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

[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.