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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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?

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.

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!

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.

Do they ever kill us? Yes, about one a year. In 2009 Kelly Ann Walz, 37, of Ross Township Pennsylvania was attacked as she cleaned her “pet” (she also had a Bengal tiger and a lion in her backyard) bear’s cage; Donna Munson, 74, was feeding bears on her property in southwestern Colorado when one ate her instead. These are the only people to have been killed by a bear in 2009.

In that very same year, in the State of California, The Department of Fish and Game reported 1,900 black bears “harvested”. In Virginia, the number was 2204.

Meanwhile, I could find no authenticated account of an adult bear killing another adult bear in 2009. I am not saying it never happens (we are not likely to be there to witness it when it does), but bear researchers agree it is rare.

Also in 2009, 15,241 people were killed by other people in the United States.

What is it with us? We kill each other; we kill bears; yet we call them top predators and act like they’ve been terrorizing us for millennia while in fact all they wish is to be left alone. So again I ask: What is it with us?

People who claim to love bears, and would not dream of killing one, have no problem though in putting them in the prisons we call zoos. And what do we believe we achieve when put a polar bear on display in a zoo, only to drive him mad? I saw this, at the London Zoo – a polar bear pacing back and forth. He looked miserable, defeated, stumped, not comprehending how he had gotten where he was. How could he? People see him there, and think: “He’s fine.” But he’s not.

Do we need proof, the imprimatur from Nature? We have it: Georgia Mason and Ross Clubb from Oxford University pointed out that in a zoo a polar bear is confined to a single one-millionth her natural range’s size. What I saw then makes sense. It also explains the strange behavior of Gus, a polar bear living in the Central Park Zoo in 1994 who incessantly swam in figure eights in his pool. Mason and Clubb conclude: “Our results show, to our knowledge for the first time, that a particular lifestyle in the wild confers vulnerability to welfare problems in captivity.” In plain English, polar bears don’t belong in zoos! (Does any animal?)

But what most people want to learn about bears is how dangerous they are.
Damn, what was that again? Play dead with a grizzly; fight a black bear (they’re just bluffing, right?)? Or the other way round? Do I run (no!) or try to look big and menacing (yes). Hence the popularity of a marvelous book: Stephen Herrero’s Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. Don’t run!

We insist on learning whether grizzlies are dangerous. But dangerous to whom? Each other? Us? Other animals? Under what circumstances? Where? When? Consider Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man that recounts the true story of Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell spent twelve years with the grizzlies in Alaska, shooting one hundred hours of extraordinary footage, at close range. His own website (www.grizzlypeople.com – still up and running) warns against getting closer than a hundred yards to a bear, yet he was often right up in their face, even touching their noses with his finger. Bad idea. There is little doubt that he adored the grizzlies he knew. But it is highly unlikely that they adored him in return. This is a difficult idea for humans to swallow. If we love an animal, we expect to be loved in return.
But most animals, in fact, basically all wild animals are at best indifferent to us. That is a harsh word, and harsh judgment but it is true. The reason we cannot take this in easily is that we are accustomed to our domesticated cats and dogs, and other “pets” who do, in fact adore us in return. Dogs actually love us more than we love them, the only such instance in nature. So we falsely project dog love onto other animals. Treadwell spoke to the grizzlies exactly as we speak to our dogs. But the grizzlies were not jumping for joy. It was more like “what the fuck is he on about?” Sure enough, in 2003, just minutes after filming, Treadwell and his girlfriend (who did not want to be there) were attacked and killed by a male grizzly. Nick Jans, in his excellent book on this case, makes the point that the bears “couldn’t care less about human trust or physical affection. They’re too busy being themselves and are at best indifferent to our existence unless we insinuate ourselves into their lives.” It’s a hard lesson for any of us to learn that most animals simply want to be left alone.

In fact, though, almost no society in the past where bears come into contact with humans ignores bears. We have very strong views about them. Why? Perhaps it is because bears resemble us in many ways. As a recent article put it: “The bear is a large and dangerous carnivore. However, fear alone does not account for the rich and varied traditions linking bears and humans. Not infrequently, people have felt a kind of kinship with bears, for humans and bears share many characteristics. They live in the same regions and eat the same fish, roots, and berries. Unlike other animals, bears can stand on their hind legs as humans do and they can use their fore paws as humans use their hands. A bear’s skinned body looks human, and several bear bones resemble human bones, which lends credence to the view that the animal is really a man in disguise.” To the Native Americans, for example the Lakota, Black- foot, and Shoshone, bears occupied a special position because of these similarities. The Cherokee, Crow, Yavapi and other Native Americans thought bears and humans could be transformed into one another.

While bears resemble humans in some ways, in others they are like Über humans. Polar bears, for example, are very large. In fact, polar bears are the largest land meat-eater, three or four times bigger than a big tiger. An adult male can be nearly ten feet tall, and weigh more than fifteen hundred pounds. Slow, though, right? Alas, their top speed running on all fours has been reported to be around 40 mph currently. Usain Bolt, the fastest man on earth has a peak speed of 27 mph. You will not outrun the bear.

You don’t want to tangle with a bear like that. In a balanced world, the two species would hardly come into contact. But since humans have created climate change, the bears are not finding as much food as they need. So they come into towns, like Churchill, Manitoba in the Hudson Bay, Canada, known as the Polar Bear Capital of the World. One thousand residents, one thousand polar bears.

The town has what they call the “bear police” to protect tourists and residents. They catch bears wandering into town and put them in a ‘polar bear jail’ until the ice freezes, at which point the bear police fly them by helicopter and drop them onto the ice so that the bears can hunt and find food on their own. If there are problems with bears, we are the ones who have created these problems.

One often reads that Polar bears are one of the only animal species known in rare cases to hunt humans, especially when undernourished, frightened or provoked.
However, Tony Smith, a polar bear expert at Brigham Young University noted that if bears stalk and hunt humans, “they’re doing a pretty poor job of it.” In the 125 years prior 2008 he noted, polar bears had killed just eight people in Canada and two in Alaska.

So if bears kill humans only infrequently (on average in North America, eleven people are injured by bears and one person killed per year), how common is it for bears to kill other bears? Well, they are pretty much solitary creatures, like most of the big cats. Just as are the big cats, bears are extremely well endowed with lethal equipment in their claws and jaws. Given that both the big cats and the big bears are of uneven temperament, and can get into a bad mood faster than you can say “lets get out of here now,” it is not surprising that they tend to avoid one another. Bears rarely fight each, probably because the likelihood of mutual injury is so great. They’re not stupid. Encounters between ill-tempered bears could result in death. But in fact, “bear-bear confrontations rarely result in injury on account of a highly developed hierarchy of social interaction. Bears may turn to present their profile or stand on their hind legs in order to appear larger and more intimidating.
They hiss, they pop their jaws, they yawn, and they swing their head.” If you did not recognize these as warning signals you better learn them now. Actually, humans do not understand these signals, and bears will often charge. They normally stop short of actual contact. They just want to show who’s boss. Now we know: they are.

Some of these comments are just plain weird. “Animals eat our houses.” Really? What kind of animal? What kind of house? Does he mean termites? I have yet to meet somebody who was so upset by the killing of termites that she went vegan. They eat our children? Is he referring to tigers in India? It does happen, but what has that to do with eating meat? And what is he referring to when he talks about animals killing each other? Lions and gazelles, perhaps? Wolves and moose? Yes, that is part of their diet. Always has been. “Each other” is an odd way to phrase it. Humans certainly kill each other, but not because “others” are part of our diet. We are the ones almost entirely responsible for creating endangered species in the first place, not other animal predators. The cliché that medicine would be frozen in its current state without animal experimentation is very much an outdated view, when more and more scientists recognize the value of replacing animals in research with computer graphics or Petri dishes. Mice are hardly any longer the heroes of experimental medicine. Had he said “for the sake of chimpanzees, dogs, and cats” he could not rely on any reader’s sympathy. As for his final question, the reason he and most compassionate people object to a hunter shooting a moose is that most hunters shoot moose for fun, not for food (if a subsistence hunter kills an animal, most people would in fact not object to the image). No grizzly bear has ever, or ever could, choose to be a vegetarian (by the way, bears do not “hunt” moose – they may feed on a carcass, but they do not seek them out). In fact, we are the only species that can make such a choice. But choose we can. Bears cannot. So all in all, considering that this passage is key to his thesis, it does not withstand scrutiny of even the most superficial kind. Read it to a friend, and see the astonished looks.

Pinker gave a TED talk just before his book was published, and this is what he says in the very first paragraph:

“In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, ‘the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.’ Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.”

This is obtuse. Because it is simply not true that such sadism is unthinkable in most of the world. All you have to do is keep abreast of the news. Never mind humans (I take that for a given), but since Pinker has chosen to talk about cats, i.e., animals, just think of what happened YESTERDAY in Australia: the Government has banned live-export of cattle because an animal rights group bravely found their way into the slaughterhouses of Indonesia, and filmed what goes on there. I read accounts, and declined to watch the actual video footage, but let me tell you, it makes Pinker’s description of cat-burning sound like kindergarten play. The last animal in line was “quivering with terror” at what she had seen happen to her companions. This is not some barbarous practice in one bad slaughterhouse. It is routine. I have seen videos of pigs, cows, chickens, and sheep and all suffer the same exquisite horrifying torture. Dogs? Think Michael Vick. Cats? Go to the website of the Korean and Vietnamese animal rights groups to see or read about the horrors inflicted on them NOW, not in sixteenth-century Paris.

I wanted to point out how badly argued these passages are, because it should alert us to the rest of the book’s implausibility. I have not read it all yet, but as I read, I am struck over and over by how skewed the data is. In a book which argues that violence is decreasing all over the world, there is no mention of Srebrenica, the Rwanda genocide, Pinochet in Chile, the Junta in Argentina (or Brazil or Greece), no entry under colonialism, no former Yugoslavia, no Haiti, no Dominican Republic, no Mugabe and only one mention of Mussolini, two of apartheid, and three of Pol Pot. This is a book about violence!

Pinker even manages to make it sound as if the whole of the Second World War was the fault of one man, and that a delusional Hitler reluctantly dragged the German population into war and genocide:

“Even in Nazi Germany, where anti-Semitism had been entrenched for centuries, there is no indication that anyone but Hitler and a few fanatical henchmen thought it was a good idea for the Jews to be exterminated. When a genocide is carried out, only a fraction of the population, usually a police force, military unit, or militia actually commits the murders.”

I am not the first to notice this bizarre passage (a fine article in The New Yorker mentions it as well). It goes contrary to everything I know about The Third Reich. Unless of course you insist on parsing the words very literally: Yes, it could be argued that people who were indifferent to the fate of the Jews did not think it was necessarily a good idea for them to be exterminated, merely eliminated. But as Goldhagen has successfully argued, it took a lot of people to carry out the extermination of 6 million Jews. Many thousands or even hundreds of thousands who were directly involved, and hundreds of thousands more who were indirectly involved, and then the vast majority of the population who simply did not care. Ian Kershaw ends his magisterial two-volume biography of Hitler with these words: “The vast majority of Germans had no more than minimal interest in the fate of the Jews.” If this “bystander” effect is not a part of the indictment of our species, I don’t know what is.

Why, then, is he garnering so much positive attention? Well, that is a deep question, having to do with the human propensity for denial, and it is something I intend to deal with in a book, not a blog.

Then two days ago, while in LA with my friend Jeff Nelson, I ran into an old acquaintance, Lorin Lindner, a Ph.D. psychologist who many years ago started a parrot sanctuary (www.parrotcare.org) still thriving on 20 acres of garden on the grounds of the VA Hospital in West Los Angeles where returning veterans get to work with therapists with feathers. She told me that she and her husband Matthew now run a wolf sanctuary, in Lockwood, in the hills about an hour north of Los Angeles, off Highway 5, called Lockwood Animal Rescue Center. Manu, 10, and Ilan, 15 were immediately alert: “Dad, please can we go?” So on our way back to Berkeley for a day (before returning to Auckland), we stopped off at the sanctuary. We only had a few hours, but I have to say it was among the most amazing two hours I have ever spent, and my family would concur. As soon as we got out of the car six dogs surrounded us, and without further ado we were ushered into the wolf enclosure (acres of ground) where Manu was immediately the object of affectionate attention. There were wolves licking his face, others rubbing against him like cats, others wanting to play. Ilan and Manu were transported into wolf heaven.

Before I could register a single objection, or even attempt to give voice to my (false) views on how dangerous wolves could be, Lorin and Mathew and the two boys were playing and laughing and running around with wolves of all kinds. “Low content wolves” (the new PC term I learned from Lorin), medium content wolves, high content wolves, and pure wolves, were all as playful, as friendly, as eager to please as any dog I have ever known. We walked over the house, and there, on the balcony, were another 8 wolves. They had two acres to play in, but they were all eagerly awaiting us, tails wagging, chuffing with delighted anticipation. They wanted to be around humans! And these were all wolves who had been rescued. One had even been shot by a human, but found it in her heart to forgive. Others had been abandoned, or had become too wild to keep. But with the love that Lorin gives them constantly, they have become completely reliable animals who would never dream of hurting a human who comes to them with love.

Matthew, or as Ilan calls him, Mr. Macho (he built a fence in an afternoon when Lorin requested it), himself a Desert Storm vet, works with combat veterans suffering from PTSD in a program called “Warriors and Wolves.” They are introduced to the wolves and wolfdogs, and the results have been nothing short of miraculous. I urge you to read for yourself (lockwoodarc.org; or call directly 661.245.3111 or you could email her at wolf@lockwoodarc.org) and better yet, make the trip there, and plan to spend some hours with the wolves. I can promise you it will be an experience you will not forget.

Howard Garrett who runs a modern Orca website, notes:
“Such hostile interactions have never been recorded in free-ranging orcas, which is truly a remarkable statistic. Zero times have wild orcas attacked a human (though undocumented anecdotes of incidents have circulated, even they are so extremely rare and inconsequential that such stories are insignificant). Even when orcas were being captured, when divers and handlers were in the water or in small boats among the orcas during capture operations, as the mothers were being poked and driven away with sharpened poles while their young offspring were being wrapped in nets and forced into slings, never did the mothers or calves or any of the accompanying whales, male or female, strike out with even the slightest shove or swing of a fluke. This exemplary restraint is the norm among all the many diverse communities of orcas worldwide, whether they specialize in foraging for fish or hunting and killing 8,000-pound sea lions. I can’t explain this reticence even to defend themselves when threatened or attacked by humans, but the record stands: Orcas in natural habitats do not harm humans.”

In many ways, orcas resemble humans: they protect and care for injured and sick individuals. Females are sexually mature around puberty, between 10 and 18. They live about as long as do humans. They are, like us, apex predators, that is, they have no natural enemies. Next to humans, they are the most widely distributed of all mammals, found in every ocean of the world. Each pod (similar to a human tribe) has its own distinct dialect. Young calves nurse for at least a year, and possibly longer.

For no other animal species except the human, can we speak with such authority of the culture of different groups of orcas: “The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties.” Rendell, L and Whitehead, H (2001) “Culture in whales and dolphins.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(2): 309-382.
Orcas are the largest members of the dolphin family. They are found in all oceans of the world. They are impressive animals to see: the males are as large as 32 feet and can weigh up to 18,000 pounds. On average an orca eats 500 pounds a day.

Lyall Watson, the South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and director of the Johannesburg Zoo, held degrees in geology, chemistry, marine biology and several other disciplines, including a Ph.D. in ethology from the University of London. He died in 2008 at the age of 67.
Watson was in the middle of his career as a writer of more than 24 books. One of his first, published in 1973, was his most popular, Supernature. It was about bizarre, and mostly unexplained phenomena in nature. It raised hackles by claiming things that we will probably never know, for example that plants know when a snail has died. Two decades later he wrote a book called Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil. That is also the topic of my next book, and in this context I found it fascinating that he should tell the following story (which I retell in my own words) about an orca. . He was in the south of Argentina, in Patagonia, on the Valdes Peninsula famous for orcas who beach themselves in order to hunt penguins and seals and other animals on the shore. Only a few orcas know how to do this successfully and have mastered the art. Others get stranded and die. Sometimes they take the baby seals alive, and bring them to their pod, to give to their young to eat.
What Lyall Watson saw defies belief, or at least explanation. He saw a mature orca capture a baby seal, and carry it around in her mouth for some time. Watson saw the look of sheer terror on the little baby’s expressive face (you have seen seals and how cut they look to us). He could hardly bear to look at what was sure to come next. But it did not come. The orca stopped and seemed to consider. She looked at her prey, and suddenly she made a decision: she raced for shore at great speed, then as she approached she gently placed the baby seal high onto the beach, and turned and swam back out to sea. There could be no question that this was deliberate. It was as if the orca was as taken with the unbearable cuteness and the unbearable fate of the little seal, and decided, this once at least, to save his life by releasing him back onto land. Was this really what it appeared to be, Watson asked himself? Could it be that the orca spared the life of the other, intentionally? There seemed to be no other explanation. Watson had never seen this before, and it’s not like orcas ever get too full and leave some of their meal behind. This seemed deliberate to Watson. He was there and he felt certain of it.
Before we explore what could motivate such behavior, we have to ask the prior question of just how much credence we can give to this observation by Lyall Watson. It is, after all, only an anecdote in his book.

Researching this, there was little I could do to verify it by speaking with Watson, since he was dead. But I did the next best thing: I spoke with Roger Payne, a deeply respected and much admired whale researcher. I asked him what he thought. He said that he knew a far more reliable whale watcher, who had also claimed to have seen the same empathic behavior, and he found him an unimpeachable source. I was to call him, for he may well have kept a video of the event. Unfortunately he too had died.
Yet, I’m inclined to believe the story. And this is what I think: The orca was going to lunch, and baby seal was on the menu. Before you say “yuk” stop and consider a typical lunch menu at any of our upscale restaurants in the Western world: Lamb, veal, chicken, and duck. So why not a baby seal? And how old do we think the lamb or the veal or the chicken or duck is? Weeks? A few months? When their natural life span could well be many many years.
But can orcas really be sentimental about their food and survive? Sentimental? It’s an odd word to use about a seal-hunting animal. After all, the orca is also known as the killer whale – an animal that no other animal in the ocean is able to escape should he decide to eat them. Well, maybe not. Orcas do have enormous brains. Not only are they big, four times the size of a human brain, but they are also highly convoluted with many folds especially in the frontal cortex, indicating that they are, in many respects much like us, and probably have brains as complex as our own. They use them to negotiate the highly intricate social relations orcas engage in for life. Recently it was discovered that orcas (and some other dolphins and whales) have spindle cells, previously only seen in humans and some great apes, cells that code for deeper emotions and social bonds. Orcas stay with the same pod for life, a matriarch leading the entire pod. She may well live for up to 90 years.
So what was it about this particular orca (or was it that particular baby seal??) that made such a choice possible, when all around her other orcas were going about their lunch in the usual fashion? Did she draw attention to herself and her eccentric behavior? It would be like sitting down in San Francisco at noon, watching all around you as the office workers unwrap their chicken sandwich and begin to eat. And then have one person suddenly stop, look at the chicken in the chicken sandwich and up pops an image in his head: chickens on grass. He looks around. None of the others have stopped eating. But he has. The difference is of course that we humans can afford to make the choice. We don’t starve or suffer if we choose to be vegetarians or vegans. Orcas, and all other animals, have no such choice.
From time to time an orca might get sentimental (in the best sense of the word), or just hesitant, or suddenly she might feel empathy for her meal. She might say to herself: “Not this time. Not for me.” But only rarely, if at all, for otherwise he would starve. “Let’s not get sentimental about food,” says his mother. Eat, or else. “Iss mein Kind,” as my Jewish grandmother always told me in Yiddish, especially when I blanched at eating an animal.
In fact, when you think about it, is it so different for us, when we look at the history of our species? Until recently, hardly. Throughout most of our history, we all ate what everyone else ate. I have asked New Zealand Maori elders in their eighties whether they had ever heard of anyone in earlier times, when they were little, refusing to eat meat. No, such a thing had never happened. I am not sure when the first vegetarians appeared on earth, but surely not before the early Upanishads in India, from around 800 BC.
And thus the reason this behavior by a wild orca is remarkable is that no wild animal species ever displays compassion over what they eat. That includes us humans for nearly our entire natural history. In fact, if you search online, you can see plenty of video scenes of orcas tearing out the tongue of young whales while the poor animals slowly bleed to death. The orcas have the brainpower to recognize the suffering they cause. They seem to have tremendous emotional depth for the suffering of other orcas. So I am sure they could understand what they are doing as well as we can when we slaughter baby lambs.
The fact is, if some particular orcas didn’t feel much like killing they would starve, and those particular genes would not be preserved. Orcas who felt bad all the time about killing seals would soon die out and their genes would no longer be carried by any other orcas. And orcas are apex predators, that is, they have nothing to fear in their environment, the ocean. It is their domain. Remember, they can be 20 feet long and weigh up to 20,000 pounds.
If being on top of the food chain sounds familiar, it might be because you’re thinking about humans in our habitat here on solid ground. We also have little to fear in the animals around us, even if we as a species did not start out that way.
But it must also be said that animals that orcas do not eat have nothing to fear from them. And it is here that orcas really begin to differ from us: Whether or not an orca might hesitate for a moment to inflict panic, pain, suffering and death on a species it sees as food, one thing is certain: Orcas don’t hunt of the hell of it. Not even to hone their skills. And most astonishing of all, they don’t kill one another.
As far as anyone knows, no free-ranging orca has ever killed another orca. Not one. Not once. Never. When thinking about modern human history, this fact stands out as remarkable. It took me a while to establish the veracity of this altogether remarkable fact. Indeed researchers were at first puzzled by my question, although none could think of an exception. Slowly the implications began to sink in. It is one thing to realize that no wild orca has ever killed a human (remarkable in itself, given our slaughter of whales), it is quite another to think they never kill one another. There is no known rape among orcas. No torture. No murder. No war. No genocide.
These are killer whales, indeed, let us not kid ourselves. But they are not the killers we are, or should I say the killers we as a species have become.
“All men would be tyrants if they could,” said Daniel Defoe. Yet no orca, as far as anyone knows, has ever tyrannized another orca in nature.

Kind of obvious, right? Yet, think about how cautious we are when we attempt anything to do with the Sunnis and Shiites, with Catholics and Jews, with Bosnians and Serbs, with Hutu and Tutsi; indeed, we can barely hold a party with doctors and electricians (unless you live in Australia and New Zealand where egalitarianism is alive and kicking). We think we are tribal. We believe in rank. We think familiarity breeds contempt, rather than harmony.

And we often add: This is part of our “animal” heritage, our tie to the jungle. It is “natural” we believe, for like to like like and to dislike unalike.

But every human experiment and every animal experiment that attempts to familiarize the unalike with one another ends in success, not the failure we would expect if it was “their nature” or “our nature,” to keep to ourselves, to distrust “the other” or simply others. Young children who go to school with other children from different cultures, or who are of a different color, or speak a different language, form friendships and close ties that seem to have nothing to do with what adults regard as basic differences. Once familiar, the children fail to see them.

I found the same when I conducted my own small and rather benign experiment of raising these five different species together in our house on the beach. I even wrote a book about it called Raising the Peaceable Kingdom, and I see in re-reading the book that maybe I had in some way intended that book to be this book: I have a chapter in which I briefly examine the ugly history of the 20th century in human terms, examining with some dismay the dismal figure of 200 million members of our own species murdered by other members of our own species.

I contrasted this with a photo of my cat with one foot over the neck of the rabbit, both sleeping peacefully on our sofa. Another showed our older Bengal cat, who was not part of the experiment, nonetheless eating out of the same can as Rani the Rat. Hohepa (Maori for Joseph) the Flemish giant rabbit had to be sent to a remote country home because he had learned to trust all dogs, and would run up to them eager to play just as he was accustomed to doing with Mika. We knew that tragedy was in wait if we allowed his naïve friendliness to prevail. Strange dogs walking the beach were not part of our experiment and we could not expect them to conquer their chase instincts, which often lead to heart attacks from rabbits.

The same thing happened to the chickens: not only were they absolutely insistent on being part of the family, tapping angrily on the window when we shooed them outside, but they also believed they had the right to expect friendship from unlikely sources on the beach. Their life too was in danger, and are now safely on a farm in the far north of the North Island of New Zealand, surrounded by hundreds of progeny in no danger of being eaten. The rats lived out their lives with us, often free to roam the house (they would find their way to our bed at night and settle down near our feet to sleep). Tamaiti the ragdoll cat is still with us and the three older cats who adjusted, albeit grudgingly, to my experiment. Mika learned to live easily with other species; but he kept a certain hostility to other, smaller dogs, and is now living with our good friend Conny, a dog trainer who is able to keep a closer eye on him.

The idea was to get all the animals as babies more or less at the same time and raise them as if they were siblings of the same species. We expected to be faced with natural aversions, instinctual needs to either flee or chase, and indeed this was the case. I did not want to “correct” this in any flagrant way, simply prevent harm and let familiarity work its magic. My theory was that in a short time the fleers would recognize there was nothing to flee from, and the chasers would acknowledge there was no reason to chase. This is indeed what happened, and in very short measure. My only lack of success turned out to be the chickens and the rats. The rats were all too willing to co-exist, but for some reason I could never quite ascertain, the chickens were invariably hostile to the rats and it was not safe to allow them any time together without supervision.

The only near-tragedies we had were with uninvited guest animals: I can still remember with horror how we heard the terrible screaming of the hen and quickly followed the sound to the side of the house where she was in the mouth of a strange dog. We freed her immediately, but were afraid she had been literally frightened to death and might not make it. But she surprised us all by making a startlingly quick recovery. Nor did she show any signs of hostility to Mika, the dog, after that, as we feared she might, thinking he belonged after all to the category of perpetrator. As might be expected, Mika became every other animal’s favorite. There is something about a dog that exerts charm on all other species, humans included.

My own favorite activity became the daily walk along our beach. This is because everyone wanted to participate, even Hohepa and the chickens. It became quite a spectacle for onlookers to see the four humans walking with their dog, four cats, two chickens, rats in sleeves, and Hohepa hopping along as best he could. Now what could it possibly mean for these animals to “want” to go on a walk? I really can’t answer beyond saying that there was no coercion involved, and the only reason that comes to mind is that they positively enjoyed it. They did too. That was easy to see and easy to read. I don’t think humans make all that many mistakes when they read pleasure and joy in the animals they know. It is usually pretty obvious, and was so in this case: they could hardly wait for their daily walk. Did they get any special pleasure in walking with members of other species? I cannot answer for them, but I certainly did.

What became clear to me from this attempt, mostly successful, to raise animals together was how easy it was for animals to ignore the species barrier. When they had nothing to fear, when they did not expect to become lunch, they were happy to live and let live, and also to enjoy the company of “the other.” You see this whenever you visit an aquarium, where large predator fish are housed in large tanks with their prey. As long as they are not hungry, the shark poses no danger to other fish.

Or consider the many accounts and pictures of watering holes in Africa, where the big cats can be found coming for a drink along with their wary prey. Wary, true, but not in fact frightened to death, because they know the difference between a hungry lion and a satiated or a thirsty lion. They do not expect to be used for target practice, and their expectations are correct. No animal hunts down prey for the fun of it. It is not recreational, ever, only a matter of eating. Humans cannot claim as much, not even close. The most common answer to why did he do that (read whatever horrible deed is in the paper at the moment) is the simple “because he could.” When Primo Levi famously asked a guard why he was not allowed to slack his thirst with an icicle hanging in a windowsill he was told “There is no why here.” That is, he was refused the ordinary pleasures or necessities of life because the guards could. Such would never occur to an animal.

This is fundamental. I realize I am treading on very delicate ground here, raising the question of why, along among all animals on this earth, we are the only species to torture others of our own (and other) species, for the sheer pleasure of it. Indeed, we are the only species who can even conceive of getting pleasure from treating others badly. Sadism is a uniquely human trait. I won’t get much argument about this. The arguments come when we try to understand why.

Some will argue that there is no moral value in lack of sadism if sadism cannot even be envisaged: an animal, they say, who cannot conceive of evil, gets no points for not engaging in it. As if we must be tempted to do something before we can get any merit for having resisted the temptation. This is a familiar argument that comes up frequently when discussing particularly egregious crimes against humanity: We all have inside us the Nazi beast. (I am always sorely tempted to point out, when somebody says this to me, that there are no Nazi beasts). We can all envisage ourselves engaging in the worst possible human behaviors. My answer to this is simply no. It is not true. I know, and so do you, many people who simply would not behave this way. Needless to say, it cannot be proved either way, since it is in both cases hypothetical.

Another argument goes something like this: Our being able to use our hands and their opposable thumbs to create things (read weapons); our being able to communicate our creations to others (put plans for building home made bombs onto the internet); our big brains that allow us to come up with such brilliant ideas of bombs capable of incinerating the earth and all that lives thereon, is what differentiates us from all other species. OK. But does it follow from this that it makes us superior? Most would say yes.

Am I insane in not finding the ability to destroy the entire planet something of which to boast? If all other animals manage to live without ending life on earth is this because they are stupid? Is that not a rather strange definition of “intelligent?”

Well, but the experiment was entirely artificial. No, not entirely. We like to think that we live in a world where all other animals spend their time hunting one another down. But that is not true. First of all, only a small percentage of mammals actually live by eating other animals, about 10% of mammals. The rest live on plant life. Secondly, even when a herd is threatened by a predator, only a very small number are actually killed and eaten; the vast majority live out their lives without predation. Prey species live in risk, it is true, of being eaten, but it is a bit like our living at risk of falling prey to an accident, or falling ill. It happens a lot, but not all the time, and not to all of us. Most of us manage to live life without being murdered, and most animals, even prey species, manage to live their life in the same way. When you look at big vegetarian animals like elephants, and rhinos and hippos and giraffes, the charismatic megafauna as they are sometimes called, the vast majority live out their life spans in peace. They may not make friends with other species (in fact they do not), but nor could they be said to have any enemies. Is the word “indifference” justified? I am not really certain, but if it is, I see nothing wrong with the state it describes. True, in my experiment I was not aiming at indifference, but at friendship. Perhaps that is my human bias showing: I value friendship over indifference. Did I in any sense enrich their lives? I like to think so. It could be a naïve sentimentalism of mine.