Do Elephants Have Souls?

Metadata

• Author: [[Caitrin Keiper]]
• Full Title: Do Elephants Have Souls?
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls

Highlights

• Consider how any empathetic connection forms. You begin with some point of commonality with your own life, something as elaborate as a similar identity or experience or as simple as a feeling everybody knows firsthand, such as pain or affection. From what is same, however basic, you can begin to bridge the difference to what is other, and learn something new through someone else’s eyes.
  • Tags: [[favorite]] [[empathy]]
• This leap will always involve some element of imagination, as we cannot know exactly what someone may be feeling on the other side. Thus our empathy and irrepressible imagination are not merely impediments to clear understanding, but may instead offer new avenues toward it.
• In a 1990 paper serendipitously titled “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” Brooks observes that evolutionarily, “the essence of being and reacting” — that is, “the ability to move around in a dynamic environment, sensing the surroundings to a degree sufficient to achieve the necessary maintenance of life and reproduction” — was a far more difficult development than reason-centered capabilities, as impressive as they are. More importantly, the latter emerged in continuity with the former, not as a detached occurrence with an unrelated meaning.
• Staff members at the Elephant Sanctuary told me of an incident with one of their “girls,” who spotted a fallen bird outside her barn and ran right over to it, utterly distraught. She crooned and stroked it and did not settle down till it had been properly laid to rest. What did this mean to her, exactly? We don’t know. But she was clearly very moved by a fellow creature’s woe and had no trouble seeing it for what it was, different life forms though they were. How sad when we, “higher” animals who share this gift, convince ourselves to dull it.
• It is interesting to consider how the everyday proximity to different kinds of creatures may have affected the development of these beliefs. That is, elephants, higher-order primates, and the like are not native to the West, and thus our basic common sense of what “animals” can think or do calibrates at the level of, say, horses and dogs — not to malign the intelligence of horses and dogs, which we tend to underappreciate anyway. But in Asia and Africa, where there’s been much more natural interaction between people and very smart animals — and not as novelties but as members of other communities — most cultures seem to take a more expansive view of animal potential.)
  • Tags: [[animal intelligence]]
• But finally, on the optimistic side of understanding, there is a reminder of the awesome significance of language in the urging to tell what happened. What could be more crucial in the search for truth than this ability to translate individual experience into common comprehensibility? You just tell what happened, and someone else will hear it.
• Freedom is the hardest, greatest gift, returning nothing to the giver but the selfless fact of having given it.