Being With Animals by Barbara J. King - Excerpt

8/14/2019 Being With Animals by Barbara J. King - Excerpt

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BARBARA J. KING

Being withAnimals

Why We Are Obsessed with

the Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who

Populate Our World


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Copyright 2010 by Barbara J. King

All rights reserved.Published in the United States by Doubleday Religion, an imprint of theCrown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks ofRandom House, Inc.

Little Dogs Rhapsody in the Night (Three) on page 169 is from The TruroBear and Other Adventures by Mary Oliver, copyright 2008 by Mary

Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data

King, Barbara J.Being with animals : why we are obsessed with the furry, scaly, feathered

creatures who populate our world / Barbara J. King. 1st ed.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Animal behavior Popular works. 2. Emotions in animals Popular works.

3. Human- animal relationships Popular works. I. Title.QL751.K5175 2009

590dc222009020030

ISBN 978-0-385-52363-9

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Ellen Cipriano

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

www.DoubledayReligion.com
http://www.crownpublishing.com/http://www.doubledayreligion.com/http://www.crownpublishing.com/


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To purchase a copy of

Being With Animalsvisit one of these online retailers:

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523639&ref=other_scribd-pdf-random-beingw-0210http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780385523639-0http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385523639http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2665379-10568661?url=http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=0385523637&cmpid=pub-rh-56http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Being-with-Animals/Barbara-J-King/e/9780385523639&afsrc=1&lkid=J28248944&pubid=K124596&byo=1http://www.amazon.com/Being-Animals-Obsessed-Feathered-Creatures/dp/0385523637?tag=randohouseinc2-20http://www.doubledayreligion.com/


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C o n t e n t s

1. A Holy Procession of Animals 1

2. Humans Emerging: From Savanna to Art Cave 8

3. Taming the Wild? 37

4. Cat Mummies and Lion Symbols 64

5. Animal Souls 88

6. Ravens, Shamans, and Dogs Who Dream 109

7. Of Whales and Tortoises 135

8. Articulate Apes and Emotional Elephants 145

9. Dog and Cat (and Buffalo) Mysteries 169

10. Finding Compassion 195

11. Clones, Crows, and Our Future 216

E P I L O G U E 2 2 7

N O T E S 2 2 9

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S 2 4 7

I N D E X 2 4 9

http://www.doubledayreligion.com/


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waiting clergy. As much as the individual animals themselves, it wasthe animal- human relationship that was celebrated. The choir sang,

and young girls lined the aisles, waving colorful ags. As the animalsslowly turned to move back up the aisle, the human congregants sang and moved in harmony with the music.

As I watched the ritual, I saw how the joys inherent in sharing theworld with animals lighted peoples faces and enriched their voices.Throughout the church, people bent forward to whisper a word to thedog by their side, or to re- settle into their carriers a cat or a rabbit.

People not only came to the ceremony in the thousands, they also brought their own animals along. When the service concluded,people and animals walked, two by two, into the cathedrals garden sothat clergy could bless each pet with loving words and touch.

The blessing ceremony at St. Johns is the most elaborate andfamous of any in the world, but many smaller ceremonies in othertowns and cities take place on the rst Sunday in October, a day set

aside to remember the patron saint of animals. People attend not towatch passively but to participate actively, to bring into alignment andharmony their love of animals and their love of God.

Rituals like this, whether focused on the Christian God or someother modern God or gods, mark an emotional connection betweenanimals and people that stretches far back into human prehistory. Ourspecies, Homo sapiens, becamehuman by being with animals.

Deep inside a cave in prehistoric France, early Homo sapienspeoplegathered in near darkness. Artists in the group had adorned the wallswith pigments, rich reds and jet blacks, in order to create spectacularanimal images. Now the group assembled in dim light, singing andmoving rhythmically together.

As they lost themselves in the pulse and the beat, some people began to experience a slightly altered consciousness and a heightened

connection with the living creatures whose representations graced thewalls. Hunters felt at one with the animals they would stalk the nextday. A skilled healer stared at a half- man, half- bird image cruder thanthe others. Feeling the rst stirrings of a transformation, he knew he

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would soon be released from his earthly moorings and in contact withotherworldly creatures and forces. 1

In prehistoric Turkey, at the village of Catalhyk around 8,000 years ago, a man was buried together with a lamb. The bodies, one per-son and one animal, were kept slightly separate in death by an unusual,contorted position of the lamb and by the placement of a mat or blan-ket between the two. Yet, in a place where animals were routinelydomesticated but not usually buried, the lamb was placed in a gravesiteused traditionally for human ancestors: a pit dug beneath a house oor.

In subsequent years, three other people were buried there as well. 2 At around the same time in Israel, people at a place called Kfar

HaHoresh constructed a large mosaic. The material used was not tile, but the carefully positioned bones of humans and gazelles. The image(when viewed from above) is the prole of an animal, perhaps a boar,an aurochs, or even a lion. Elsewhere at the site, a human skull was buried underneath the oor of a rectangular structure and just above

a headless gazelle carcass. 3In ancient China, a hermit called Zhuangzi entered a game park

and took aim at a magpie. Preoccupied with a cicada, the magpie didnot notice Zhuangzi; neither the cicada nor a nearby preying mantisnoticed the magpie. The magpie swept down on its prey in highexcitement and gobbled them both up. A feeling of compassionwelled up in Zhuangzi: here in the certainty of death was the essence

of life. For months, Zhuangzi felt depressed, but also enlivened bynew thoughts: Life is about endless transformation, and death shouldnot be feared; realizing this, Zhuangzi felt an exhilarating freedomthat changed his life. 4

In modern- day California, a small group of people shared anamazing encounter with a fty- foot-long, fty-ton whale. In thewaters beyond San Franciscos Golden Gate Bridge, a female hump-

back whale became tangled in equipment used by crabbers, abouttwenty crab- pot ropes, each 240 feet long and with weights attachedevery sixty feet. Unable to free herself, and struggling to keep her blowhole above the waterline, the whale was in real peril.

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When rescuers arrived by boat, they determined that the besthope of saving the creature would be to cut her free, working in the

water . To swim and dive right near such a powerfuland frightened sea mammal presented serious risk. The procedure to free the whaletook an hour, but the mighty creature remained calm throughout, andemitted what rescuers described as a strange kind of vibration. Oncefreed, she did not bolt for the open sea. Rather, she circled her four res-cuers in a way that struck them as joyful. She then approached eachperson and nudged each in turn. Diver James Moskito said later, It

felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that wehad helped it. . . . When I was cutting the line going through themouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me. It was an epicmoment of my life. . . . It was an amazing, unbelievable experience. 5

These examples tell a fundamental truth about how we humansmake sense of the world: we think and we feel through being with ani-mals. Utterly unique to the human- animal realm is an emotional kind

of mutual relating. Yes, the ever- shifting light on the walls of theancient Grand Canyon or on the cypress trees swaying gently in aTuscan breeze may move us profoundly. Yet neither the light, thecanyon, nor the trees will ever actively engage with our admiring gaze, or with our emotions. They will never give back emotionally asanimals can.

To feel that mutual kinship with another creature is a special expe-

rience, one that brings us into attunement with the whole world. Itsa feeling deep in the chest, resonant in the heart: I share with all crea-tures a way of being in this world. All animals, in their own ways, struggleto live, and feel their lives in different ways. I belong here in this world, withthem.

We know these things, and in a sense we may even take them forgranted. After all, we live in a time and place where animals infuse our

lives. We share our homes with animals, and make ourselves mentallyand physically healthier by doing so. We vacation in national parksand other animal- rich areas because we want to witness our compan-ion animals wild counterparts and their behavior. Most of us eat ani-

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mals and dress ourselves with animals. The sports teams we root fortake on animals as symbols, and the cereals we buy are sold to us by

talking animals. The tales we read to our children are inhabited by ani-mals who impart wisdom; the poems, novels, and adventure storieswe read may ignite our felt connection to nature.

But why should it be this way? Why are we humans emotionallyinvested in, and sometimes transformed by, close encounters with ani-mals? Why does a multimillion- dollar pet industry in the United Statesthrive even in tough economic times? Why do most major cities invest

in a zoological park and an aquarium? Why are sports teamsnotonly the Lions, the Tigers, and the Bears, but also the Jayhawks, theMud Hens, and the Marlins so often named for animals? Why arethe television shows Animal Planet and Nature so enduringly popular?Why is an animated mouse named Mickey recognized instantlyaround the world? Why do our emotions at being with animals sooften spill over into religious experience? In Being with Animals,we will

journey through prehistory and history, and across the globe in thepresent day as well as the past, in order to answer these compelling questions. As we go, we will bring animals, emotion, and evolutiontogether with religiosity, humans expression of religious awe. We willlook over the shoulders of scientists who offer the latest insights fromanthropology, archaeology, and studies of mammals and birds.

For me its a natural, bringing together these four threads. Im an

animal lover, and have been since childhood. My personal life revolvesaround family, which we dene to include a rather stunning numberof domestic cats (and the occasional rabbit). My professional life as ananthropologist is chock full of monkeys and apes; I lived for fourteenmonths in Kenya in order to track and observe baboons, and morerecently have observed gorilla and bonobo groups closer to home. Iteach and write about evolutionary matters, with a focus on humans

as the apes who became upright walkers, speech talkers, and believersin the supernatural.

I believe that one of our most profound connections with animalslies in our emotional experiences of the world and each other. For one




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animal, Homo sapiens, that world of emotion became a world of reli-gious ritual, and it fascinates me how that happened and what part

other animals played as it came about. And I love to tell animal stories. The stories offered in this book

are grounded in three themes. Animals the mammals and birds of which I write are complicated beings. They may bond as friends, andoffer to each other comfort in times of trouble. They may also snarl,snap, attack, maim, and hurt each other, even outside of the predator- prey context when they are just hunting for a good meal. No animals

are noble savages, expressing a simple ethic of goodness and simplecompassion, and no animals are only efcient killing machines atwork in a nature run red with blood. Like us, animals tend to expresscomplex facets of their being. Like us, they have personalities andmoods, and animal equivalents of grumpy mornings and sunny after-noons. All this is as true for animals when they go about their dailylives with each other as when they interact with us.

This complexity comes about because of variation. Even within aspecies, individual animals differ dramatically in how they tend torespond to events. Some of those differences probably stem from ani-mals genetic makeup. Genes matter! Genes may cause an animal totend to be more shy, or more gregarious. Still, a resounding principleto emerge from recent science studies is that animals are highlyresponsive to the ways that they are reared, and to their immediate

surroundings just as we humans are.Of course, we humans are animals. This is my second theme. Its

only for simplicitys sake that I write as if humans and animals aresomehow separate categories. The mutual relating we engage in withother animals transforms us, yes, but that transformation rests squarelyin the common evolutionary trajectory that we share with other crea-tures. We, all of us, have evolved, and changed over time. Homo sapi-

ens, those evolutionary newcomers in a scene choked with animalsand plants in thriving prehistoric ecosystems in Africa, evolved tothink and feel with other animals right from the start. To explore being with animals is to explore our own past, from hunting and gathering

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lifeways on the African savannas through Ice Age art through earlysettled villages in Anatolia and beyond.

And nally, being with animals may heighten our senses througha renewed appreciation of the beauty of evolutionary continuity or adeepened sense of Gods hand at work in the world, or both. We nd,indeed we create, our best selves through animals because it is onlyother animals who can offer us the transcendent experience of sharedways of being in the world.

This transcendence sits, ironically, side by side with the reality that

some humans, in some postindustrial, frenzied, all- about- ourselvessocieties, have lost the knowledge and the feeling, the visceral cer-tainty that lives in the body as well as in the brain that we are part of a community of animals. Yet lost cannot be the right word, becausethe knowledge and the certainty is there: hidden perhaps, but therenonetheless. Its just as the writer Thomas Berry says: [Animals] pro-vide an emotional intimacy so unique that it can come to us from no

other source. The animals can do for us, in both the physical and thespiritual orders, what we cannot do for ourselves or for each other. 6

Animals and emotional intimacy and evolution. Lets startthere.




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To purchase a copy of

Being With Animalsvisit one of these online retailers:
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523639&ref=other_scribd-pdf-random-beingw-0210http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780385523639-0http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385523639http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2665379-10568661?url=http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=0385523637&cmpid=pub-rh-56http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Being-with-Animals/Barbara-J-King/e/9780385523639&afsrc=1&lkid=J28248944&pubid=K124596&byo=1http://www.amazon.com/Being-Animals-Obsessed-Feathered-Creatures/dp/0385523637?tag=randohouseinc2-20

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Being With Animals by Barbara J. King - Excerpt

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