I had forgotten the depth of feeling one could see in horses' eyes. I was therefore unprepared for the expression in Blue's. Blue was lonely. Blue was horribly lonely and bored. I was not shocked that this should be the case; five acres to tramp by yourself endlessly, even in the most beautiful of meadows — and his was — cannot provide many interesting events, and once rainy season turned to dry that was about it. No, I was shocked that I had forgotten that human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember. However, the animals have not changed.posted by Rhaomi at 3:17 PM on April 28, 2010 [22 favorites]
One morning, looking out the window at the fog that lay like a ribbon over the meadow, I saw another horse, a brown one, at the other end of Blue's field. Blue appeared to be afraid of it, and for several days made no attempt to go near. We went away for a week. When we returned, Blue had decided to make friends and the two horses ambled or galloped along together, and Blue did not come nearly as often to the fence underneath the apple tree. When he did, bringing his new friend with him, there was a different look in his eyes. A look of independence, of self-possession, of inalienable horseness. His friend eventually became pregnant. For months and months there was, it seemed to me, a mutual feeling between me and the horses of justice, of peace. I fed apples to them both. The look in Blue's eyes was one of unabashed "this is itness."
It did not, however, last forever. One day, after a visit to the city, I went out to give Blue some apples. He stood waiting, or so I thought, though not beneath the tree. When I shook the tree and jumped back from the shower of apples, he made no move. I carried some over to him. He managed to half-crunch one. The rest he let fall to the ground. I dreaded looking into his eyes — because I had of course noticed that Brown, his partner, had gone — but I did look. If I had been born into slavery, and my partner had been sold or killed, my eyes would have looked like that. The children next door explained that Blue's partner had been "put with him" (the same expression that old people used, I had noticed, when speaking of an ancestor during slavery who had been impregnated by her owner) so that they could mate and she conceive. Since that was accomplished, she had been taken back by her owner, who lived somewhere else.
Will she be back? I asked. They didn't know.
Blue was like a crazed person. Blue was, to me, a crazed person. He galloped furiously, as if he were being ridden, around and around his five beautiful acres. He whinnied until he couldn't. He tore at the ground with his hooves. He butted himself against his single shade tree. He looked always and always toward the road down which his partner had gone. And then, occasionally, when he came up for apples, or I took apples to him, he looked at me. It was a look so piercing, so full of grief, a look so human, I almost laughed (I felt too sad to cry) to think there are people who do not know that animals suffer.
What would surprise me very much is to learn that a chimp understands that death is coming for him too, someday.How would you observe this? I'm not trying to be dismissive: I think it's an excellent idea. But I don't know that it's possible to learn in the same sense as the observations reported here. I mean, I think that my four-year-old understands somehow that death is coming for her someday --- at least, she asked about it a lot, after great-grandpa died --- but I don't think she understands it in the same way I do, and I don't think that I understand it in the same that my widower friends do, and all of us have the benefit of a shared language and a shared corpus of culture and literature on the subject. What would a chimpanzee do that would indicate he understands his own mortality? What do you do?
Go to funerals.That is, congregate around the recently deceased and exhibit symptoms consistent with emotional distress, as described in the article? Or gather together to bury the dead, which this troupe of chimps had no opportunity to do?
DNA studies indicate that Humans and chimpanzees carried on interbreeding for thousands, perhaps millions of years after the two species diverged.posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 5:30 PM on April 29, 2010
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posted by DU at 12:12 PM on April 28, 2010 [24 favorites]