Trevor Lautens, columnist and journalist, owner of an AAS dog, and an AAS supporter, kindly allowed us to reprint this article from the North Shore News.
By TREVOR LAUTENS
There are so many officially earth-shaking issues to deal with of late that
I rejected them all and turned to the beauty of animals.
Only the other day I spent some time in the stables talking to horses -
many would say the most beautiful of all animals. "Oh, you are a beauty," I
assured each of them - whispering to make sure those in adjoining stalls
couldn't hear and be offended or jealous.
Perhaps you consider this fairly mild madness, but you may feel it tips
into the dangerously demented category when state that I asked them very
gently, very seriously, their enormous heads pushing against the stall bars,
their impossibly huge eyes calmly (or is it curiously? or hungrily?) fixed
on this human creature: "What are you thinking?"
This was not just comic Dr. Dolittling. At the other extreme it was not
cognitive ethology, which studies "the consciousness, cognition,
self-awareness and intelligence of animals," to quote Juliet Clutton-Brock
in the Times Literary Supplement. I am too grave for the one
and too shallow for the other. Somewhere in between?
It may be a low level of scientific inquiry, but, if science is a simple
matter of asking simple questions, my question has a claim to science. This
is science on the way to becoming poetry - and science at its noblest (ital)
is (unital) poetry, and divinity too.
I really yearn to know. What are they thinking? Dr. Clutton-Brock, editor
of the Journal of Zoology, University of London, says the
conclusions about what goes on in animal minds "are as much a reflection of
the social attitudes of the authors as they are of empirical experiment."
There you go - once again, it's mankind's self-absorption, what's in our
heads, not the animals'...
But it seems clear that all animals have only limited problem-solving
intelligence and no complex communication skills. Even the famous Clever
Hans, who appeared to be capable of elementary arithmetic by clomping his
hoof when asked what two and two make, or whatever, was found to be reacting
to subtle signals from his owner. (But didn't that require intelligence itself?)
But perhaps animals have a form of intelligence beyond our intelligence,
undiscoverable to us, an intuitive intelligence closed to us, even a branch
of wisdom we can't penetrate. At an elementary level, all observant
dog-owners have witnessed the phenomenon of the dog accurately reading their
minds. Canine manipulation follows, often impressively skilful and subtle.
It seems equally obvious - if it is to me, then it must be to billions -
that any animal capable of play must also have some sense of humour. And
that requires intelligence too. We've all encountered dogs that were wittier
than their owners.
This just in from my spy in Winnipeg: A couple rescued, more or less, a
young black Lab - terrified, as dogs are when discombobulated, and throwing
up repeatedly in the car travelling to her new home. Miracle, they named
her. A few days later she was introduced to the couple's grandmother,
approaching her mid-nineties and sadly rather senile. For some seconds
Miracle examined the woman. Then she abruptly leaped forward and - kissed
the woman. Yes, kissed. I can't speak for you, but the story fills me with
wonder.
Returning to the wisdom thing: Animals may not be capable of rocket
science, but then again, if they don't rise as high, neither do they sink as
low as human beings. They don't propose to fire those rockets at each other,
nor do they conjure up well-reasoned justifications for doing so.
This should shame us into admitting that even the most reason-worshipping
human beings - the basis for making ourselves our own gods - are none too
bright, and brings me back to the mystery and attraction of animals.
And how stunningly handsome most animals are - animals in the wider
sense, including birds, those astonishing navigators and acrobats. Take your
eyes off the "beautiful people" on the glossy magazine covers and the humbug
TV set and movie screen and look at people on the anonymous street. By and
large we are the ugliest, most ill-shaped, ungainly, unappealing of the
animal kingdom.
This above all: There is a dignity about animals, a dignity that, if I
did not have to bring the news, would awe me into silence - strike (ital) me
(unital) dumb rather than the "dumb" animals. Only the rare human being
touches such dignity.
Of course you know Walt Whitman's incomparable lines about animals, but
it will be a joy to read them again:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
Not that Whitman - possibly the most towering self-worshipper of us all -
had the last word on everything, or anything. But my own last word:
I'm not a member of this 2,000-year-old club - too wicked to be admitted,
incapable of turning the other cheek and lacking other prerequisites - but
I'm a sympathizer and fellow traveller. The Christmas story, with its
powerful images that have inspired great faith and great art for centuries,
would be immeasurably poorer without those indispensable supporting roles in
the cast: The animals in that stable.
Copyright Holland House Communications Ltd. 2004
Used by Permission