And there is, with the wind, the gentle wind, tugging at my t-shirt, sifting through my hair, my eyes, eyelashes, over my hands and my legs, sighing in my ears, a light swell on which the boat rises, and a moment poised on a vertex of consciousness, filled with being.

In boundless seas, I am transfixed, I am moving, I am.

The moon is yet to rise. Behind me stretches the boat, its throbbing engine now silenced with a switch. The mizzen sail billows with mainsail and foresail and the boat leans into the darkness. There is a lull and a surge of air as if the ocean has held its breath briefly and the sails slacken and then fill with a pop, like a slap on the rump of a horse that gets it going again.

There is no other boat or ship around. Except for the faded glow of an instrument panel astern, there is no other light not of the seas. There is just us, in a boat pointed towards an unseen island. People of a purpose sailing on the undefined and relentless purpose of the seas.

Dawn flenses the cowling of night off the waters, revealing clear blue unmarked by cloud. The world opens before us and the bow parts the brightened waters. Flying fish break forth, like a fountain of grasshoppers flushed in a meadow. They arch through the air gleaming and flashing in sunlight. They skitter the surface, rise briefly, and plunge. The water is glassy smooth and secretive again.

Suddenly the sea is alive with spinner dolphins. Their sleek and shining shapes course through the waters in a sibilant rush. In energetic waves they rise and breathe and curve and dip, in a sinuous symphony that scarcely mars the waters.

In the distance others breach the waters into the air in exuberant bursts, spinning and twisting and falling in founts of spray.

The water is cobalt and clear and I watch a dolphin near me swimming its sea as he watches me sail through mine. His curved fin and flippers and flukes, the snout and streamlined body are all crafted to perfection in the waters.

The dolphin effortlessly keeps pace, now scouting ahead, now falling back. And then with a surge he is gone and the rest of them are gone. Barely ten minutes of being with dolphins and yet there is a pang of loss at their passing.

The boat cruises on and the sun rises into brilliant day. Did we come upon the dolphins or they come to us? The dolphins have the answer. And I wish I could ask them. I feel a strange kinship: is it because I know that they know?

The biologists have figured this much. Dolphins and their kin, porpoises and whales, are counted among the most intelligent mammals. Their large, intricate brains, in relation to their body mass, place them somewhere between humans and the great apes. Faced with a mirror, a bottlenose dolphin can recognise himself, a self-recognition that bespeaks a self-awareness and earns a membership in a small but growing club of animal species, which includes the human being. Dolphins are social and empathic, intelligent and emotive. They can be affectionate, enchanting, aggressive, playful, endearing. Their life is in the open sea. The life of the sea is in the dolphins.

The sun sears its way west. As dusk settles, a pod of pilot whale makes its way through the darkening waters. A brown haze hangs over the water, like an airy smog, the breath of a sea monster. Through the haze, the sun drops quickly from blood-red sky to bloodied sea. Our journey is not over.

The intelligence and sentience of dolphin and whale carries consequences, as does ours. Dolphins and whales such as orcas can be driven from delight and vitality to depression and debilitation when held captive in artificial sea ‘worlds’ that are more like tanks and puddles. They can become extremely distressed when people drive them for slaughter or separate a mother and her calf for capture and trade. Then the dolphin or whale must buy its life, its existence of sorts, by succumbing to perform and amuse other people to the chimes of artificial music and the ringing of the cash registers. We know now for sure, the biologists say. They can feel pain. They can suffer. They are sentient beings, too.

Darkness returns and we are enveloped by the seas, with dolphins on our minds. What does it mean to be a human being in a world with other sentient beings? And what the moral imperative of our ability to bring far greater harm and pain to a dolphin than he or she can ever bring to us? Will our search for new worlds and other intelligent life bring us great discovery from the starry sea above, or from the yielding sea below? Or will it come instead from the sea within us, in surprise and joy and revelation? “When it is dark enough”, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “you can see the stars”.

It is early yet in our quest into the lives and languages, the cultures and personalities, of dolphins and whales. The interpreters are still busy: marine scientists and other philosophers, the writers and the poets. Every day they probe the seas, to fish out a nugget of knowledge or ravel out the skein of connections. It is an expansive, artful, expanding world.

Meanwhile, I am on the bow of the boat again, cruising the dark seas. I sense an impending arrival at a place ordained but of my own choosing, too. And a sense of place impels me through waves of thought into a consciousness of what it means to be.

This article appeared titled Dancing with Dolphins in The Hindu Sunday Magazine, 18 Mar 2012. Photographs and latter video courtesy Kalyan Varma.

My first reaction to these two astounding books, as a practicing wildlife scientist with a claim to be involved in animal research and conservation over the last two decades was: “Why were these profoundly important issues never a formal and thorough part of my academic training or practice?”. Is it because issues of human values, morals and ethics are considered outside the pale of training to be a wildlife scientist or ecologist? Is it because they are considered wishy-washy or vague, or, devil-take-you, too subjective? Or is it simply because most present-day wildlife scientists actually do not have a deep understanding or appreciation of the central issues, or if they do, they prefer to keep it to themselves? But why not? We use animals in research. We make claim to efforts to understand them. We make conservation appeals, ostensibly, on their behalf. We probe, we peer, we collect, we tag, we trap, we handle, we follow, we even sometimes kill animals for scientific study. Do we really do all this on the basis of a comprehensive ethical and moral foundation? Or do we shy away from these issues because of being tagged an animal-rights activist even if we are not really speaking of rights? In the context of conservation, can we achieve our goals if we lack a foundational conservation ethic? These books give plenty of food for thought.

The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A brilliant work by a Nobel laureate in literature and a wonderful book to start the year with. A superb form of academic novel (a novel genre, I could say, if the pun may be forgiven), this is top-notch writing on a theme of profound and enduring significance for anyone concerned with human values and connections with other animals.

J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton to deliver the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values, presents the lectures as a fictional story with debate and dialogue crafted into the form of this book. Within it is the story of Elizabeth Costello, herself an academic, invited to deliver lectures at a University, and the lectures she delivers and the ensuing responses. Reading it as a sort of literary dialectic, one is swept by Coetzee’s tight and engaging prose into central moral, philosophical and ethical issues related to the lives of animals. The four commentaries that accompany the central work by Coetzee are excellent, too. The book’s introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann, and accompanying essay commentaries by Wendy Doniger (religion scholar), Barbara Smuts (primatologist), Marjorie Garber (literary theorist ), and Peter Singer (moral philosopher and author of Animal Liberation reviewed below) are worth reading and add great value to this book.

Coetzee touches on vital issues that relate to whether we perceive other animals as beings with interests or as objects for our manipulation. Cruelty, sentience, sympathy, empathy, and the morality of our actions towards other sentient beings is the undercurrent of Coetzee’s words, of Costello’s debate. Vegetarianism, animal intelligence and how we perceive it even as trained scientists, pain and suffering, animal slaughter or ‘sacrifice’, these are all themes seamlessly woven into a gripping narrative thread. Coetzee brings sudden and scathing clarity and depth to the work of a litany of earlier writers, scientists, and philosophers: of Thomas Aquinas and Jeremy Bentham, Franz Kafka and Tom Regan, Wolfgang Köhler and Mary Midgely, and many others.

And yet, the implications are not thrust on you as absolutes, as dogma. It comes in measured words, prompting a dawning awareness. To do this Coetzee draws brilliantly on Kafka’s Red Peter, the ape presenting A Report to An Academy, and Costello’s words only seem to echo his own hidden voice:

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

A phenomenal work, worth reading and re-reading, even if only to be touched by Coetzee’s prose, or perhaps for introspective and outwardly illumination.

Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement by Peter Singer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Compelling and well-written, Peter Singer’s book is a classic that should be required reading for anyone concerned with the interests of animals. Without taking recourse to the issue of the rights of animals, Singer explains how moral and ethical positions we can take and understand become inadequate if restricted only to humans. Trying to separate humans as a species as somehow distinct and above beings of all other species (speciesism), if pursued logically and through all its implications, only leads to moral, ethical, and philosophical positions that are untenable.

A considerable portion of the book is devoted to detailed and balanced consideration of two major issues affecting the interests and welfare of animals: (a) the millions upon millions of animals used in research and vivisection, and (b) the billions and billions of animals ‘reared’ (=imprisoned) in factory farms and other facilities in cruel conditions and inefficiently (from social and ecological perspectives) only to be ultimately slaughtered, often painfully, for use as food for humans. This is not to overlook the (ab)use of animals for other reasons, such as for fur or other animal products such as leather, but just that the number of animals cruelly treated for vivisectional research/animal testing and for food is enormous. According to Singer, the greatest impact on the largest number of animals will result from immediate changes in these two areas: by avoiding and finding alternatives to animal testing and vivisection, and by going vegetarian, vegan, or being far more circumspect and choosy about where the animal flesh or produce you eat comes from and how the animals were raised and treated.

Besides bringing these issues forward and in-your-face for serious consideration, Singer’s major contributions in this book are a lucid articulation of some central issues. First, the issue of what equality involves (not assuming that everyone is equal as there is undeniable variation, but the ethical imperative of equal treatment). Second, bringing consideration of the interests of animals to the forefront (without need to draw on or call for animal ‘rights’). Separating issues related to preventing pain and suffering, from issues related to the actual killing of animals is another distinction that leads to nuances in treatment of animals and animal welfare in various contexts.

The book is perhaps titled Animal Liberation to raise analogies with other liberation movements, for instance against slavery, racism, and sexism. In fact, many ethical and moral issues raised are consistent across these various movements. The way these are highlighted by the author and the analogies that he draws are very useful both to understand issues and to strengthen reasoned debate. One can ponder on the ideas Singer presents. One can grasp practical suggestions he gives for more ethical personal choices. And one can act.

Worth reading, absolutely.

Biologists and philosophers have many lofty answers to the deeply fundamental questions of human existence. Ask Richard Dawkins and he will, delving into the firmaments of the science of evolutionary biology, essay answers to the question he posed in the opening of his famous book The Selfish Gene: why are people? The answers provide one view of our existence. Ask the philosophers and they will thread you through the arguments as to what sets apart us from them, and how we know we are who we are. The religions and the prophets have their own answers, too, some deep, many dubious. For me, as yet, the glimmerings of an understanding hover at the periphery of my vision, but is clouded by an intellectual cataract that needs to be lifted.

We are a species named Homo sapiens, meaning the man that knows or the man who is wise. Sometimes it seems strange that sapiens, a Latin word meaning wise, is applied to our species. Behind and beyond our intellectual and cultural achievements is a litany of apparently senseless acts—war and plunder, environmental destruction and pillage, racism and genocide, crimes and violence—which questions the assumption that we are the wise ones. Are we truly sapient? I, for one, am not so sure.

We are also called human beings. I am not a trained philosopher, yet it seems to me this is a term of firmer substance. It suggests a species that has something above a mere functional existence, it hints at the possession of a mind of non-trivial cognitive capacity, and of certain existential qualities of perception and self-awareness. To me, it suggests and in some ways is inseparable from, a refined quality of sentience.

The dictionaries define sentience as the state of having or feeling sensation, or our faculty or readiness to perceive sensations. We may perceive our own sentience and those of others in many ways. A neurologist may see it in the firing of neurons in the brain as clearly as a behaviourist may see it in the turn of a head. It may be in the dilation of the pupils in the eye, in a lump in the throat, or, during the aftermath of an emotive moment, in an averted glance or in the words said or left unsaid. We feel it; it affects us.

Are we a sentient species? Sure, we are.

If we take sentience to refer to the form of perception or awareness of sensations emanating from our sense organs, we are clearly not alone, as a species on this planet, in being sentient. Yet, sentience has also been defined as “an example of harmonious action between the intelligence and the sentiency of the mind”. Applied to us, this view of sentience suggests the need to strike a harmony between our intelligent understanding of the world and our mind influenced by sentient perception. It suggests a marriage between reason and affect. A marriage that, if performed, may justify our claim, as a species and as individuals, to uniqueness.

I think of human sentience often, in the context of conservation. I think of it when a burst oil well a mile under the sea spews, not spills, millions of litres of oil into the open ocean. When equatorial rainforest of exhilarating diversity is cut and burned to make way for a vast plantation of one species. When the furrows of old roads and mines are still raw on the hills and the metal claws of heavy vehicles gouge for more. And when the rail track sings to the passing of an express train—sings a ringing requiem for the four elephants left behind, their life ebbing away in stunned and bloody repose. I think of it, even, when the man, by the side of the road, raises his crowbar to bring it down on the head of a small, harmless, and nearly-blind burrowing snake, just because it is a snake.

Image courtesy: Kalyan Varma (www.kalyanvarma.net)

Aren’t these, and many other human-nature interactions, matters that not only concern us, but affect us? Should we then approach solutions for a reconciliation purely through reason and science, as is a common refrain (including of this blog), or include in our ambit human emotion and feeling? Can we build a popular movement, patriotic to a cause as to a nation, if we were to use only logic and dry fact, ignoring sentiment and disposition, music and arts, poetry and passion? Should we always seek answers in our intellect rather than in our humanity? In today’s world, where credible science is called for to inform debate and decisions, human emotion and feeling is treated as an errant child to be kept in rein—side-lined, side-stepped—or as an unwanted churl who would confuse rather than clarify. In the process, a great and material part of human existence is brusquely overlooked.

I think an approach built on science, alone, cannot help conservation. We must include human sentience. Both reason and affect must be brought to bear on conservation problems.

The idea is not new, yet it is seems worth articulating, reiterating. Fortunately, threads of support for this approach are emerging from diverse sources.

First, an over-reliance on science alone may turn out to be counter-productive (or at least insufficient) as seen in climate change campaigns. George Monbiot, writing about “The Unpersuadables” says:

The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away.

He sounds lost “that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science”. I cannot help wondering if an approach that did not rely only on science would help more.

Understanding human emotions and incorporating that into how we deal with human-wildlife interactions, conflicts, and conservation issues is now being suggested as an important direction to take. The discipline of conservation psychology is also taking shape, hoping to link the understanding of human behaviour with conservation. Writing in the book Who cares about wildlife? Michael Manfredo presents developing ideas and results of research on the effects of emotions on memory, decision processes, norms, values, attitudinal changes, and health. His tentative conclusion:

Emotions act with cognition to direct human behaviour. They play an important role in memory, decision making, and attitude change; they clarify roles and social structure… Wildlife professionals should re-examine the widely held view that emotional response issues are trivial, unimportant, or non-informative. Emotions merit careful consideration and thoughtful response.

He also quotes Jon Elster, who says, more pithily:

Emotions matter because if we did not have them nothing else would matter.

Another line of argument comes from the work and ideas of the renowned primatologist Frans de Waal in his recent book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s lessons for a Kinder Society. de Waal opens his book with the questions:

Are we our brothers’ keepers? Should we be? Or would this role only interfere with why we are on earth, which according to economists is to consume and produce and according to biologists is to survive and reproduce?

Linking both ideas of competition-is-good-for-you to their origins around the time of the Industrial Revolution, de Waal presents a survey of modern research in animal behaviour, primatology, and anthropology, where there is compelling evidence for the importance of empathy in moulding social relationships. He examines social animals from dogs to dolphins, monkeys and apes, wolves and elephants.

If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one.

He also does not shy away from talking about emotions and moods, greed and gratitude, attachments and morality. I have not read the complete book yet but the previews seem tantalisingly pertinent. “What is it that makes us care about the behaviour of others, or about others, period?” Can we probe the hidden wells of human empathy for a more benign and graceful citizenry on this planet?

The foundations of a conservation ethic must be built on human sentience. And for this to work it may need to sincerely garner the support, not only of conservation scientists, but of painters and musicians, poets and songwriters, playwrights and psychologists, humourists and social workers. It needs, as is often said, to rebuild burnt bridges across the arts, humanities, and the sciences. It needs to bring back into serious discourse our motivations, emotions, passions, sensitivity, and humanism. Then, perhaps, in the years ahead, we will tread our path on planet Earth as Homo sentiens.