Paul Shepard (1925-1996)
grew up in rural Missouri, during a
primitive era that lacked television, internet, and cell phones. He was lucky to live in a community where
progress had not yet erased the wildlife.
Young Paul was fascinated by wild animals. He collected butterflies and bird eggs. He hunted and fished. He adored the great outdoors. It was a happy time.
World War II
hurled him into the mass hysteria of modernity.
He survived D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. He spent 20 years at Pitzer College, close to
the monstrous megalopolis of Los Angeles.
During his lifetime, population tripled, and nuclear bombs turned cities
into ashtrays. It was easy to see that old-fashioned
rural society was starkly different from the industrial nightmare. Modern society was insane. Why? Shepard
explored this question in Thinking
Animals (and in all his
other books).
Over the passage of millions of years, evolution gradually
increased the intelligence of many species.
As predators got better at tracking, stalking, teamwork, and killing,
the herbivores got better at being escape artists. For this balancing act to work, predators had
to be slightly more clever than prey. If
predators got too good at hunting, or prey got too good at escaping, the
ecosystem would plunge into chaos. For
both teams, intelligence and awareness were essential.
Our two-legged ancestors were not natural born carnivorous
predators like lions, tigers, and wolves.
The two-legs had to play two roles, hunter and prey. This required them to have the aggressive mindset
of stalkers and killers, as well as the hyper-awareness of delicious walking
meatballs.
Living in a healthy ecosystem was vastly more stimulating
than staring at glowing screens. Everything
was alive, intelligent, alert. The sky,
land, and water were filled with living things.
The air was rich with music and fragrances. Paying complete attention was a full time job. A jaguar might be hiding behind any rock. Just over the hill, a group of deer might be
taking a nap.
Forests were not an ideal habitat for hunters, because large
herbivores did not eat wood or leaves.
Savannahs, on the other hand, were a yummy all-you-can-eat buffet of
nutritious grasses and forbs. Grasslands
attracted mobs of herbivores, as well as their sacred partners, the carnivores
that kept them in balance.
Without weapons, two-legs could not kill animals that were
ferocious or speedy. The spear was
invented by Homo
erectus, maybe two million years ago. Maybe they were tired of eating frogs, grubs, bird
eggs, and assorted carcasses. Maybe they
were tired of losing their kin to big cats.
Armed with spears, they could kill big game and survive on
the savannah. Spears also enabled them
to kill the man-eaters that kept them in balance — a devilish whirl into dark
juju. In so doing, they stepped outside
the boundaries of evolution, and the balance it provided.
And so, to avoid overhunting and overbreeding, the
spear-chucking two-legs had to become self-regulating. They had to live with utmost mindfulness,
year after year, without fail. Today,
it’s obvious that two-legs are far better at overbreeding than
self-regulating. There are still a few
wild tribes skilled at self-regulation, but they are not doing well in their
struggle to resist obnoxious outsiders.
Shepard sidestepped this discussion of our fateful experiment
with weapon technology. Instead, he
focused on the growth of big brains and human intelligence. He believed that complex language played a
major role in activating our developmental turbo-thrusters. We kept getting smarter and smarter and
smarter. Wow! It was amazing — for a while — until it got
stuck in the muck. By and by, too smart
two-legs began goofing around with a fateful experiment in plant and animal
domestication.
The core of Shepard’s message was that we evolved in a world
where we were surrounded by a variety of wild animals, and this played a
central role in the development of human intelligence. A healthy wild ecosystem was a fantastic
place to live. We learned about
everything. We named everything, and complex
language made it easy to transfer large amounts of vital information from one
generation to the next.
Humans were odd in that their throbbing brains spent more
than 20 years in their immature phase. Year
after year, they got bigger and smarter. A quirky aspect of extended childhood was that
the immature phase did not automatically graduate into the mature phase. This required a kick. Wild cultures used initiation ceremonies to
guide youths through this transition. Modern
societies tend to flub this up. Endless
youth often leads to infantile behaviors, or to neurotic hardening, “where
rigidity and protective shells make a grotesque parody of true maturity.”
For Shepard, everything was cool until the dawn of domestication,
the rebellion against evolution. The
wild ecosystem was replaced by a manmade landscape inhabited by enslaved and
castrated animals. Folks began
hallucinating that two-legs were the masters of the world. Of course, the theory of evolution, made
famous by Darwin, blew this foolish homocentric nonsense completely out of the
water. Two-legs, indeed, are animals,
but most continue to strongly deny this most embarrassing fact.
Wild animals were fascinating to observe, and they taught our
ancestors many skills for living on the land — concealment, stealth, stalking,
tracking, ambush, and so on. Critters
lived perfectly well by their wits and abilities. They had no desire to be our friends, nor any
need for humans whatsoever. They were
wild, free, intelligent, and alert.
Domesticated animals were the opposite. Wild traits were undesirable, so they were
erased via selective breeding. This
resulted in pathetic, pudgy, dim-witted, docile mutants. Unlike barnyard fauna, wild animals were only
submissive in their immature phase. Similarly, modern folks, deprived of
growing up in a healthy wild ecosystem, fail to develop in a healthy way. We have a strong tendency to retain infantile
or adolescent tendencies long past childhood.
Many spend their entire lives in an immature state.
Today, our bodies
and minds are the end product of millions of years of hunting, foraging, and studying
nature. Our genes are at home in the
wild, and every newborn is a wild animal, eager to enjoy a life of wild freedom. We cannot develop normally when we are raised
in abnormal circumstances. This damages
us. We become frustrated, alienated
adults, lacking a confident sense of self.
In an effort to
compensate, we buy pets. “The
very concept is unknown among most of the world’s pre-industrial peoples,
except… by an affluent minority. …Only
in this perspective of the rarity of the pet does the pet explosion in modern
cities take on its full strangeness.”
Pets may dull the pain of modern life, but “keeping pets is a hopeless
attempt to resurrect crucial episodes of early growth that are lost forever.”
Healthy childhood development
requires successfully accumulating a sequence of time-critical
experiences. Adult attempts to reconnect
with their missing childhood wildness might be partially successful, at
best. “The mind, like the body, is an
organ with multiple ripenings, and going back is a pathetic, exceedingly
difficult undertaking.” To bypass this
mess, kids should be raised very close to nature. “The point of this book is to assert that
animals have a very large claim on the maturing of the individual and his capacity
to think and feel.”
Thinking
Animals was published in 1978.
Eighteen years later, Shepard published The Others,
which took a fresh look at the subject.
It’s a better book, and easier to understand. Shepard’s
wife, Florence, wrote a warm essay celebrating Paul’s life. Click here.
Shepard, Paul, Thinking
Animals — Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence,
University of Georgia Press, Atlanta, 1978.
2 comments:
Great article,
also a very moving essay.
Thank you
Thanks! Glad it was meaningful!
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