs, and screams, as animals in captivity traditionally arc and though he performed his tricks well enough, he had no love for humans. Just as a battered grows up to be a child abuser, a battered animal awaits its chance to do unto others as has been done unto him. I had been done unto royally by that lion, and I had plenty of time during a long convalescence to figure out why. That lion had attacked me, as so many other animals have attacked humans over the centuries, not because he was ‘wild,’ but because he was unloved. Your dog or cat is no dWerent, nor is your horse or fish or pig or bird.
“The idea of affection-training was born in that hospital bed Animals respond to their lives emotionally, I reasoned. If an animal could be trained by addressing its negative emotions (with threats and punishment,), he could probably also be trained by appealing to his positive emotions. Surely the results would be even better with love than with pain, for the animal would be motivated to cooperate. Where pain might get the horse to water, love could induce him to drink.
“Since that time, Pve proved my theory with almost every animal known to man. I’ve traveled from the jungles of Africa to the forests of India, working with everything from hippopotami to tarantulas.
When I first heard of training wild animals through affection, I was skeptical. But Helfer’s success record, “with everything from hippopotami to tarantulas,” is hard to discount. His animals have been used in many television shows, movies, and commercials. There is one thing, however, that affection-training cannot accomplish.
There are some circus “tricks” which animals can be forced to perform through threats and fear, but which they cannot be coaxed to perform though positive means. The reason for this is simple: the tricks we see in circus rings are often in violation of the anatomical structure and deepest instincts of the animals. Horses dancing on their hind feet, bears roller-skating, dogs walking on their back legs and pushing prams, cats firing off cannons, tigers jumping through burning hoops. These are displays, not of the magnificent natural capacities of the animals, but of their degrading obedience to the dominance of their trainers, a dominance achieved in the ugliest of ways. The quickest and least expensive method of breaking the spirits of the animals held prisoner by the circus trainers is by using whips, electric shocks, sharp hooks, loud noises, and starvation. The training is done in seclusion, and if local SPCA’s get too nosey about what is being done to the animals to force their compliance, the animals are moved to foreign countries where there are no restrictions on animal treatment.
One elephant, trained to dance and to play “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” on the harmonica, was described recently as being probably the meanest elephant in the United States. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had good reason.

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