Wild As Wild Can Be

Shanti is a wild animal, breed in captivity for human profit and pleasure, sold to the highest bidder: me.

African Grey parrots have not been domesticated for thousands of years like dogs, cats, chickens and cows. They are today the genetic equals of their diminishing and endangered forest siblings, at most a couple of generations from tropical mangrove and savannah. They are wild as wild can be.

We take a parrot from its flock, from its parents, from its habitat. We deny it flight, freedom, mating, parenting and the society of birds. We keep it in a cage. We exercise our ownership and dominion. We take on a casual and temporary responsibility, but when human concerns intrude or when the animal becomes a nuisance, we break our promises. We get on with life; and they suffer, go crazy or die.

It troubles me how blithely and brazenly we invade this creature’s nature, its purpose. We assume – based on nothing but banal arrogance, reckless speciesism and empty assertion – that a life among us is an enviable life. Or worse, we assume that life doesn’t really matter all that much to the dumb creature; for mattering is exclusively human.

Shanti and I have oddly come together—-the 9-month-old Psittacus erithacus and the 62-year-old Homo sapiens. We have become symbiotic, fallen in love. A fate sealed.

Certainly it's a good deal for the grateful human and not the worst that could have befallen the choiceless parrot. But I wonder about the legitimacy of this covenant. We have exerted unwarranted authority when we usurp all the freedom of the wild, all the rights of nature's creatures.

Genesis and Animal Rights

God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. —Genesis 1:20-21

It’s low tide and the birds are abundant. I am awake to gulls and sandpipers, in awe of unknowable animal consciousness.

The journey to justice, dignity and rights for nonhuman animals begins in humble contemplation and wonder.

It’s almost always imprudent to make pronouncements about the limits of science. What once seemed inscrutable and hopelessly beyond comprehension has turned out—time and again—to be knowable, accessible and of vast practical consequence. The progress of scientific knowledge and the development of new technologies are so fast and vast that it would be foolish to make predictions even 10 years out, much less than 100, 1,000 or 10,000.

If I had a crystal ball I wouldn’t be surprised to find in the blink of an eye at the end of the 21st century enormous advances in addressing the problems we face today: global warming, overpopulation, degradation of the environment, disease, ageing, world hunger and war. We may have much longer human lifespans, colonies in space, brain-boosting drugs and a world running on energy sources we’ve barely begun to develop today.

Of course, dystopian outcomes are also possible. We may fail to address climate change; we may blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons; we may be wiped out by a virus. We may be too aggressive, xenophobic, reckless or unlucky to survive.

But whether the next century brings us peace and prosperity or misery and megadeath, animal consciousness will remain largely impenetrable to us. What it’s like to be a fox, a bat, a dolphin or a parrot will remain both wondrous and distant.

We may gain enormous knowledge of the psychology and biochemistry of other animals, but we won’t grasp their inner life. The species barrier will remain. Intersubjectivity—communion—is beyond science.

Although we can communicate with animals, we’re too different to share an inner world. We cannot experience camels and eagles or even fellow Great Apes the way we experience other human beings. We don’t share body and mind with other species. Thus, our communion with them is the stuff of intuition, deep empathy and ultimately, the imagination.

But don’t despair. The intersubjective gap can be filled by love and respect. When we stretch our compassion, our imagination and our awareness, we learn that somebody is home in animal sentience. We don’t quite know who or what she feels, but she’s there. On the inside. Sacred. Alive.

When we contemplate living creatures like these gulls and sandpipers we find them lovable; and our capacity for love expands to meet them. That is awe. That is wonder.

Radical wonderment is the message I take away from the Biblical creation myth – not that man has dominion over the animals, but that “God” saw Creation in wonder. “God saw that it was good.”

God—the contemplator-in-chief—saw the sandpipers, the dolphins, the parrots and every creature in the wondrous intuitive light of empathy.

This is a light, I believe, that will eventually guide us to reject dominion over animals and honor their rights. Let there be light.

Paradigm Shift: Animals Have Their Own Interests

During a lull in the heavy rain I watched a dozen White Egrets in the grass south of Lake Casitas. Two families of deer were prancing on the hill above them at the forest’s edge, no doubt delighted with the replenishment of the grasslands. Across the road stood a solitary, statuesque Great Blue Heron. I carried with me an essay explaining how it is that we come to own wild animals. When the rain started up again, I went home to pet and hold Shanti, the 9-month old wild animal I live with. He's starting to greet me with “Hello.”

The dominion we grant ourselves to exploit every living creature on Earth is regulated exclusively for human benefit. We have crafted some exceptions to the general rule that animals are ours for the using and killing. For example, animal fights for human entertainment are banned in the United States, and laws against cruelty to animals limit some obvious and egregious abuses. We have also protected some animals through instruments like the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

But for the billions of hunted, slaughtered, tormented and abused animals outside these statutes, it’s basically tough luck. They have little legal recourse. Wolves may be protected from being shot, plowed or urbanized into utter extinction, but only because such protection is viewed as a public (i.e., human) good. Rarely, if ever, are the animal’s own interests taken into consideration.

One problem is that legal theory reserves the concept of rights for “persons.” Animals have no standing in court. As a result of being defined out of the game, animal interests are by definition subservient to human interests.

The paradigm needs to shift. Animal rights must be represented—-first in our imaginations and then in our courts and legislatures--independently of human interests.

Until this happen, no one is safe. Not the herons, not the deer, not the parrots, not the people, not the Earth.

Hope and Change for Parrots and Other Sentient Beings?

The more I learn about the commercial parrot trade, the more gravely concerned I become about the future of these animals, both in the wild and in captivity. There has been progress in the protection and preservation of wild parrots and some endangered species have even been rescued from extinction. But native parrot habitat continues to disappear at a rate far beyond alarming and as Mira Tweeti explains in her brilliant book , the plight of captive-bred parrots like Shanti is grim. Parrots are daily abandoned and mistreated and the few rescue facilities that exist are understaffed, underfunded and overwhelmed.

We need to begin to look at parrots and other animals from their, not our, point of view. Deep empathy and compassionate listening must extend to animals as well as people. This is an easy concept to articulate, but it’s immensely hard to put into practice.

We are as gods to the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea— an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient deity, but not a benevolent one. We bring animals into sentience for the sole purpose of killing them. We raise and slaughter billions of animals every year just in the United States. We create to annihilate.

Factory farming is an economically unsustainable practice that degrades the environment on virtually every level: pollution of the air, global warming, fuel inefficiencies, desertification, extinction of species. You name it. Human meat and dairy consumption are toxic to the planet. Factory farming brutalizes us as it destroys us; we are desensitized to the suffering of animals as we commit global environmental suicide.

Our world is presented to us as if designed for man. But there is no reason to believe that is so. The assumption that evolution culminates in homo sapiens is false. We know it to be false. We know there is no evidence that human interests are superior to monkey or giraffe or trout interests, but we have inherited and constructed a world based on this false premise.

Is another way possible? Is there an alternative to our radical presumptuousness? Is there something other than taking our supremacy and centrality for granted? Is there a way out?

Incrementally we may make progress. Just as human rights have emerged and evolved over the centuries, so too may animal rights. Human slavery, for example, though not eradicated, has been condemned and outlawed by virtually every nation on Earth. Animal welfare has emerged as a public concern of civilized people over the past two centuries, and it has always been a consideration for thoughtful people.

While we are a long long way from ceasing to view animals as commodities and a longer way yet to granting them the fundamental rights they deserve, our values are gradually changing. The conversation has begun; the questions have been raised.

Prof. Cass Sunstein is President Obama’s nominee for director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has also been mentioned as a possible future Obama choice for the US Supreme Court. Sunstein is extremely fluent in animal rights discourse. He has written, “There can be no question that the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals is now being fundamentally rethought.”

The Sanctity of Parrot Life

In the year 2000 the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and the World Parrot Trust published their “Action Plan.”

Noting that “No other group of birds has been subjected to more exploitation, numerically and financially, than parrots,” the WPT called upon the millions of ordinary people who keep psittacines to “accept more responsibility for the survival of parrots in the wild and the welfare of existing captive parrots.”

I’m one of the millions of ordinary people who live with a parrot, so I’m going to try to do my share.

According to journalist Mira Tweti, author of "Parrots and People," there are between 40 and 60 million companion birds in the USA alone, perhaps half of them parrots. If just 1% of us bird "owners" began to lobby vigorously for the conservation and protection of parrots, we’d have an enormous influence.

But we can’t do it alone. We also need the cooperation of the parrot industry—those who profit from parrots. They includes cage and accessory makers, food suppliers and distributors, pet stores, and of course breeders.

On the conservation side of the equation, 28% of the 330 known parrot species are threatened with extinction. The parrots we love are decimated by the bird trade, destruction and fragmentation of native habitats, and hunting for food, feathers or for crop protection.

Parrots did fine for many millions of years before they ran into people.

Birds in general are perhaps the only living dinosaurs. They survived the extinction events that finished off other dinosaurs because they had the most powerful brains. That made them more adaptable, more capable of prospering in emerging ecological niches.

European parrot fossils have been dated at 54 million years, although modern parrots may be “only” 20- 23 million years old.

Parrots flourish in warm regions of South America, Africa and Australasia. They love the sun, the verdant tropical forest and the open sky.

What got them in the most trouble with us? Their brains, their looks and the fact that we want their land.

But conserving their habitat and outlawing their importation is only half the battle.

We also have the vast responsibility to protect those many millions of parrots who live in captivity.

Most of that job is educational. We need to teach our children that parrots are not commodities, not things. We need to acknowledge the sanctity of parrot life. As awareness increases, we’ll become better (and surely fewer) parronts. We won’t buy and sell parrots on a whim. We won’t release them to fend for themselves or kill them when we get bored with them. We will treat them with the respect we accord to people, to each other. They will join our “each other,” our community of consciousness and conscience.

Illustration: Sinornithosaurus millenii, a flying, feathered dinosaur ancestor of modern birds

In Memory of Arne Naess, Deep Ecologist

One of the reasons it’s so hard to acknowledge the rights of animals is that we are all complicit in their abuse and exploitation. If we acknowledge our culpability, we’ll feel obligated to do something about it.

But what are we supposed to do? This was the fundamental question that occurred to the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess who died in his sleep last week at age 96. He was the founder of the Deep Ecology movement.

According to Naess, there is no absolute answer. Each person must develop her own “ecosophy. ”

Naess thought that once we recognized a truly non-anthropocentric ecology, wisdom would follow. The paradigm would change.

According to Naess, no creature has privileged value in the ecosystem; we are all equal.

Living with Shanti as an equal does shift the paradigm for me. I’m obliged to figure out how a person can live without exploiting a parrot or a pig or a cow or a dolphin. It’s not easy because our civilization is predicated on the notion that human beings are superior to all other beings.

There have been previous human attempts to live without exploiting animals, but in practical terms, such a utopia is impossible.

Jainism, an inspiring Indian religion with 10,000,000 adherents, is based on the principle that all living beings have souls and that all souls are equal. Nonviolence (Ahimsa) is a foundational principle, and Jain compassion extends even to microscopic organisms.

Jains notwithstanding, however, our spiritual concerns for animals are trumped by our perceived anthrosupremacy and our massively invasive technology.

There is no way to take a Hippocratic animal-rights oath to do no harm. Human technology harms animals. Period. We are big, smart superpredators and we’ve developed immense power over the rest of life on Earth.

How then can we reduce the harm we do— the overpopulation, destruction of habitats, depletion of resources, extinction of species, global warming, pollution of air and sea?

Although our concern for animals is different from our human concerns, it must still be guided by humility, austerity and compassion. It makes sense for humans to end world hunger among our fellow humans, but it is scientifically incoherent to advocate the eradication of animal hunger. Some species’ gratification of hunger comes at the expense and demise of other animals. And we, one way or another, are in charge. We will always be making enormous decisions for other species. Some will result in death.

We have a special role in protecting animals not from all harm, but at the very least from the deliberate and unnecessary infliction of pain and suffering.

The first step, I believe, is to take other beings seriously. That's what shifts the paradigm. We must realize we are not superior, and we are not alone.

Photos: South American parrots and a Jain temple complex in India.