We are All One
New research is blurring the species boundary, forcing us to rethink what it is to be human.
by G.A. Bradshaw • Posted June 14, 2006 12:13 AM
Picture a psychiatrist at her desk reviewing a case file. The report describes
a young, teenaged male who, with several others his age, killed nearly a hundred
victims. The case is astounding—not only because of the intensity and magnitude
of the violence, but because nothing remotely like it has ever happened in the
community before. Not even a single murder. As the psychiatrist turns the pages
and reads on, the pieces of the puzzle start to come together. A few years before,
the young killers had witnessed the massacre of their families and been orphaned.
Afterwards, although still very young, they were relocated to another community
with few adults to raise them; importantly, it was absent of older, mentoring
males.
Resignedly, the psychiatrist writes her opinion: post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). She recommends intensive counselling and psychotherapy. Trauma and social
breakdown—in this case, loss of a mother and community—compromise
normal brain and behavior development, often resulting in hyper-aggression, violence
and other asocial behaviors. Although treatment is called for, such developmental
trauma, in the absence of family and friends who can psychologically, emotionally
and physically support recovery, often leads to a pattern of psychobiological
disorders. Trauma becomes neurobiologically etched and may be transmitted across
generations. Unfortunately, the teenagers' story echoes those of many others,
each unpleasantly familiar in their association with a string of wars and genocide
in Uganda, Rwanda, Iraq and Sudan. However, there is something different and
perhaps more disturbing about this account.
These teenagers are young male African elephants. At a South African park,
in the 1990's, three young males attacked and killed 58 white and five
black rhinoceroses; at a second park, young male elephants killed 40 white
rhinoceroses. While these events have by far been the most dramatic, elsewhere
in Africa and Asia, reports of elephant aggression are appearing more frequently.
Moreover, violence is not just directed at other species. In yet another
African park, male-on-male intraspecific mortality is responsible for 70%
to 90% of adult male elephant deaths.
Until recently, these types of behavior have been almost unheard of, leaving
conservation biologists searching for an explanation. Habitat destruction, starvation,
social breakdown from poaching and culls, and the loss of herd coherence are
factors known to severely threaten elephant survival. But the levels and types
of atypical behavior being observed suggest an added dimension to the problem.
Some biologists think that increased elephant aggression might comprise, in part,
revenge against humans for accidental or deliberate elephant deaths. Could it
be that elephants, like humans, also suffer psychological trauma as a result
of violence?
Until a few years ago, making such inference and diagnosing elephants with
PTSD would have been dismissed as anthropomorphism. But no longer. Elephant
psychopathology, chimpanzee infanticide and other un-animal-like behaviors
are part of a growing body of research that suggests science is building
toward a radical paradigm shift. Streams of new data and theories, critically
from neuroscience, are converging into a new, trans-species model of the
psyche. Humans are being reinstated back into the species continuum that
Darwin articulated, a continuum that includes laughing rats, octopuses
with personalities, sheep who read emotions from the faces of their family
members and tool-wielding crows.
We now understand that all vertebrates, and it is argued even some invertebrates,
share many biological structures and processes that underlie attributes once
considered uniquely human: empathy, personality, culture, emotion, language,
intention, tool-use and violence. Furthermore, we are able to see beyond species
differences in ways we have never been able to before. Neuroimaging advances
such as PET and fMRI can help map more elusive subjective qualities—such
as emotion, states of consciousness and sense of self—to specific regions
of the brain. In conjunction with a rich legacy of observational data and theories
on animal behavior and human psychology, neuroscience is bridging long-standing
conceptual and perceptual gaps.
Whether or not this paradigm shift conforms precisely to science philosopher
Thomas Kuhn's definition, its potential effects on science and society are revolutionary.
The idea that humans share a psyche with other animals is enormously challenging.
First, it alters the basic model around which biomedical and other disciplines
have organized theory and terminology. Concepts like sense of self, empathy and
intention have largely been considered exclusive to humans, and have therefore
defined what animals are not. Such perceived dissimilarities have shaped theory,
practice, law and custom for centuries. The human-animal gap influences how we
live, how we formulate scientific questions, how we practice science and even
what we eat. Today, in contrast, models of species' similarity are replacing
models of difference, and the lines between species have become increasingly
blurred—blurred to the extent that many insist on limits to stem cell-chimera
research to avoid mixing the neuronal and psychological capacities of humans
and other species.
In itself, similarity among species is not new. Animal models that employ
diverse species as surrogate humans have long been a staple of scientific
research. Together, rats, mice, cats, dogs, apes and even invertebrates
form the backbone of the biomedical and anthropological research that shapes
the theories, practices and policies of human health and well-being. It
is this understanding of relatedness that grounds scientific inference
and makes studies on animals translatable to humans. Consequently, violent
elephants and rats with a sense of humor are not remarkable because of
the similarities they expose, per se, but because of the specific nature
of the similarities.
For instance, the notion of "at-risk elephants" conflicts with our
sense of what defines an elephant as well as what defines a human being. Because
so much of human identity—who, how and what we are—has been based
on what other species appear to lack, the possibility of a shared, trans-species
model of brain and psyche simultaneously prompts us to reflect on what it means
to be human.
Nonetheless, similarity does not confer identity—and species' differences
do exist. The task before us is to understand the significance and meaning of
these differences, under a paradigm of similarity. An apple and an orange are
both fruits and therefore the same if we are comparing fruits with doughnuts.
But their differences become important when we are trying to decide which one
to eat. The same holds true for the species we study. Since so much of science
has been built on, and references, the assumption of human-animal difference,
shifting to a model of human-animal similarity recalibrates the scale by which
differences are measured. Accordingly then, today's theory, practice, law and
customs in science and society, which have been shaped by human-animal dissimilarities,
must be revised. Clearly, ethical considerations may be compelled to change,
but science itself is also affected. For example, consider how intraspecific
violence and infanticide in multiple species might now be assessed. Diverse explanations
have been put forward, largely depending on the species. From the perspective
of evolutionary psychology, primate infanticide can be seen as an adaptive reproductive
strategy. On the other hand, in our society, these behaviors are regarded as
abnormal and dealt with by the law and psychiatry. A trans-species model of vertebrate
brain and behavior requires resolving whether this atypical behavior observed
in chimpanzees and elephants is a disorder caused by trauma or an adaptive strategy.
How might one or the other conclusion affect science's current theories and practice,
conservation and even law?
Neuroscience has made it possible to make inferences about animals from humans,
in much the same way as animal models have been long used to infer human behavior
from animals. Inference, then, is no longer unidirectional—and, it seems,
models of the psyche are no longer limited to humans. Future historians of science
may very well look back and consider the violent young elephants as symbols of
a dramatic epistemic turning point in science and culture. For now, they have
helped us realize that neuroscience has brought us much more understanding about
what it means to be—no matter the species.
—Gay Bradshaw is on the faculty of Oregon State University's Environmental
Sciences Graduate Program. She is currently completing her second book, Elephant
Breakdown: The Psychological Study of Animal Cultures in Crisis.
Study finds zoo visitors spend little time viewing animals
even nearly extinct species
Published on Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Kansas State Collegian
Zoos tout their educational endeavors, but like the person who visits Sunset Zoological Park to "get out of the house," zoos are little more than easy distraction. Dale Marcellini, a curator at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., conducted a study of zoo visitors in which he and several colleagues watched, tracked and listened to more than 700 people over the course of a few summers.
His study concluded that zoos are little more than backdrops for people's other preoccupations. The visitors' conversations dealt not with the animals but with their own lives. When people did remark on an animal, the most common words Marcellini recorded were derogatory.
The study found that almost 60 percent of visitors' time was spent walking from place to place, almost 10 percent was spent eating, and other chunks of time went to resting, bathroom breaks and shopping.
People spent less than eight seconds per snake and one minute with the lions. Pere David's deer, expected to be extinct when the last captive deer dies, rated a mere 27 seconds.
It's not just visitors who are disinterested. Even a former director of the renowned Zoo Atlanta, for example, said of the animals, "They're the last thing I worry about with all the other problems."
Jennifer O'Connor
http://kstatecollegian.com/article.php?a=9994