Shark as “other.”

Why is the shark, and especially the great white shark, so relentlessly “other,” more other than perhaps any other animal? There is nothing cute and cuddly about sharks, true. On the other hand, most humans throughout history have not been cute and cuddly (only their young are). In fact if you think about it, it is the very young, the newborn, the 8 week old pups, of just about any species, our own included, that occasion the oohs and aahs, and the endearments and the desire to pick up and kiss and hold and fondle. Adults may inspire respect, awe, curiosity, but rarely do we see a full-grown wild animal we wish to pick up or lie down next to. And even baby sharks look like adults; indeed they have the size and the teeth that go with maturity even when they are newly born.

Sharks kill far fewer people than do hippos or elephants; yet our fear of the former is by an order of magnitude greater than our fear of the latter. So what makes an animal “other?” Obviously one thing is their desire to do us harm. Even if it is accidental, when an animal can do us serious damage, we tend to be wary of them. And yet there is the elephant. When aroused they can and often do stomp a human into the ground. Sometimes we ask for it (by hunting them) and sometimes we just happen to be there where we shouldn’t. But we don’t take it quite so personally as we do with sharks. Perhaps we feel that if push came to shove, we could reason with an elephant. We could make her see that we mean no harm and have intruded where we should not be by mistake. We might not expect a gracious apology, but we feel, rightly or wrongly, that we could convince an elephant of our innocence. Not so a great white. Yes, they may have bitten into you by mistake. But do they care? Nah. Can you hope for any kind of understanding on the part of a great white shark? Not many would believe such a thing possible (I include myself here). So it may be prejudice, it may be deep-rooted, it may be due to ignorance or lack of experience, but when most of us see a fin heading toward us in the ocean, we feel primeval, primitive dread.

Nabokov, Freud, and Lolita

I am no Nabokov scholar, but I have the privilege of knowing Brian Boyd, perhaps the world’s pre-eminent Nabokov pundit. In reading his comments on Lolita in his magisterial book Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, I was struck by his argument, entirely persuasive to me, that Nabokov himself fully understood the damage that Humbert Humbert did to his 12-year-old step-daughter. The book is in many ways profoundly moral; it also, I may note, give us the most complete description of an incestuous relationship in literature until that time (1954).

Before that time, the most profound accounts of the damage that can occur in child sexual abuse belong to two great psychologists, none other than Sigmund Freud, and his favorite disciple, Sandor Ferenczi. Freud had delivered a speech to a group of mocking psychiatrists in Vienna in 1896, called “The Aetiology of Hysteria” in which he caught the very essence of incest. Alas, for whatever reason, Freud seems to have lost the courage of his early years, and changed his mind. Ferenczi took up where the master dared not go, and wrote a beautiful paper in 1932, “Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child.” It doomed his relationship with Freud and just about all other analysts at the time, and Ferenczi died shortly afterward, probably of a broken heart.

Here is the paradox: Nabokov loathed Freud and psychoanalysis. He called him “The quack from Vienna,” and in an interview went so far as to insist, “Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods appears to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others.” The question I think worth further investigation is to what extent Nabokov knew Freud’s writings, and in particular, in writing Lolita, was anything of Freud’s views on child abuse available to him.

Brian Boyd points out in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, that Nabokov’s beloved father had a fine library, and was “one of the leading Russian criminologists of his time. His study of sexual crime was the best thing on the subject in Russian.” Is there any chance that the library contained Freud’s early writings on child sexual abuse or even, say, the 1895 Studies on Hysteria which could not have failed to intrigue Nabokov, both as science and as literature?

Nabokov criticized Freud’s easy use of dream symbolism, understandably, and his equally facile views on puns. I concur. But I find it impossible to believe that he would have mocked Freud’s deep insights into the damage of incest, and it is to both authors’ eternal credit that that they made it apparent to the rest of the world for the foreseeable future, even if in the case of Freud he recoiled from his own most profound views, and in the case of Nabokov, he was widely misunderstood by his audience.

Why I Love Animal Sanctuaries

Sanctuaries like Animal Place in Grass Valley, and Farm Sanctuary in California and New York, do more for advancing the cause of animals than anything else. First they save the lives of the individual animals; then they allow others to see for themselves how each and every animal at a shelter is a unique individual with a history as valuable (to the individual) as our own histories. Rich and famous human animals get to write their autobiographies, or have them written for them. But we all acknowledge that in fact, every human on earth deserves his or her own biography. The same is true for animals.
As Tom Regan so memorably put it: Every animal is the subject of a life. Each and every one is as worthy of a biography as any human. And when you consider that the animals rarely do any harm to any other being, they are probably more deserving than the average human biography.

What most people discover when they visit a sanctuary is that all these animals share most, if not all, human emotions. As I have sat next to these residents, something else occurred to me that is somewhat heretical not to say outrageous, at least to some. This: That in certain respects, some animals may be our emotional superiors. Dogs are more friendly; cats more contented; birds more gregarious; swans more faithful; elephants grieve more deeply, and so on. You can add to the list.

I love it that there are more sanctuaries every year, all over the world, and that more people are visiting them. Some come away with a promise: “I will no longer participate in the suffering of these innocent creatures: from now on, I will eat no animal or, even better, no animal product.”

I am also pleased to see that there are more and more books about sanctuaries, with actual photos of the animals, so if you cannot visit one yourself, you can at least see them as they truly are. There is little doubt that there is a sea-change happening when it comes to farmed animals. The kinds of crude comments about “dumb beasts” that were made just a few years ago are falling out of favor. I am trying to understand why this is so, while at the same time countries like India and China are causing more and more animals to be killed for food so that even as attitudes change, more animals are probably killed right now than at any other time in human history. Will that, or even can that, ever change?
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The Many Forms of Human Violence

For those of you who only follow my blog because of your interest in what I have to say about animals (the vast majority of you), consider for a moment that anything to do with our species is a comment about animals, not just because we too are animals, but because, alas, alas, alas, we, and only we, are the most deadly and most inventively deadly animal on the planet. Until this is widely discussed and researched, it will not be explained, and until it is explained, we cannot expect any kind of solution to present itself. So I am treading here on sacred ground.

Because I am reading (and disagreeing) with Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, I find myself thinking that violence is one of those words that can mean many different things to many different people. You could make a case that violence has declined, if and only if you use a narrow definition of violence. For example, Pinker states that second world war was followed by over 40 years of peace in North America and Europe, and that “Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries,” (This tone is, by the way, typical of the whole book, smug, self-congratulating, and faintly racist).

But unlike Pinker, I am more concerned with the essence of violence, and for me, violence is very broad. I am especially concerned with comparing violence in our species to violence in other species, and the results of the discrepancy have appalled me. Especially when you consider hidden violence, that is, things we don’t usually consider under the topic of violence.

I want to say just a few words about two of these that have recently caught my attention. One is what I will call…actually, you know what? Let me not call it anything, and simply describe it as the violence caused to somebody’s mental state by telling them something completely untrue. The book The Secret is an example, and from an earlier time, so is The Fountainhead and all of Ayn Rand’s works and essays, and the ideas in just about any cult, which are then disseminated to members as the truth, also function in this way. I have written about a rather benign version of this (compared to so many others) in my book My Father’s Guru. There are endless examples. For example, the woman who “when I mentioned how I was struggling to come to terms with my mother’s death, she (the Guru figure) asked why I “chose” to come down to a mother who would die. Some of these fraudulent gurus go so far as to claim that everyone who died on 9/11 “called death into their lives.” This form of blaming the murdered for their own deaths is a form of intellectual violence.

I have long been interested in psychiatric violence, which I define probably more broadly than just about anyone else, because in my view, almost everything psychiatrists do is a form of violence, that is, imposing untrue beliefs on people. (I know you think this is a completely outrageous thing to say. I have tried to argue it more academically in a series of books, beginning with The Assault on Truth, Final Analysis, A Dark Science, and Against therapy).

But for the moment, stop to think of the horror that is lobotomy. I still cannot wrap my mind around the fact that Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize his “discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses, ” to use the exact words of the Nobel Committee when it awarded him the prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1949. Stop to consider how noble it was that a psychiatrist, of all people, wrote the one book categorically opposed to Lobotomies, Peter Breggin, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry – you also have to admire Thomas Szasz another psychiatrist who has gone on record over many years documenting his disgust with this and other “somatic” therapies.

Think of the many tragedies of lobotomies: Tennessee Williams’ older sister, Rose, the sensitive, delicate heroine of The Glass Menagerie and Suddenly Last Summer, was destroyed by such an operation in 1943, which left Tennessee Williams guilty for the rest of his life for not stopping it. Rosemary Kennedy, the brother of president J.F. Kennedy, was forced to have a lobotomy by her father Joseph Kennedy when she was 23, in 1941, and lived for the rest of her life in an institution. Her father never visited her. One wonders whether it is possible that he abused her and wanted her out of the way. Speculation, true, but I know this happens with ECT (the very best book ever written against psychiatry, Janet Gotkin’s Too Much Anger Too Many Tears alleges this very thing.

Perhaps the most shocking case of all is Howard Dully who in 1960 when he was 12 years old (!) was brought in for a lobotomy because his stepmother said he was “unbelievably defiant,” engages in a “good deal of daydreaming,” and “objects to going to bed.” In 2005 he published an extraordinary account: My Lobotomy, which should be required reading of every psychiatrist.

These are just a few examples of what must come under the category of human violence if we truly wish to understand its extent and its causes. We must not be afraid to include whatever can destroy another human being, and we must remain open, and sensitive to the myriad ways that sadism manifests itself in our sad species.

Look around: Do we see anything even remotely resembling this kind of violence among other animals? Does this not cry out for explanation?

I Hate Zoos

Anyone who has followed what I have written about animals over the years will probably guess that I am no fan of zoos. But its more than that: I detest zoos. (Not to confuse  animal sanctuaries like Animal Place or Farm Sanctuary, which are wonderful places, with zoos). I’ve heard all the pro-zoo arguments. They leave me completely cold. The Australian/Indian philanthropist Phil Wollen says the meanest four-letter word in the English language is “cage.” I agree. I don’t care what size they are. An enclosure is a cage is a prison.

Education? Come on: name one fact you learned from a zoo-board in front of a caged animal. If you really want to know something about elephants, there are more than a dozen good books. Should somebody object that it’s not the same as actually seeing a living elephant, I would ask what it is that one see when looking at an elephant in the zoo? What you see is an elephant removed from her country, from her family, from her friends, from her forest and rivers and valleys, only to be constantly reminded that she is in a prison at the mercy of her most loathed predator (basically the only other animal who hunts elephants for fun).

I overheard somebody in front of an elephant enclosure telling the dejected looking animal standing motionless “You are a sorry excuse for an elephant.” You mean, I wanted to tell him, that after she has been traumatized during captured, probably witnessed the murder of members of her family, she should put on an act for your benefit? Pretend she’s happy? Show herself to be adjusted? In a circus, she just might learn to fake it, out of fear. But in a “good” zoo where she is not physically abused, she can revert to her default position: depressed, lonely, miserable and in existential despair. How can anyone go to a zoo and not see that?

I am saddened every time I go to a zoo. I took my sons to the Berlin Zoo recently. We were all horrified and by the time we left we were in a state of depression, not entirely dissimilar to that of the animals. How could anyone find it entertaining or educational watching animals live out their lives in completely artificial surroundings bearing not the slightest resemblance to their true homes?

When we left we were walking down a large avenue with a grass island between the two streets. On the island we noticed dozens of rabbits racing from hole to hole. We watched them, enchanted. Nobody we asked knew how they got there, only that rabbits had lived there for years, completely undisturbed. They had innumerable warrens and were safe from predators (foxes, mainly), living a completely autonomous existence. We saw them lying about lazily relaxing in the sun, undisturbed by the unceasing traffic. I caught the eye of one and he gazed back at me confident in his wild state. He was free. What a contrast with the zoo we had just left behind. I would never visit another zoo in my life, unless I decide to write an entire book about why I dislike them so intently (I would probably call it Against Zoos, similar to my ). I am not sure what purpose it would serve, though. Those who feel the way I do already know why. Those who do not are not likely to be convinced of how wrong they are. Somehow, though, I feel I owe it to the caged animals. Who knows, one person might be moved to close down one zoo, if not now, perhaps some years in the future.

Viktor Frankl and Excusing Evil

Viktor Frankl, a Viennese Jewish psychiatrist, who survived the holocaust to found a school of psychotherapy called “logotherapy” was born in Vienna in 1905, and died in 1997. I was recently alerted by a comment of Thomas Szasz, that Frankl talked about doing lobotomies in the camp, and ECT when he returned to the practice of psychiatry in Vienna after the war. I wondered how somebody who had seen so much suffering could then impose it in the form of these two brain-disabling “therapies” (more like torture in my view). So I decided to re-read his most famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which is about his experiences during the war in various concentration camps. The book was originally published in German (in 1946!) and called then Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, (In Spite of All [that happened] Say Yes to Life: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp.)

Frankl was taken in 1942 to Theresienstadt and was there for two years until he was taken to Auschwitz in 1944, where he spent 5 days, then to Dachau where the Americans liberated him in 1945.

The book is probably the single most read book about the concentration camps (the Book of the Month Club claims it as one of the ten most influential books in America). At the time of the author’s death, it had sold some 10 million copies in 24 languages. Frankl himself was awarded 29 honorary doctorates.

I am not going to use this blog to rant against therapy or psychiatry, much as I would like to. Instead, I want to raise an issue that has been troubling me for some time, and that is how common it seems for some people to claim that we are all the same in our proclivity to evil (or good). It would seem that for some, acts almost don’t matter. I find this appalling. Frankl is guilty of this tendency, in two passages in his book, one that struck me as dead wrong, and the other as horrendous.

Here is the first (considered the essence of the book, and one of his most famous passages):

“It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing.”

Frankl goes on to say that he knew nice guards and awful prisoners and vice versa. What a strange comment. Knowing that a person was a Nazi concentration camp guard tells you nothing about him?? How could anyone believe such a foolish thing? Nobody was forced to be a guard. It was a choice. Even in the Third Reich. Most were sadistic, which is undoubtedly why they chose to be there. The few that were not, well, how do we actually know who they are or even if they were? Very few were reported like this, and mostly at the end of the war, when they sensed they had lost.

But the next passage is far worse, and I don’t think anyone has noticed just how bizarre and awful it truly is:

“Let me cite the case of Dr. J. He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life that I would dare to call a Mephistophelean being, a satanic figure. At that time he was generally called “the mass murderer of Steinhof” (the large mental hospital in Vienna). When the Nazis started their euthanasia program, he held all the strings in his hands and was so fanatic in the job assigned to him that he tried not to let one single psychotic individual escape the gas chamber. After the war, when I came back to Vienna, I asked what had happened to Dr. J. “He had been imprisoned by the Russians in one of the isolations cells at Steinhof,” they told me. “The next day however, the door of his cell stood open and Dr. J. was never seen again.” Later I was convinced that, like others, he had with the help of his comrades made his way to South America. More recently, however, I was consulted by a former Austrian diplomat who had been imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain for many years, first in Siberia and then in the famous Lubianka prison in Moscow. While I was examining him neurologically, he suddenly asked me whether I happened to know Dr. J. After my affirmative reply he continued: “I made his acquaintance in Lubianka. There he died, at about the age of forty, from cancer of the urinary bladder. Before he died, however, he showed himself to be the best comrade you can imagine! He gave consolation to everybody. He lived up to the highest conceivable moral standard. He was the best friend I ever met during my long years in Prison!”

Frankl comments: “This is the story of Dr.J., “the mass murderer of Steinhof.” How can we dare to predict the behavior of man?”

What an extraordinary comment! (We should bear in mind that Frankl was a psychiatrist at this very hospital in 1938). A man who kills 789 children is somehow rehabilitated in Frankl’s mind (? I think that is his point), because an Austrian diplomat, also in prison in Russia at the same time (I would imagine because of his Nazi past), tells him that he was a good man (good Nazi?), and Frankl takes this as fact, and balances it against the killing of thousands of innocent people! It boggles the mind. (Another fact to bear in mind: Frankl after the war was very eager for reconciliation – so this diplomat may well have been a Nazi, whom Frankl was eager to forgive).

The psychiatrist in question is Erwin Jekelius (1905-1952), who was once engaged to Hitler’s sister, Paula. Why Frankl uses only his initials I do not know. He was responsible for the death of at least 4,000 patients at his hospital, INCLUDING children as young as 4! In 2005 the Russians released statements he made at his interrogation in prison, which includes this extraordinary confession: 1941, “after the arrival of Dr. Gross, we started in our clinic with the destruction of children [...] my assistant Dr. Gross had completed a practical course for the killing of children. Every month we killed 6 to 10 children … Dr. Gross was working under my supervision.”

At this same hearing he admitted to killing “thousands” of patients.

It is fascinating that when this document became available in 2005, the man Jekelius named as his assistant, Heinrich Gross, was one of Vienna’s highest paid forensic physician and “a leading expert in the pathology of mental illness” with an international reputation. He was given Austria’s highest award for services to science and art, the Honorary Cross, first class! Children who were murdered there included those suffering from stutter, harelips, or who had learning problems. Gross was finally put on trial, but died in 2005 before it could commence.

I don’t suppose that any amount of knowledge about what Jekelius did as a psychiatrist would make the slightest difference to Frankl’s judgment. What I find most frightening is that many people must agree with him. I know, though, that I am not alone in feeling dismay at this thought. You might wonder why I am paying so much attention to an old book at this time? It is because too many people at this moment feel we must always be ready to forgive and forget. Neither, is my motto!

Elephants, Trauma and the Ego

By ego, I mean egoism. As in: I own that elephant, she is mine. No, actually, she is not yours, nor does she belong to anyone but herself. So the idea of keeping an animal like that (of course I also believe this applies to any animal) in captivity is a crime against the nature of the elephant, and against nature herself.

When anyone tells you that an animal “loves” to be in captivity, ask them why, then, is it necessary to have fences, cages, closed spaces from which the animal cannot escape to freedom. Dogs and cats are about the only two species, among all the others, domesticated or not, who choose to stay with u

s (dogs because they are nature’s therapists and cats for mysterious reasons that nobody understands). Parrots need to have their bodies mutilated; horses kept locked in, and of course the so-called farm animals are there purely to be exploited.

One exception to all this: sanctuaries. Farm Sanctuary, Animal Place, any of the hundreds of places that take in abused animals, or unwanted animals, or injured animals, or escaped animals, and gives them a permanent home where they need never fear being exploited for their milk, their eggs, their skin, or their meat. Or, as in the case of elephants, their entertainment value (often wrongly stated as “educational value” – which always reminds me of the ridiculous notion that we learned about elephant lives by reading the accounts of the great white hunters).

I am sure that everyone who reads this blog will have seen the video (it went viral) of Bella the dog, with Tarra, the eleph

ant. If you have not seen it, here it is: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4696315n

What I loved about this sanctuary is that it was the opposite of a zoo. Not only did the elephants have woods and streams and ponds and rivers to wander through (more than 2000 acres!), the public was not cordially invited to gape and throw popcorn at the elephants (but observation cameras allowed people to view online the real lives of real elephants). They lived, for animals not in their own environment, as close to a natural life as we can ever expect to see. It was truly an inspiration. The sanctuary was for the elephants, not for us.

The cofounder of this remarkable and wonderful elephant sanctuary in Hohenwald Tennessee is Carol Buckley. From reading what she writes on her blog, and from watching her and from friends who know her well (I have never met her) I feel safe to say she knows an enormous amount about elephants, and how to keep them happy after a life where they suffered anything from beatings to solitary confinement to absolute loneliness. She formed as close a bond with Tarra, as probably any human has ever had, over the 30 years they were together.

Last year they were forcibly separated. From reasons I simply cannot fathom, not only was Carol Buckley removed as the CEO of this sanctuary, but she was forbidden to visit her old friend Tarra. I have no way of judging the merit of the case against her, but whatever it was, it makes no sense to deprive two beings as close as Tarra and Carol, of each other’s company. It is an outrage against both of them, and I find it unforgiveable.

Because Carol was one of the few people who are aware of the depths of animal suffering. The other is her colleague Gay Bradshaw. Gay is the director of the Kerulos Center in Jacksonville Oregon. She has written a book, Elephants on the Edge that has been one of the great reading experiences of my life. (I am re-reading it right now). I will not go into detail on what she found, because you need to read the book for yourself. Or at least read the fine article about her and her research that was the cover story of the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, An Elephant Crackup? by Charles Siebert http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant

Nothing I have read in the last while got me thinking on such a different level as this book did, for it raised the possibility that every time we see animals behaving in an odd fashion, that is, contrary to what we have come to expect, we should bear in mind the possibility that what we are seeing is the result of some trauma inflicted, almost invariably, by humans. So the adolescent male elephants Gay was studying had uncharacteristically raped and killed rhinos in southern Africa. Why? Because, she discovered, they had watched in horror as their mothers were murdered in front of their eyes and grew up in a society without elephant mentors, male and female. So they became bad boys, just like our bad bozys. When I heard about dolphins in San Francisco killing harbor porpoises, Gay wrote to me about how we had degraded their environment, polluted it, poisoned it, and this was the result. It makes perfect sense. Grizzlies, too. The theory has wide and far-reaching implications. It is a deep theory, and I love her for thinking of it. It has having a profound influence on many other animal scientists, all to the good.

While I cannot know what went on inside Elephant Sanctuary, I do know that those traumatized elephants cannot possibly welcome the loss of their closest human companion. It is a tragedy that the people now responsible for the Sanctuary cannot see this and cannot put the elephants before their own interests, whatever they may be. I understand that elephants can be dangerous, and that many zoos do not allow direct contact, even with the caregiver. But we have created this situation, and Carol does her best to remedy it. She was able to interact with the elephants in her sanctuary without fear and without danger, because they knew she meant them no harm. One thing is perfectly clear to me and must have been to them as well; whatever Carol did she always put the elephants first. This is no small feat in our anthropocentric world, and I salute her for it.