anger and pain

[freckles_and_doubt]

This BoingBoing post leads to this New York Times article, which has just made me cry bitterly and helplessly for twenty minutes. (NYT requires that you register as a user in order to access articles. It's worth it).

It's not enough that human activity is slaughtering elephants mindlessly: we also have to do it so cruelly, so thoughtlessly that the entire species is going into post-traumatic stress. Human incursions are destroying elephant social constructs, disrupting a slow, complex, careful, supportive and rational system which allows elephants to self-regulate their enormous strength, to socialise themselves and thus contain the exaggerated behaviours of adolescents through the influence of older members of the group. Fragmentation of family groups is wrecking this process. Even worse, experience of the deaths of family members is traumatising young elephants and teaching them about cruelty, and they're starting to attack humans more frequently. We haven't just decimated them, we've broken the survivors, destroyed the functionality and dignity of their society.

The extent to which this study's findings in elephant societies mirrors current trends in human society, breaks my heart. It's one thing for our own young to be deprived of mature parenting and exposed to ongoing violence: our social functioning at the moment is absurd and dangerous, but you could argue that it's our own problem and something we're doing to ourselves. It's another order of iniquity altogether to impose our own disfunctions on another species, as we are undoubtedly doing to other species besides the elephants: not even that we assume, with absolute arrogance, that we have some kind of right to destroy other species for our own profit, but that often we don't even notice. I can't work out if it's worse to be unthinkingly destructive or actively psychopathic. As an individual, the human race is both. It could learn a huge amount about self-regulation from the elephants, who have, if left undisturbed, a far better ability to control their own enormous destructive power.

Things like this make me not want to be human. I am ashamed to be part of a species which could commit this kind of crime. I hope we destroy ourselves quickly, soon, in time that some other remnants of life on this poor planet have an actual chance at survival.

Comments

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

mm, read about this in NS some months back. Awful.

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Eloquent and moving (and that's your post; I haven't read the NYT article yet). To me, the unthinking destructiveness is worse. The majority of people aren't psychotic bastards, but they have well-developed blinkers that make this sort of thing possible, and them quietly complicit.

The travesty is that your views above, especially if they're expressed by someone less articulate than you, tend to be seen as hysterical, silly, and/or willfully depressive. It's far more mainstream to shrug and say tant pis. Now that's mentally ill.

But who am I to criticise? My LJ icon is a real picture of a real fly, and I'm sure they didn't do anything nice to it to get those micro glasses on. I like leather coats and cheap flights. It's not slaughtering elephants, but if there is a difference, it's is only a matter of degree. I've thought deeply about this, and still I do these things, quite aware of my hypocrisy. Maybe the psychotic bastards are worse after all.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

The problem with our current world - okay, one of the many problems with our current world - is that its disfunctions are so enormous, complex and far-reaching that an individual who is aware of them is likely to feel overwhelmed and helpless. I can spend twenty minutes locked in my office crying about the elephants, but what can I do? their tragedy is the result of colonialism, post-colonial African politics, capitalism, poverty, poaching, war, overpopulation, habitat destruction, global warming, and disrupted human society leading to moral decay.

Maybe blinkers are actually necessary to get most people out of bed in the morning. As Douglas Adams says, the one thing you cannot possibly afford as a human is a sense of perspective. But it's a lovely, vicious circle, because the problem is certainly not being addressed as long as everyone is going "la la la!" with their fingers in their ears.

I think we'll crash, personally. I think the weight of unthinking humanity driven by a few thinking, selfish egotists will run us spectacularly into the ground, taking the planet with us. Aliens from across the 'verse will come and show their children the blasted cinder that was Earth, and tell them "That's what happens when a species doesn't put its toys away when it's finished playing." And serve us right.

It's just rough on the elephants, though.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

It is a pity, but (I think) specifically so because elephants are so lovely. If we were breaking the back of, say, hagfish, and causing them to descend into bloody welters of interspecies violence - well, I for one would find it much easier to live with.

A sociologist called Robert O'Connell cites some interesting work on the fact that most animals have one fairly decorative or less-lethal set of weapons (e.g., deer have horns) for fighting other members of their species, and another (e.g., sharp and powerful hooves on the same deer) with which they implement lethal force against, say, predators. O'Connell speculates as to whether the human lack of natural weapons led us to cultivate exactly the kind of nasty, snarling, craven approach to killing which a species that got picked on a lot in its youth would. If so, I guess the tragedy you point out is that a critter like an elephant, usually able to be quite benign in its relative unkillability, is being taught to kill to survive and propoagate. It's a shame, but it's not unique in the repertoire of mammalian experience.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

We probably are breaking the back of hagfish and destroying their happy hagfish family life, but I think the thing about elephants is the extent to which they're (a) extremely highly social animals, with complex and powerful structures in place, and (b) large and dangerous enough that we really notice when they start being unhappy. I don't know if you could say hagfish have a society. Maybe they do and we simply haven't discovered how badly it's being trashed by, oh, divers, fishers and things being dropped into the water by cruise liners. We're certainly stuffing with polar bears, but they do have a certain cute and cuddly quotient, in a ravening and psychotic sort of way.

And, yes, I can definitely see humanity as the feeble geek species lacking both muscle and weight who gets back at the playground bullies by designing machines to destroy the WORLD, mwa ha ha. Guess that wasn't an idle threat, then. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Then again - humanity, disfunctional psychopath.

This wouldn't happen if we were all orang-utans, probably because the ability to hold aggressors above your head and tie them into complex Boy Scout knots gives a species a certain sense of security.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

My daddy was a Scout Master, from which I know that Scout Masters' little daughters can tie pretty good knots (till they grow up and stop practising them), but the scouts themselves aren't that great.

, aside

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I'd think it would be a significantly more awful experience if you were being held in the air and tied into knots by an orang-utan who couldn't get them right first time, necessitating several goes and lots of untying and retying. Painful.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Well, now, remember that most primates (oh, and dolphins) torture, raid, and rape as a matter of fact. So this orang-utan civilization of yours might look just like the ol' H. Sap. sap. civilization, except that the Orang-utan Idi Amin would be tying people in knots before killing and eating them.

I'm not sure I can fully swallow your depiction of elephants as far more sociable than hyenas or sunbirds, but this isn't my field. Again, I wonder if the ethics and the aesthetics aren't proving difficult to separate.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

"charismatic macro-fauna" as they say.

aesthetics: spotlight, not smokescreen

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Ethics and aesthetics are difficult to separate. I admit to feeling quite queasy with unhappiness when I read about this phenomenon. I think elephants are wonderful, pretty much for aesthetic reasons alone. However, if we are ruining one creature's social structure, or many (every?) creature's social structure it doesn't make a difference to the acceptability of our actions. It is not okay to trash the social structure of even one creature (if we can avoid it, I suppose I should add).

The plight of the elephant, however, due to the aesthetic of the animal involved, might draw much needed attention to the human actions which are bringing it about. Such attention, if it causes us to change our actions in horrified response might have far reaching effects similar to the far reaching effects of our distructive actions.

To push aside the horror at realising what we've done to elephants by saying we've done it to other animals too (and besides other animals can be pretty nasty too) and that it is simply the aesthetic of elephants that is finally bringing our awfulness to our attention does not in any way negate that horror. On the contrary, it increases that horror by emphasising how the situation of the elephant is merely our pinprick view of a much larger scene of devastation.

You just like stirring...

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

I don't 'just like stirring', and it wearies me when people say that kind of thing. It's part of the general pathologizing of disagreement which I think has weakened our society since the advent of the postmodern era.

Your point re: spotlights is intellectually sound, but I reiterate that in practice we DO only care about the woes of pretty animals and not the ones we eat or kill for their skins. You're right, we shouldn't. I don't think our points necessarily clash: you're simply adding that our awareness of our hypocrisy should spur us to further action against the awful phenomenon we are concerned about. Do I have you right?

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose. Although ... it's more our awareness of our thoughtlessness than our awareness of hypocrisy ... although, again, that's just a game with words and it really amounts to the same thing.

And as for you stirring: first, I should have put a smiley, as it was said with amusement, not censure. Second, it's true! You do like stirring! I stand by my statement, although I'm not saying you don't mean what you say. You just rather enjoy poking an ants' nest. smiley smiley

I apologise for wearying you, and shall saunter off to weaken society in some other way.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you should have used a smiley. And to repeat, I don't like stirring. I actually far prefer concord, perhaps with a side order of teasing, but actually fighting with someone is a lose-lose proposition which I may find myself unable to avoid, but which I don't relish in the slightest. When I'm in a fight, though, I do think of it as my duty as a sapient creature who should mean what he says, to conduct myself honestly and dispute the issues I find worth disputing - onerous more than enjoyable, although I do take a technical pride in doing it well when I can. Perhaps it's this behavior - i.e., not backing down - that you misidentify as enjoyment.

And, of course, I didn't say you weary me, although you seem to prefer acting as if I did. Fine, then.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

My sense of elephants as highly social is gained from the 10-page NYT article which interviews various experts who describe them as highly social. They have long lives, good memories and a very close-knit, intricate and supportive family structure. I do take your point about aesthetics, but I think in this case, quite apart from the charismatic mammal problem, it's a particularly sophisticated social system that's being destroyed, apparently more sophisticated than many other animals.

Also from the article, elephants apparently don't torture or rape as a matter of course, they seem to do it as a response to trauma and social disruption. Which makes me wonder how far human observations of dolphin or primate violence are a sort of quantum observer effect - it might happen because the fact that we are there to observe it means that animal society's function has been disrupted. Although this might also be wishful thinking.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

I worry that I have lost the strand of your argument. Your first paragraph seems to imply that the more sophisticated an animal society - in our terms, of course, and predicated on the idea that longer lives mean more complex interactions - the worse we should feel about disrupting it. This seems hard to pursue. Any animal behaviorist or zoologist will gladly sit you down and tell you at length how complex the social relations of his or her chosen animal's life is: I chose hyenas and sunbirds for precisely that reason. So, how do we evaluate complexity?

As for this 'quantum observer effect'... uh, I think you're just flailing here. Now humans are the cause of all ill, whether its male lions killing their predecessor's offspring or inchneumon flies laying eggs in caterpillars. Nature's redness in tooth and claw speaks pretty strongly against any attempt to garb any one species - dolphin, marmot or wallaby - in the garb of the angels.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

A complex and sophisticated animal society basically means that there are all sorts of other unpleasantnesses we can inflict on the species apart from simply killing them, or even killing them unpleasantly. Now the special offer at Humanity's Take-Out Bar is unpleasant death plus a side order of species trauma. I don't think I'm saying this is better, or worse, than simply killing animals in large quantities. I'm saying it's something more. I object to what seems to me to be the projection of our own social disfunction onto species who would be perfectly functional if left to themselves. And to say that elephants are highly social is not for an instant to say that hyenas or hummingbirds are not. I'm talking about my response to a specific instance, not trying to establish the Unified Theory Of All Animal Societies Anywhere. Surely the more a species function depends on interactions and mutual dependencies among a population, the easier it is to unbalance it?

I also at no point said that humanity was the cause of all ills or that all animals are dear little fluffy bunnies, please stop taking my statements and exaggerating them into absolutes. I am interested to consider the possibility that some violent animal behaviours may not necessarily be intrinsic to the animals, but rather the result of human presence. I agree that some species probably are quite capable of violence and nastiness without our intervention, but surely there is at least some possibility, given our widespread effect on animal populations and environments, that other behaviours may be basically "unnatural", i.e. responses to human effects on habitat, social functioning or whatever? Is this so radical or absurd a speculation?

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Neither radical nor absurd - please stop taking my statements and exaggerating them into absolutes. But you didn't start off saying 'some', you implied 'most' or even 'a lot', and I think your use of the term 'function' speaks directly to the hollow core of your argument. What precisely is the 'functionality' of animal life? What is a 'functional' elephant existence? Something that correlates most closely with our ability to project our feelings about animals onto them? For many animals, especially the higher-order social ones, 'function' includes infanticide and sexual violence. If we disrupted that, would it be as bad as making elephants murderous? If not, why?

I'd also like to understand your statement that some social animals have 'more complex' relationships which are more susceptible to perversion by human influence. I wonder how it is, exactly, that you differentiate elephants from other social animals in this respect.

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

Let me support wytchfynder's championing of useful disagreement. A preference for concord is perfectly compatible with a belief in debating with intellectual integrity. That's how we learn and develop better agreements, anyway.

However, I suspect the current thread is degenerating into an argument over how many angels can dance on the social structure of an elephant.

The essential point of extemp's post was that humans are causing unnecessary suffering to elephants, and this is a tragic thing. I don't think that point is being disputed by anyone? (I'd be interested to hear if it was.) Most of us have a general background awareness that we're doing unpleasant things to the earth and the creatures upon it, and it's painful to have a particular instance described. It should be.

Clearly it's more painful reading about the devastation of elephants than of hagfish. I see a valid argument in the aesthetics/ethics interaction, though I think the question of social complexity is a bit of a cul-de-sac. But ultimately, ethical/moral rationales come down to "because I say so". We can learn from debating each others' rationales, but they're fractalesque, and so sooner or later you have to call time, step back, and admire the pretty patterns.

Since I've stuck my oar in, I'll go on to declare another level of my "say so". (And I'm prepared to go into length about why I say it, but that's not really the point).

I think it's unacceptable for humans to wreak systemic havoc on elephants, hagfish, dolphins, polar bears, hyenas, sunbirds, or the wasps in my back yard. It may not always be avoidable, but to the reasonable best of our ability, we should avoid it.

The naughtiness of the beasties in question is irrelevant to me. For most animals, we have little evidence that they can reason abstractly about their behaviour. They just are. We, on the other hand, can choose whatever behaviour we like, and can even get quite frustrated while debating the finer points of morality. This gives humans a unique responsibility. Even if all animals routinely torture and rape one another, or poke each other with spoons, there's no justification for us to do the same to them. Nor to stress them such that they do it more.

Self defence is another matter. If the wasps start stinging me, I'm going to exterminate them. (Though if they did it because I stuck my finger into their nest, then I'm an asshole.)

Okay, stopping there. Ooh, but each sentence of this is over-long comment just cries out to be questioned. If debate fatigue hasn't set in on this topic yet, I'll be glad to field the questions, though I may migrate my part of the discussion to rantinggents.

Footnote-ally: humanity as weakling-turned-darkmage/madscientist? Yes, I see that too (and thanks for the O'Connell reference). The question, as ever, is: what are we going to do with Teh Power now that we have it? The answer so far isn't very nice. Certainly not if you're one of those elephants.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm bowing out of this now. The discussion is not only going around in circles, its positions are basically on different planets. Not fun.

My tree-hugging 2c

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

Thought I might as well throw in a comment on this, as ecowarrioring is one thing I will gladly get into an argument about.

I don't think it's a bad thing that we are only concerned about the environment when it comes to cute cuddly animals (like pandas). The cute cuddly animals can then act as "spokespersons" for the plight of all endangered species. While it's true that few people, if any, care that we are losing insect species in urban areas, quite a lot of people will sit up and take notice when presented with a picture of a beautiful butterfly or cute little froggie. If we work to save the cute and cuddlies, many more species will get saved along the way. The plight of pandas has highlighted the need to preserve their habitat, and they're surely not the only ones benefiting. The same can be said for other, more local animals. With the creation and expansion of wildlife reserves, many more fauna and flora benefit from the exposure that elephants/rhinos/lions/leopards bring. Umm, so,if we need to focus on something charismatic and cute to get the general public's attention on to the broader picture, then I'm all for it.

I too disagree with extemp's "quantum observer" idea. Orcas are terribly cruel, like cats, and I really don't think it's to please us. I don't think they do it out of some "broken family upbringing", rather it's just who they are. Perhaps cruelty is linked to intelligence in some way? Although, I've never seen pigs or blue whales doing anything bad, maybe they're just more surreptitious.

Re: My tree-hugging 2c

[khoi-boi.livejournal.com]

I'd disagree that things like Orcas or cats are cruel. "Cruel" is a human perception, not an inherent property. The Orca just does what it does, possibly deriving some pleasure, but there's none of the perception of transgression it takes to be cruel.

Humans are cruel. Dogs, our paramount slaves and imitators, can be cruel. Orcas just like the noise seals make when they connonball...