Jonathan Balcombe – Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

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Book Review, Ethics, Jonathan Balcombe, Philosophy, Reflection, Science and nature, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

Embracing our animal nature may be the only hope for us

Jonathan Balcombe is an animal behaviourist of the right sort. By which I mean that he views animals with respect and empathy, in the same way, I surmise, as he views other members of his own animal species.

Essentially, this is the nub of the book. Balcombe eschews the idea of ‘anthropomorphising’ because in effect he shows (backed up by good references and citing) how time and again many of the ‘higher’ behaviours which we arrogantly assume are evidence of our unique ‘humanity’ – such as altruism, empathy, the ability to reason, language are in fact ‘animalistic’. There is not such a clear divide between ourselves and the rest of the, particularly, mammalian and avian world, though Balcombe also shows reptiles, fish and even insects to be more advanced than we might suppose.

In fact, rather disturbingly, the idea cannot help but surface that our unique
humanness may rather be a retrograde capacity to delight in the wanton infliction of suffering upon others, whether of our own species or of other, supposedly dumb (sic) animals. Balcombe posits that we may well have introduced the philiosophy of regarding ourselves as separate from other species in order to justify this brutality, to find an excuse for our cruelty towards other animals – and indeed, our cruelty, expressed across cultures, geographies and the centuries, towards individuals and groups of our own species, which the dominant cultural group regards as ‘subhuman’. This ability to separate the human from the subhuman has been responsible for some of our most intense acts of racial cruelty.

Balcombe’s well written, carefully thought through book ends with an impassioned argument in favour of veganism, on environmental grounds, as much as any other argument against the exploitation of our fellow, though non-human, animals.

Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals Amazon UK
Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals Amazon USA

Jonathan Balcombe – Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good

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Book Review, Ethics, Jonathan Balcombe, Philosophy, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, Reflection, Science and nature

A challenge to blinkered speciesism

This is a terrific book, giving the lie to those who dismissively accuse those of us who ascribe emotions to animals as ‘anthropomorphising’ Its always seemed to me to be rather crucially the other way round. As human beings are after all also animals, and as we can see clearly the development of anatomical structures across aeons of time, and across species, its absolutely obvious that all the aspects of physiology have also been a-developing. Animals – not just other mammals, but other vertebrates, have neurological and endocrine systems like ours. It has always seemed to me to be supreme arrogance to interpret human behaviour and human emotion one way, and deny that complex behaviour and emotion also exist in animals. Why should we interpret the playful human one way, and see other animals, both wild and domesticated, behaving in a manner which looks playful, and looks as if the animal is enjoying itself, and not draw the conclusion that he/she is also having fun. I have used the term he/she deliberately, as Balcombe does, pointing out that our language, calling animals ‘it’ removes them from individuality. His tenet in this book is that we have failed to investigate the clear evidence that animals feel ‘pleasure’ in all its many guises – pleasure from companionship and social bonds with other animals, pleasure in play, a sense of beauty, enjoyment in the feel-good of sex – not just a mechanical urge, but pleasurable, like it is for humans. Even, in one startling image, he presents the idea that certainly other primates may experience a sense of awe.

As he points out, carefully tracing what appears to be complex emotion back and back – even to invertebrates, to insects, once we begin to see the adaptive, in evolutionary terms, nature of ‘feel-good’ and to see that ‘dumb animals’ not only feel pain, but also the complexities of the pleasurable (a much more individualised, personal identity response than the pain response) we should be forced to change our thinking about the separation between ourselves and other species.

The further I read into this book, the more Jainism, with its deep respect for all that lives, makes scientific, not just ethical sense.

My only cavil about this excellently put together, well-written, carefully argued and researched book is that I wish the extensive bibliography and citing of published research material had been footnote referenced, rather than all the books and studies cited in a chapter collected together at the end of the book, as I wanted to look for the evidence of some of the more surprising information given.

Its possible that this may have been done in the physical text, but certainly is not a feature of the Kindle edition.
Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good Amazon UK
Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good Amazon USA