Thinking Animals

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.

Beyond Zenith

From the zenith of the Upper Paleolithic, things began a downhill drift.  A number of species went extinct from climate change (ice ages) and/or over-hunting.  Every type of animal had effective survival strategies, like flying, fleeing, swimming, climbing trees, injecting venom, or counterattack.  These strategies were very old, and programmed into genes and instincts.  They worked.  They permitted a survival rate high enough to enable the continued existence of the species.

Clever humans invented ways of outwitting these defense mechanisms, and killing more and more animals.  Part of this was due to continuous improvement in hunting hardware — like spears, lances, nets, bows and arrows, traps, and snares.  We also improved our skills at exploiting enslaved animals. 

“The history of ecological catastrophe begins with the hound,” wrote Paul Shepard.  “The first domesticated wolves were not pets, guards, companions, or meals but fellow hunters.  With dogs, the first domesticated animals, the ‘conquering’ of nature started toward its final calamity.”  Super-sensitive canine noses were powerful assets for our hunting teams, and working in packs reduced the odds of prey escaping.

During my research, I was surprised to find that war dogs have long been used for killing human enemies — by the Romans, Britons, Greeks Babylonians, and others.  When two armies met, dozens of dogs, weighing up to 200 pounds (91 kg), deliberately underfed, would be set loose to attack, terrify, and kill both soldiers and horses.  War dogs were especially effective in the New World, where the Indians had darker skins, distinctive scents, and different attire than the incredibly sadistic Spaniards.  The dogs had an easier time identifying the designated prey, thus ripping to shreds far fewer white dudes by accident.

The trio of horses, dogs, and humans took hunting and warfare to a new and far more deadly dimension.  Marco Polo described Genghis Khan’s process for acquiring wild meat.  There were two flanks of hunters, each having 10,000 men and 5,000 great mastiff dogs.  The line of hunters would extend to the length of a full day’s journey, and no wild animal would escape their dragnet.  These hunts were like a bloody vacuum cleaner.

On the US plains, vast buffalo herds survived because these animals could run at speeds up to 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).  When Indians got horses, the buffalo lost their speed advantage, and became much easier to kill.  And then came the legions of white guys with rifles, on a sacred mission to eliminate all buffalo.

William T. Hornaday was born on the Indiana frontier in 1854, and he experienced the thunderous roar of millions of passenger pigeons passing overhead for hours.  He was of the last generation to know the incredible abundance of wildlife that once existed in the American west.  He witnessed the final conquest of all lands from coast to coast, and then he was horrified to observe a million bubbas with cheap rifles and shotguns blowing away every wild creature they could find, as fast as they could.  He wrote “that nowhere is Nature being destroyed so rapidly as in the United States.”

William M. Tsutsui wrote an essay about environmental impacts in wartime Japan.  By the end of World War II, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and dogs had almost disappeared.  Zoo animals had been eaten.  Many millions of songbirds were netted and consumed.  When allied soldiers landed in Japan, it was extremely rare to see a bird anywhere.  In 1945, the Japanese were clear-cutting almost 50 square miles (129 sq. km) of forest each week to make fuel for the war machine.  It took many tons of pine roots to make a single gallon of oil.  Rapid deforestation created many eco-nightmares.  Could this be a preview of our future?

Humans evolved in a world filled with abundant wildlife.  Wild animals played an important role in shaping what we became, mentally and physically.  Shepard noted that hunters were spellbound when observing wild animals, and could watch them for an hour, in a state of absolute fascination.  But the children of tourists at Yellowstone are quickly bored by the sight of a herd of elk.  These kids suffer from an immense deprivation of healthy contact with the natural world, multiplied by the stresses of living amidst crowds of humans, mostly strangers — not to mention their obsession with techno-gadgetry.

With the explosive expansion of the domesticated world, our children have largely lost contact with the shrinking realm of the normal, healthy, unspoiled wild.  Shepard was a dog owner, and he understood that many owners experience genuine affection for their pets.  But pets can never be, in any way, replacements for regular contact with free wild animals.  “Something is profoundly wrong with the human/animal pet relationship at its most basic level.”  Pets were “compensations for something desperately missing, minimal replacements for friendship in all of its meanings.”

In our daily lives, we are bombarded with countless consumer fantasies, including many from the highly profitable pet industry.  In these fantasies, pets have become living toys, and living toy fantasies are starkly different from the real experience of bringing an animal into your life.  Real live pets have little in common with Disney fantasies, and every year millions of people realize that they no longer want a real live pet in their lives.

For each human born in the US, 8 to 15 dogs are born, and 20 to 30 cats.  In Inside Passage, Richard Manning wrote, “Six million to seven million dogs and cats are killed in animal shelters every year.  The city of Los Angeles alone sends 200 tons of dogs and cats to rendering plants each month.”  Should this bother us more than the chicken industry, or mass murdering cockroaches with toxic poisons?

The pet industry has convinced us that feeding human food to pets is unhealthy, and that commercial pet food is excellent.  Laura Sevier explored the ingredients used in commercial pet food (including road kill, euthanized pets, livestock with cancer, moldy grain, etc.).  “Surveys show that overall pet health is declining almost as rapidly as human health.  Cats and dogs are now developing a vast list of degenerative diseases, including autoimmune diseases, allergies, heart disease, diabetes, chronic digestive problems joint and arthritic problems, and cancer.”  Nearly one in three British dogs are overweight, but thankfully diet pills are available (Yarvitan, Slentrol, etc.). 

One in every three dogs gets cancer, and cancer is the leading cause of death in dogs.  Cancer kills between 60 and 70 percent of golden retrievers.  The average bulldog lives a bit longer than six years, and the breed typically suffers from an unusual number of health problems.  In Thinking With Animals, James Serpell, an animal specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that “if bulldogs were the product of genetic engineering by agripharmaceutical corporations, there would be protest demonstrations throughout the Western world, and rightly so.”

Imagine what the pet industry could do with your children if breeders were given the freedom to produce trendy, and profitable new forms of Homo sapiens — adorable little kewpie doll critters with big eyes, or heavily-muscled 800 pound security guards.  Whenever I see a miniature dog, I shudder at what humans have done to wolves.

A study by Dr. Claire Corriden of the British Small Animal Veterinary Association concluded that “eighty per cent of dogs have one or more behaviour problems,” including hyperactivity, phobic behavior, separation anxiety, sleeping problems, anxiety, anorexia, self-mutilation, stress, and depression.

Australian journalist, Ruth Ostrow, was fascinated by the growing use of psych meds for pets and zoo animals.  There was a growing pandemic of mental problems in domesticated animals, including humans.  “It has something to do with depression and captivity, or a sense of captivity.”  There was a connection between freedom and happiness.  Healthy wild animals don’t become mentally unbalanced.  “When the soul feels free, a natural sense of wellbeing follows.  The power of freedom cannot be put into a tablet for animals or humans.”  (I love that last sentence!)  Nothing beats freedom!

So anyway, we’ve been reduced from an amazing zenith of total wildness and freedom to a depressing manmade world of domesticated humans and dogs, many overweight, suffering from degenerative diseases, and widespread mental illness.  Luckily, the temporary bubble of cheap energy is almost over, which will force the status quo into a fundamental reboot.  Our grandchildren will not suffer from the same extreme zaniness that we do, but they are sure to have interesting challenges of their own.

OK, your homework assignment is to imagine new ways of living that might become possible after the temporary bubble of abundant cheap energy is over.  Can you imagine paths to genuine sustainability?

To be continued.

Hornaday, William T., Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1913.

Manning, Richard, Inside Passage — A Journey Beyond Borders, Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2001.

Ostrow, Ruth, “Freedom Heals the Soul,” The Australian, September 15, 2012, p. 20.

Paul Shepard, The Others — How Animals Made Us Human, Island Press, Washington, 1996.

Polo, Marco and Rustichello of Pisa, The Travels of Marco Polo, Project Gutenberg, 2004 (Henry Yule’s third edition, 1903).

Serpell, James A., "People in Disguise: Anthromorphism and the Human-Pet Relationship,” Thinking With Animals, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006.

Sevier, Laura, “Should My Dog Eat Dog Food?” Ecologist, March 2009.

Tsutsui, William, “Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan,” Natural Enemy — Toward an Environmental History of War, Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2004, pp. 195-216.

Before Dogs Became Pets

The saga of dogs is a long strange trip.  Experts agree that all dogs are descendants of wild gray wolves.  They don’t agree when dogs were domesticated, but most say around 14,000 years ago.  Could it be a coincidence that this occurred around the time when humans were getting really good at killing really big animals with stone-tipped lances, and the countryside was dotted with mastodon corpses, and other dainty delicacies?

As humans emigrated from our African home, we moved into wolf country, and learned important skills from our new neighbors.  Wolves were social creatures, like we were.  We both lived in hierarchical groups.  We both chased and ate the same critters.  We both scavenged each other’s leftovers. 

Wolves and humans coexisted for a long time before dogs emerged.  Wolves learned to hang out on the fringe of human camps from time to time, because they were a source of food to scavenge.  They found bones to gnaw and offal to wolf down.  They slobbered whilst inhaling the intoxicating aroma of meat roasting on our campfires.  They found human excrement to be indescribably delicious, an overwhelming passion that may be the prime reason for the creation of dogs.

This scavenging activity became a regular habit, and humans actively classified their canine visitors as naughty or nice.  Aggressive nuisance wolves were killed, while the presence of more timid wolves was tolerated.  By and by, over many generations, this selection process resulted in dogs.  Dogs were smaller than wolves, and had smaller skulls and brains.  We selected for dogs having juvenile characteristics, because they were less trouble to have around.  Dogs helpfully announced the arrival of humans and beasts, and they drove away other predators.

Before going further, I must reveal my motives.  I believe that the domestication of plants and animals played a major role in the process that got us into our current predicament, the Earth Crisis.  Wild humans and wild wolves once lived in a manner that worked quite well, for a very long time.  Today, both are endangered.  Meanwhile, the population of domesticated humans and dogs has grown explosively, because of a temporary bubble of abundant energy.  The family of life is temporarily out of balance.

Humans and dogs live in the highest density in poorer regions, where many are malnourished and unhealthy.  In prosperous regions, humans and dogs are more likely to be over-nourished, neurotic, stressed out, and excessive consumers of resources (trendy $1,500 purebreds are not shit-eating dogs).  

I am not here to judge or criticize dog owners, and I mean that sincerely.  My goal is to explore the dark side of domestication, because there are many lessons to be learned — knowledge that may be important for any attempts to return to genuine sustainability.

Many assume that dogs have always been pets, since our days in the caves, but this is not true.  Dogs had a semi-wild, pariah-like existence for thousands of years before being reduced to pets, and losing their freedom.  Dozens of gray wolves were interviewed for this story, and they unanimously agreed that wolves never had any desire whatsoever to become dogs.  In fact, they were grievously insulted by the mere suggestion of this.

In his book Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez told many wolf stories.  Once upon a time, in Alaska’s Goldstream Valley, wolves killed 42 dogs one winter.  The Athbascan Indians took a vote, and by a landslide chose not to retaliate against the wolves.  Why?  Because everyone knew that wolves hated dogs.  Case closed.

I was repeatedly surprised in my research to discover that hunter-gatherers had little respect for dogs.  Dogs were uniquely second-class animals.  Domestication had diminished them to the degree that they were no longer able to survive in the wild, outside the human sphere (similar to sheep, cattle, maize, and consumers).  This serious abnormality was perfectly obvious to every illiterate, uneducated savage.

Wild hunting people recognized that wolves were beings that possessed immense spiritual power, according to Lopez.  The Nunamiut understood that wolves had souls, but not their sled dogs.  In the Sioux language, the term for wolf was shunkmanitu tanka, “the animal that looks like a dog (but) is a powerful spirit.”  Dogs were banned from ceremonial lodges, except when they arrived in the stew kettle, as they often did.

In The Way of the Shaman, Michael Harner discussed the animals that shamans used as guardian spirits.  Guardian spirits were almost always wild and untamed.  Domesticated animals typically lacked the spiritual power required for shamanic purposes.  (Cars are often named after powerful wild things, never pudgy barnyard riffraff.)

In The Forest People, Colin Turnbull described how Pygmies treated dogs: “And the hunting dogs, valuable as they are, get kicked around mercilessly from the day they are born to the day they die.”

In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff wrote that the Yequana people never imposed their will on others, but with dogs they used strict discipline, hitting them with fists, sticks, and stones.

Dogs inherited coprophilia from their wolf ancestors (an obsession for the smell and taste of excrement).  In Book of the Eskimos, Peter Freuchen wrote that sled dogs were often a nuisance when someone attempted to take a crap.  Sometimes a good buddy would drive the dogs away with a whip until you were finished.  Dogs would sometimes have bloody fights over fresh turds. 

Freuchen also mentioned that it was perfectly acceptable to copulate with a dog when she was in heat, as long as it was done outdoors, in the open.  Brighter lads never attempted this with wolves.

In The Harmless People, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas discussed the dogs that lived with the Bushmen.  They were typically skeletal and weak from hunger.  Dogs were owned and named, but they were only fed excrement.  When they tried to snatch human food, they were stoned or whipped.  In return for regular hot meals, the grateful dogs drove away leopards, jackals, and hyenas.

In Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, John Lame Deer wrote, “There was great power in a wolf, even in a coyote.  You have made him into a freak — a toy poodle, a Pekingese, a lap dog….  That’s where you’ve fooled yourselves.  You have not only altered, declawed, and malformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves.”

In Ojibway Heritage, Basil Johnston told some dog tales.  In their creation stories, humans and other animals worked together in harmony.  All animals served the family of life in some way — except for the lowly dog, which had nothing to offer.  Dogs were dependent on humans for their survival, and the other animals had no sympathy: “He who allows himself to be servile deserves servitude.”

Other animals were outraged by the treachery of dogs, and considered killing them, but Bear objected.  He told the dogs: “For your betrayal, you shall no longer be regarded as a brother among us.  Instead of man, we shall attack you.  Worse than this, from now on you shall eat only what man has left, sleep in the cold and rain, and receive kicks as a reward for your fidelity.”

To a devout Muslim, a dog is an unclean animal that drives away angels, annuls prayers, and limits their owner’s benefits in paradise.  Muslims who touch a dog require ritual purification.  In 2011, a journalist commented that in the village of Novosasitli, Dagestan, dogs do not bark when the call to prayer beckons, because all unclean animals have been exterminated.

Likewise, their Jewish and Christian neighbors have been long-time hard-core dog haters.  “Dog” appears in the Bible 41 times, always harshly scribbled with venomous ink, never fondness.  For example:

“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”  (Matthew 7:6)

“Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.  For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.”  (Revelations 22:14-15)

So, dogs have not been beloved pets since the beginning.  They were the first offspring of domestication, and they were diminished by it.  As many times has they click the Undo button, nothing happens — they remain dogs.  Woof!

To be continued.  Stay tuned.