When Elephants Weep:
On the Emotional Lives of Animals
Jeffrey M. Masson

What are the implications of finding that animals lead emotional lives? Must we change our relationships with them? Have we obligations to them? Is testing products for humans on animals defensible? Is experimentation on animals ethical? Can we confine them for our edification? Kill them to cover, sustain, and adorn ourselves? Should we cease eating animals who have complex social lives, are capable of passionate relations with one another and desperately love their children?

Humans often behave as if something like us were more worthy of respect than something not like us. Racism can partly be described, if not explained, in this way. Men treat other men better than they treat women, based, in part, on their view that women are not like them. Many of these so-called differences are disguises for whatever a dominant power can impose.

The basic idea seems to be that if something does not feel pain in the way a human being feels pain, it is permissible to hurt it. Even though this is not necessarily true, the illusion of differences is maintained out of fear that seeing similarity will create an obligation to accord respect and perhaps even equality. This appears to be the case especially when it comes to suffering, pain, sorrow, sadness. We do not want to cause these things in others because we know what it feels like to experience them ourselves. No one defends suffering as such. But animal experimentation? The arguments revolve around utility, pitting the greater good against the lesser suffering. Implicit, is the greater importance of those who stand to gain (for example, the scientists employed by cosmetic or pharmaceutical companies to do experiments on rabbits) compared with the lesser importance of those who are sacrificed to their benefit.

An animal experimenter will almost inevitably deny that animals suffer in the same way humans do. Otherwise he would implicitly admit to cruelty. Experimental suffering is not randomly imposed without consent on human beings and defended as ethical on the grounds that it would bestow enormous benefit to others. (At least not any longer.) Animals suffer. Can we, should we, measure their suffering, compare it to our own? If it is like ours, how can vivisection continue? Moreover, why should the suffering have to be like ours to be unjustifiable to inflict? It has been argued that humans experience pain more acutely because we remember and anticipate it. Yet it is not apparent that animals cannot do both. But even if they cannot remember or anticipate pain, there is no reason to suppose that they suffer any less than humans do—they are “sensible”—while there is some reason to suppose some may suffer more. British philosopher Brigid Brophy, for example, points out that “pain is likely to fill the sheep’s whole capacity for experience in a way it seldom does in us, whose imagination can create breaks for us in the immediacy of our sensations.” But isn’t the fact that they suffer at all enough?

Speaking of the connection between suffering and selfless love in animals, Darwin wrote: “In the agony of death, a dog has been known to caress his master, and every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man is close enough to hear the anguished cries of the animals. Was it right to send an animal to slaughter who so desperately wished to live? Do they feel the same way? If resistance is to be respected, does lack of resistance confer a right to kill? We do know what the cow wants: the cow wants to live. The cow does not wish to sacrifice itself for any reason. That a cow will willingly offer itself as food is a fable.”

When humans refuse to inflict pain on other humans, surely it is because they assume they feel. It is not because another person can think, nor because they can reason, nor even because they can speak that we respect their physical boundaries, but because they feel. They feel pain, humiliation, sorrow, and other emotions, perhaps even some we do not yet recognize. We do not want to cause suffering. If, as I believe, animals feel pain and sorrow and all the other emotions, these feelings cannot be ignored in our behavior toward them. A bear is not going to compose Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but then neither is our next door neighbor. We do not for this reason conclude that we have the freedom to experiment upon him, hunt him for sport, or eat him for food.

Modern philosophers seem somewhat more willing than biologists to consider animal emotions, and they have also become engaged in issues of animal rights. Philosophers like Mary Midgley and Brigid Brophy in England, Peter Singer in Australia, and Tom Regan and Bernard Rollin in the United States, all take a strong position that animals are capable of complex emotions. In an influential passage, Jeremy Bentham—in 1789—connected sentient feelings with rights this way:

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized that the number of the legs, or the villosity of the skin are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should cross the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Peter Singer, in his book Animal Liberation, explicitly based on Bentham’s nineteenth-century utilitarianism, argues that creatures who feel pain deserve to be shielded from that pain, especially from scientific experimentation and hurtful farming methods. The argument is that sentience — the capacity to have conscious experiences — demands equal consideration to the interests of all creatures. However, although this provides one moral ground, this position does not explicitly accord animals rights. Tom Regan in The Case for Animal Rights goes further, arguing explicitly for protecting the rights of animals who are “capable of being the subject of a life.” Every animal used in every experiment in every laboratory has its own life story. It has felt strong emotions, loved and hated and been devoted to others of its own kind.

It is a subject, and is therefore violated by being treated as an object. Have we the right to tear this being away from its fellows and all that gives its life meaning and put it in a sterile, hostile, aseptic environment to be tortured, maimed, and ultimately destroyed in the name of anything, far less of service to our species? Or lacking the right, do we only have the power?

It may be hard to imagine the sensual universe of another species, but it is not impossible. Our dog’s intense sniffing suggests she is picking up and responding to something beyond our senses. Her ability to take in information hidden from us is impressive; the resulting sudden shifts of mood are honored. We know we are in the presence of something different from us but worthy of our respect.

It is clear that animals form lasting friendships, are frightened of being hunted, have a horror of dismemberment, wish they were back in the safety of their den, despair for their mates, look out for and protect their children whom they love. As Tom Regan would say, they are the subject of lives, as we are. Though animals do not write autobiographies, their biographies can be written. They are individuals and members of groups, with elaborate histories that take place in a concrete world, and involve a large number of complex emotional states. They feel throughout their lives, just as we do.

We owe animals something. Freedom from exploitation and abuse by humankind should be the inalienable right of every living being. Animals are not there for us to drill holes into, clamp down, dissect, pull apart, render helpless, and subject to agonizing experiments. Animals are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and ourselves. They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making. We owe them, at the very least, to refrain from harming them further. If no more, we could leave them be.

When animals are no longer colonized and appropriated by us, we can reach out to our evolutionary cousins. Perhaps then the ancient hope for a deeper emotional connection across the species barrier, for closeness and participation in a realm of feelings now beyond our imagination, will be realized.

Jeffrey M. Masson and Susan McCarthy are the authors of When Elephants Weep, from which this essay has been excerpted with kind permission.

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