On HAC-Human Animal Conflict
Roger directed me to "Mad Cows (and Livid Lambs)" from Sunday’s Telegraph, which has some fantastic quotes. Here are a few, and they’ll give you the gist of the article:
- After centuries of being eaten, evicted, subjected to vivisection, killed for fun, worn as hats and made to ride bicycles in circuses, something is causing them to turn on us. And it is being taken seriously enough by scientists that it has earned its own acronym: HAC – ‘human-animal conflict’.
- In Cameroon, for the first time, gorillas have been throwing bits of tree at humans. They’re using weapons against us.
- Any sane person might decide that his theory, which posits that beasts are working in concert to take revenge on humans, is insane. But in the regions where the most research into HAC is being carried out, scientists have concluded that revenge for our myriad barbarities could indeed be a motive.
- ‘When you see reports of elephants running into crops or attacking people, they’re highly stressed’ [says Dr. Gay Bradshaw, a world authority on elephants]. ‘And there are multiple stressors – violence, lack of food, lack of water; their families are being broken up; their society is collapsing. All of these things are human-derived.’
- Bradshaw and her colleagues now think that there’s been a massive, pan-species psychological collapse throughout the world’s pachyderms. In essence, we’re witnessing the dysfunctional shenanigans of a generation of depraved elephants. These are individuals who have become psychologically fractured after being orphaned at a developmentally delicate age or are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after watching their families being slaughtered.
- For centuries, we’ve been told by priests and scientists that
animals are not much more than unfeeling, unthinking, unselfconscious
automatons. They’re a gift from God, and their purpose is to have
paracetamol rubbed into their eyes, to be turned into fancy trousers to
be stuffed with nuts on His birthday. - [Marc] Bekoff describes the sound Darwinian logic beneath this
gigantic paradigm shift. Simply, if our brains have developed the
capacity for a rich emotional inner-life over the millions of years
they’ve been evolving, then why not theirs? - But there are still many people, such as Prof Peter Carruthers, of
the University of Sheffield, who would consider this to be misguided
sentimentality. In his book The Animals Issue, he insists that animals
don’t consciously feel pain, and therefore ‘make no real claims on our
sympathy’. When vets and vivisectionists anaesthetise their subjects,
the argument runs, they’re indulging in schmaltzy, greetings-card
reasoning. - Perhaps the evolutionary achievement humans are proudest of – and
is thought by some to be the very seat of consciousness – is language.
But even chickens talk to each other.
The theory for how this happens (assuming we are the reason why) includes:
- Habituation ("familiarity breeds contempt")
- "Animals learn to fear humans under certain circumstances. This
means they’re coming closer to humans, but are prepared to defend
themselves. When they’re primed by this arousal, they can have lowered
thresholds for aggression and produce hair-trigger responses.’ When a
wild animal is just about not-scared-enough to approach a human, but
still has enough fear heating its blood to unleash a frenzy at the
slightest provocation, it’s in a uniquely dangerous state."
Finally, Bradshaw says: "Animals have the same capacity that we do,
in terms of emotions and what we consider to be high-mindedness and
moral integrity. In fact, I’d argue they have more, because they
haven’t done to us what we’ve done to them. That’s a sobering thought.
It’s amazing that all the animals are as benign as they are. It’s
amazing their restraint. Why aren’t they picking up guns?"
My questions for today are:
- What do you think of HAC? And do you think it can easily
be used as yet another in a long list of justifications we have to
"manage" and "cull" any creature who appears to be attacking humans? - Do you think this just exacerbates the vilification of certain
animals, such as sharks, and creates yet another reason to hunt them or
increase our slaughter of them? - Is there a positive, productive aspect of HAC? Is it something you
would like to see discussed more, or could that in some way be
dangerous? - And what’s with the Cartesian Professor Carruthers? Has anyone read his book?
This is why my parents bought me the Tell Me Why series of books when I was a kid, by the way.
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Really interesting post! My guess is that animals have been fighting back against humans since humans started exploiting them – but that such stories are only now being recognized. This would mirror the history of resistance and struggle coming from groups of humans that have historically been exploited – at first you don't know it's even happening because those in power don't believe the oppressed "other" has any will to resist, and those in power are the ones who write the history books. But this is just me guessing, I don't really know.
Another thing this reminds me of is an article I read on why animals "allow" humans to hurt them all the time – they didn't evolve to deal with us. We only started being these world-dominating, cruelty-inflicting, car-creating tyrants in the past few seconds of evolutionary time. Animals spent millions of years evolving to deal effectively with natural predators and environmental threats, and now we've come along, so powerfully and so quickly that not only can we shock and awe any naturally-evolved species, we can manufacture new species designed to be even more helpless (see our attempts to create pigs who aren't afraid of being slaughtered). So that's why animals don't usually take up arms against us, or fight back, or get out of the way of our cars. They don't even know what's going to hit them.
Well, most of them don't know. It sounds like the ones that have figured out what we're all about are fighting back (and probably have been all along…). And fortunately we've seen many species don't just rely on instinct but have cultures they pass along to their children through socialization and education (this is how to hunt, this is how to build a dam, etc.), so maybe other species are in fact, over time, building up a store of knowledge about who we humans are and how to avoid getting hurt by us.
Anyhow – awesome post! Your blog is always so thought-provoking.
" So that's why animals don't usually take up arms against us, or fight back, or get out of the way of our cars."
I live in an area with a lot of urban deer. On several occasions I've observed individual deer look both ways before crossing the road. Do you think this is a learned behavior, or is it an evolutionary adaptation from having generations of deer living amongst houses and streets? They also don't seem too afraid of people. Maybe that's because they can't be shot at within the city limits. Yet, some would expect that their fear of humans (obvious predators) would be hard wired. My interpretation is that, as individuals, their own experiences have shaped their unique skills, fears, and habits. I also believe they have culture, and are able to pass on learned behaviors to their family members, such as looking both ways before crossing the road. People tend to be so amazed when animals aren't dictated by their biological drives and instincts, and yet, I think it happens all the time.
On Ari’s comment:
It would be interesting to see – in evolutionary time scales – if humans self-destruct even more rapidly than our species arrived on the scene. Like a tornado – quick, deadly, destructive, and gone within 20 minutes – an unfortunate episode in an otherwise somewhat sane environment. (Yes, I’m a “species misanthrope,” even though I find many of the individual specimens of the species charming and/or interesting.)
On Jenny’s comment:
I live in a somewhat rural area of Colorado and I’m quite familiar with other areas of the state. There is no doubt whatsoever that elk and Colorado mule deer each behave MUCH differently depending on where in the state they live. For example, the elk and deer in the central mountains (where I live) are sport hunted annually and are terrified of the mere sight of humans. Contrast that with the foothills outside of Denver, particularly Evergreen (about 100 miles from the central mountains), where the elk and deer are not hunted as frequently (or not at all) and graze on private land and in large designated open spaces where they have contact with hikers (who aren’t out (or permitted) to kill them while hiking) and they will let humans get surprisingly close and well within sight before fleeing. There is a vast and obvious difference in behavior.
I think this is really interesting. For one thing, it makes the analogies between animal rights and other rights movements more appropriate. I've argued that the mere fact that fences and cages must be used in order to dominate animals is proof enough that animals seek their own liberation. But not everyone agrees. Perhaps this news of animals fighting back will help the cause a bit. At least some people will put two and two together.
Because I can sometimes be a speciesist (to the side of the fur and feathered) I'd like to think that animals can somehow adapt to the viciousness they are subject to. A learned conditioning to counter the cruelty. I like that. I also like "Cows with Guns": http://www.cowswithguns.com/cowmovie.html
Hope it's okay to unearth an older story… On this I couldn't help myself: Max Corbett 61, is killed by a bull while herding cows toward a milking barn. He had taught thousands of high school students about handling dairy cattle and built a reputation as one of California's most seasoned agricultural educators.
"That's the hardest part for kids to figure out: How could this happen to someone who's so knowledgeable about animals?"
http://www.latimes.com:80/news/obituaries/la-me-bull16-2008sep16,0,7459648.story
Yes, the poor bull was sent to slaughter, but I'd like to think he went with a small sliver of satisfying "justice". Also, I hope that the many students who were considering a career in "animal agriculture" might choose other "less hazardous" options.
Studies of human-animal conflict have emerged via two main threads of scholarship – (1) social construction of "nature" and nature/society relations, and (2) political ecology. The former examines how (for example) animals get labeled as pet vs. pest, vermin vs. resource, edible vs. inedible, wild vs. domestic – any animal could carry any of these labels depending on person/culture/context. The latter brought out the realization that international conservation efforts frequently discounted the attitudes, experiences, values, and lives of locally affected residents, often "relocated" (evicted, dispossessed) and deprived of livelihoods by the imposition of a (Western) conservation regime, often with negative consequences on the species being "conserved". Environmental historians have documented similar abuses of human and non-human inhabitants of "pristine" wildernesses in the conservation history of the US – (for example, Karl Jacoby's "Crimes Against Nature" is excellent). Studies of human-animal conflict tend to be interdisciplinary with the goal of understanding the multiple roots of conflict (ideologies, economics, politics, competing sciences) – with an implicit or explicit aim of getting to a just and sustainable solution (for humans and non-humans alike). In the end, researchers are not (usually) policy makers or enforcers, and any study can have its findings used/abused – the point being, there's no sinister agenda behind "human-animal conflict" research. The moral panic over the expert-constructed "rise" in conflicts and animal aggression towards humans IS, however, yet another fascinating tale to be examined…
In response to Bea, my dad would have never wanted kids to choose a different field. He was passionate about agriculture. I'm sad that that was the takeaway you got from his death.
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