The Souls of Animals. Gary Kowalski

       Cougar

Preface

      Have you noticed how often it is that small children are fascinated by and take delight in animals? They seem to experience a kinship, an affectionate bond with other creatures that helps to make them whole and who they are. Can you remember the first time you saw an elephant? Or a giraffe? We’re talking major excitement here, wide-eyed jubilation.

      Yet our adult society views animals in quite another way, as commodities or resources, as things, objects, and tools. We use them. We eat them. We experiment on them. They no longer enchant and delight us.

      We see them now only as means to our ends. We don’t know what we have lost.

      The Souls of Animals is an eloquent and timely book that can help us regain our connection to the mysterious and wonderful creatures who share this planet’s adventure with us. It is a beautiful book, and it is a healing one, for it brings to our consciousness the awareness that we need to regain if we are to learn to live in harmony with the natural world.

      This book will open your heart and your mind to the mysterious and wonderful companions who fly, walk, and otherwise populate this beautiful Earth.

      Ann Mortifee once wrote, “You can’t see a bright tomorrow with yesterday’s eyes.” Gary Kowalski has given us a book that brings us new eyes, eyes with which we can again look at the world and ourselves with respect and reverence, eyes that can enable us to participate in the sacred potential of Creation.

      It is an honor to be able to introduce you to such a treasure. The Souls of Animals is about our kinship with life. It is a step away from loneliness and alienation, a step toward finding ourselves welcome and well amongst the Earth community. It is about learning to take our place with reverence and respect in the council of all beings.

      —JOHN ROBBINS

      PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

      John Robbins is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated book Diet for a New America published in 1987.

Acknowledgements

      I wish to thank all those who have supplied information and inspiration for The Souls of Animals. I am especially grateful to the thousands of people who have read the first edition of the book and to the dozens who have written me letters, sharing their stories and thanking me for confirming their own conviction that animals do indeed have souls. I have tried to answer and acknowledge each of these messages. Many of the letters have given me new insight as well as material for this revised edition.

      I remain indebted to Art Wolfe for the stunning photographs that are part of this book, to Karen Savary for the beautiful cover design, and to Errol Sowers, Dorothy Mills, and Meredith Young-Sowers of Stillpoint Publishing, for their enthusiasm and their numerous recommendations for improvements in my manuscript.

      I must also say thank you to Tom Regan, Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University, for writing the foreword to this revision. Professor Regan has been an inspiration not only to me but to a whole generation of students and activists who have been influenced by his clear thinking and passionate commitment to animal rights.

      I wish to express my appreciation to Elmer Fisk for permission to retell the story of Boob, the dog who believed in ghosts; to the Gorilla Foundation for permission to reprint the conversation between Koko and Maureen Sheehan concerning death, which appears in Chapter Two; and to W.W. Norton Publishers for permission to reprint extracts from To Whom It May Concern: An Investigation of the Art of Elephants.

      In addition to the sources listed in the chapter notes, many others provided factual information for The Souls of Animals. These include Professor Jeannette Haviland of Rutgers University, who directed me to research on the development of self-concept in infancy; Gordon Dietzman and Scott Swengel of the International Crane Foundation, who gave me updates on the fortunes of Tex, Faith, and Gee Whiz; and Hank Kite, who read “Hearts of Song” and suggested additions to the text. Dr. Roger Fouts of Central Washington University shared as yet unpublished information about Moja’s artwork. Thanks go also to Margaret Carter for her amazing animal stories and to Timothy Grannis for his thoughts on art.

      I am grateful as well to my good friends John Kern and Valerie Hurley for their editorial advice and personal support. Finally, no list of acknowledgement would be complete without mentioning my wife, Dori Jones, who reads almost everything I write and offers kind but honest criticism. Thankfully, she has good taste in books and men.

Foreword

      What a piece of work we humans are! So unsure are we of our place in the grand scheme of things, we even enlist our language to mask our cosmic angst. On one side of the semantic ledger we find the word animal; on the other side, the word human. That humans are animals, it seems, is a troubling fact we would like to forget. After all, no self-respecting human would want to be caught “acting like an animal.”

      This denial of our animality has had predictable consequences. To begin with, it has nurtured centuries of ignorance about our brothers and sisters in fur, and feather, and fin. One rarely explores what one “knows” isn’t worth exploring in the first place. No one should be surprised, therefore, when (as is true of the dominant traditions in the western world) other-than-human animals are viewed as inferior beings having no purpose beyond serving the interests of the master species: Homo sapiens. Chimpanzees belong in biomedical research labs, don’t they? A pig’s reason for being is as ham, between two slices of bread, isn’t it? What could be clearer than that?

      Part of the strength of the restrained, graceful words we read on these pages can be traced to Gary Kowalski’s gentle yet resolute assault on this shameful record of our species’ hubris. What place does our vaunted “superiority” have when we read that gorillas grieve the loss of friends; elephants attempt to comfort kin who are dying; young birds need to be taught what to sing; African wild dogs risk their own lives to save that of a pup; dolphins, orcas, and whooping cranes frolic for the sheer fun of it; and both geese and jackdaws mate for life?

      Because we have viewed other animals through the myopic lens of our self-importance, we have misperceived who and what they are. Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge. It takes no special training to recognize how little one knows. It does take a special kind of wisdom to acknowledge and overcome it. As he demonstrates on every page of this book, Gary Kowalski is among the very few who are wise.

      Earlier, I noted that our species’ hubris has infected how we understand other animals. Not surprisingly, our shared arrogance has also encouraged widespread misconceptions about who and what we are. Steeped in the traditions of denial, we humans have wanted to view ourselves as being in the world, but not of it—alive within the larger community of life, but not an equal member in it.

      If Gary Kowalski has his way, this all-too-familiar fantasy will not long endure. Since other-than-human animals really are so much like us, how can we be so much better than they? Since they not only are in the world, but of the world, how can we plausibly continue to view ourselves as apart from, not as a part of, the city of life?

      “We are the youngest siblings in life’s family—the perpetual neonates of the animal world,” Gary Kowalski writes near this book’s end. “In a fundamental way we need other creatures to tell us who we are.” Whether or not we learn from these, our neglected tutors, this much we know: all animals are fortunate to have Gary Kowalski as our shared ambassador, creating the cognitive space in which other animals can speak the truths they know, preparing the spiritual place for us to hear them.

      —TOM REGAN

      PUBLISHER’S NOTE: