A Conversation between Marguerite Humeau and Carl Safina

Marguerite Humeau: What lies at the origin of your interest in exploring how animals feel and think? Was there one specific event that triggered your interest in animal consciousness?

Carl Safina: I have been interested in what animals do, and why they do it, since I was a little boy. In my book BeyondWords(2015)I did not want to focus on conservation issues. I wanted to let those beings whom I write about make their own case for their existence by showing us who they are.

MH: Would you say that this is a completely new approach to zoology?

CS: Not completely, but pretty close to it. Jane Goodall was probably the first to write non-fiction about individual animals’ lives.

MH: I remember how you explain, in Beyond Words, the way Cynthia Moss told you that she wanted to understand animals for what they are, as opposed to studying animals to understand humans better. Is that a very contemporary idea?

CS: I think so. It’s the direction of the future, if we can even keep these species in existence. There are such incredible pressures on them.

MH: Did you witness any interesting new debates and researches that took place after your book was published?

CS: Things are shifting. There is a whole movement for animal rights, another for non-human personhood, species rights, using pronouns like “he” or “she” instead of “it”, etc.

MH: What brought you to Cynthia Moss specifically?

CS: No one else has been studying elephant behaviour continuously for 40 years. Cynthia is one of perhaps two or three people in the world who have been looking at the same individual beings for four decades. If anyone was going to tell me about their lives, it would be Cynthia.

MH: Have you ever personally witnessed elephants in mourning? Are there any rituals that are constantly repeated by elephants when a death occurs?

CS: I have not personally witnessed it. But I have read about it. There are some good photos online.

MH: Have you noticed any emotions in elephants that you think humans have never actually felt?

CS: Interesting question. No, not that I’ve seen; but how would we be able to recognise an emotion I did not recognise? That might be beyond our abilities.

MH: Does this mean that, as humans, we have to accept that we will never truly know about their inner lives, their states of consciousness, and how they really experience the world?

CS: No more than we, as Westerners, will ever know what it’s like to live in the Amazon and hunt with blowguns, or that I will ever know what it’s like to grow up very poor without a father, etc. But we can know much more than we do now; there are still rich avenues of exploration.

MH: Why do you think elephants get drunk? Is this conscious self-destructive behaviour?

CS: I don’t think they are trying to get drunk. They are just trying to eat fruit from marula trees.

MH: Have you ever witnessed any self-destructive behaviour among animals?

CS: Only in captives. Parrots pulling out feathers because they have no company and are bored to death. Dogs who are neurotic, and bored to death too. I have read of captive killer whales banging their heads against the walls of their little pools (guess why).

MH: How do you think consciousness relates to language?

CS: Language is a way to label different things that we are conscious of. Human language can also help us to think through complex situations, I believe. But we are conscious of many things first, then we label them with their name. If we step outside, and it’s nice out, we notice, then we label. If we see someone we know, we recognise them, then we label–unless we have forgotten their name, as I do a lot.

MH: What are the trigger events that allow a being to become conscious?

What might be the tipping points?

CS: No one knows the answer to that question. But if any being is aware of any experience or feeling at all, that is consciousness. If a being can feel anything, that is consciousness.

MH: How much do you think elephants know about humans?

CS: They know that there are different kinds of humans, and that some are safe and others dangerous. They know which situations are likely to be safe or dangerous.

MH: Do you think consciousness can be explained and reproduced mechanistically?

CS: That seems like a possibility.

MH: Can it be engineered only using hormones?

CS: No one knows.

MH: How does thinking about the world in a non-human-centred way change our relationship with the world?

CS: It can help us understand that the world is not designed for us, that we are not the centre or measure of everything, that life is not about us, and not about now. The living world is greater and older and will last longer than us.

MH: Do you think a deeper change in our modes of existence as human beings is happening now?

CS: In some ways yes, in some ways this is the most disconnected time ever.More people seem aware of the need for more kindness to other kinds of people and other kinds of animals. But fewer people experience anything about nature at all. Many probably could not name 20 actual species of wild creatures. Our screens and devices connect us to the world of information, yet disconnect us from directly experiencing the world, the time with our families, and one another.

MH: The story you tell in Beyond Words, about the elephant and blue whale matriarchs, makes me wonder: do you think one day we will find the right signal and be able to communicate between species?

CS: If we do, I doubt it will be one signal and one mode; more likely different modes for different groups of animals.

MH: I am currently on a quest to design a world in which elephants, and not humans, have evolved as the dominant species on Earth. I call this era the “Probocene”, as opposed to the Anthropocene. I would like to enact an elephant death march in the Probocene. Imagine you could travel through time, to a parallel present or into the future, and that you arrived in the Probocene. What do you think elephants would look like physically?

CS: But they are in a parallel evolution to us already. Many past elephant species were larger, smaller, or woollier, depending on where they lived and the climate.

MH: How do you think their consciousness, emotions, might have evolved?

CS: I don’t really know how to speculate on that. They have what they need to be successful and their emotions are very similar to ours. Without hands to fashion complicated tools, there may not be pressures to evolve higher intelligence for them.

MH: How would their social structure have evolved? Would they have developed a more complex language?

CS: We don’t know how complex their language is now, so it’s very hard to speculate.

MH: Would they have developed more complex death rituals?

CS: Again, there is not really any way to know whether very much would change or how.

MH: In The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond states that a single chance mutation occurred in the gene FOXP2, allowing the larynx to go down and humans to develop an articulate form of language at the origins of humanity. What kind of event could have made the Probocene actually happen?

CS: Elephants have that gene, so perhaps it could mutate in a similar way. Much of evolution is driven by randomness and coincidences.

MH: Do you think language will always be, or now is, at the origin of consciousness?

CS: Language is not anywhere near the origin of consciousness. Language is not necessary for consciousness, and never will be.

Carl Safina is the Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the Alan Alda Center for Communicating

Science and runs the not-for-profit Safina Center. His books include Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel (2015).