Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb

A Chronicle of Sensibility to Animals

Rod Preece, Rod Preece

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135946975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Respect for animals has always been a part of human consciousness. Poets, thinkers, philosophers, scientists and statesmen have long celebrated our compassion towards Earth's other beasts.Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb compiles the most significant statements of sensibility to animals in the history of thought. From the myths of the ancient world to the Middle Ages to Darwin and beyond, Preece captures the most telling and fascinating accounts of humankind's relationship to the wild world, placing them in historical context. Jung called it an unconscious identity with animals, while Wordsworth saw it as the primal sympathy which having been must ever be. Linking the diverse chords of human experience that are touched by the animal world, Preece shows that despite a historical thread of cruelty, there still remains in all humanity a constant underlying concern for other beings as an integral part of the moral community. With musings and meditations from Lao Tse to Mohammed, from Plato to Jane Goodall, from classical religion to parliamentary proceedings, Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb is an original, superbly researched history that deepens our understanding of all living beings.

1: Animals in Myth and Religion

The stories of myth and religion reflect in part the cultural, social, political, and economic realities of the type of society in which they arise. The form of the society plays a significant role in moulding the consciousness of the people. We would thus expect rather different tales to emerge from hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and pastoral societies, and from expansionist urban state empires, such as those of the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Incas. Differing myths and differing religious parables are, in part, the consequences of differing everyday life experiences.

The ways in which animals are viewed and treated in a given society are thus influenced significantly by the practical realities of the human-animal economic relationship in that society. For example, we may acknowledge that in traditional Hindu India eating the cow was unacceptable in part because milk for consumption, calves for their labour, and cow dung for fuel and house-floor construction were deemed more valuable than beef.¹ If the Indian caste system, climate, and soil ensured there was inadequate fodder for an abundance of cattle, then the societal rules, expressed through religious edicts, must accord priorities. This should not persuade us, however, to ignore the fact that Brahmins and others refrained not only from the eating of beef but of all animal flesh. And such practices arose from the respect accorded to all living beings, primarily through the doctrine of reincarnation, which emphasized the kinship of all creatures. Indeed, while vegetarians are a decided minority in India, they are, by and large, deeply respected for their practices by those who are not themselves vegetarian. Economically driven societal organization is by no means all there is to a culture.

In some aboriginal societies, especially where the success of the traditional hunt was less than assured, animals were “worshipped,” in the sense that they were prayed to, in order to induce their relatives, or their reincarnate selves emerged corporeally from the universal spirit, to return on a future occasion to ensure a continuing supply of animal food. Thus the “worship” was primarily for the benefit of the worshipper rather than any indication of adoration for the worshipped. Nonetheless, we should not fail to recognize that the skills, courage, strength, ingenuity, and fortitude of the prey, and of other animals which were not prey, induced an authentic respect for the animal realm. Animals faced the same trials and tribulations as humans and were entitled to a sympathetic appreciation in their perilous life journey.²

In the pastoral lands of the Bible we encounter injunctions to treat domesticated food animals with diligent care and concern. They will then be healthier and more productive animals, and will thereby improve the quality of human life. Caring for them is thus in part instrumental to human ends. But animals were recognized as different from human-devised instruments, such as the hoe and the plough. They were creatures of God, and as such were entitled to more than efficient treatment for human purposes. God permitted their consumption, at least after the Flood, but required that they be treated with a greater consideration than unconscious artifacts. They were breathing beings, not inanimate objects, and were thus entitled to a degree of moral consideration.³

It would then be unwarranted to imagine self-serving prudential considerations as the perennial determinants of human attitudes to animals. And that is true for aboriginal myths as well as Oriental and Western religions,⁴ even though the particulars of each are decidedly different as a consequence of the widely differing everyday experiences occasioned by the multiplicity of societal and technological forms. To take but one example, the Talmud instructs the Jews to refrain from inflicting pain on any living creature.⁵ Not only does that injunction reflect a general recognition of the entitlement of animals, whether domesticated, feral, or wild, to live free from human cruelty, but it can be seen to be a moral requirement at odds with the immediate self-interests of the predominant pastoralists and occasional hunters themselves. Animals are entitled to a significant degree of respect as the sentient beings they are, even though that entitlement constitutes a decided interference with human self-regarding convenience. If we must always look to the historical context to understand the particulars of the human-animal relationship, we must also look beyond it to understand the universal respectful elements of the human soul. All myths and religions extend consideration for the well-being of animals beyond merely self-serving prudential consideration, even though they always include those prudential considerations, and even though the interests of the adherents always exceed those of the animals. As Leo Tolstoy wrote with his customary wisdom, aplomb, and exaggeration, “religions differ in their external forms but are all the same in their basic principles.”⁶ Overdrawn perhaps, but the basic precept is fundamentally sound.

In the final analysis, human thoughts, sympathies, and inclinations are far more alike than dissimilar, however different the societies humans inhabit, and however different the forms through which the societal values are transmitted. The human is an animal who shares his human animality, his needs and basic values, with all his fellow humans. The culture may determine how the fundamental needs and values are pursued but does not determine what they are. These common human orientations encourage us to identify with the animals we encounter in myth, parable, fable, and story. And when we identify with those animals it is only a step to respect them for the beings they are and to feel a compassion for them in their travails.

In the selections that follow, the reader will find that however much societal forces impose themselves harmfully on animals, and however much some myths and tales distort animal reality, a natural compassion and respect for other species underlies the explicit or implicit imperatives imparted through myth and religion. And yet, in our cynical and secular age, it is commonplace to witness the derision of myth and religion. Myth is what its name is seen to imply: fable masquerading as reason. Religion is seen as an outdated superstition whose tenets have been undermined by science and philosophy. But we should listen carefully to that old saw that stories—and myth and religion are in an important sense stories—are lies which tell the truth.⁷ Certainly they consist in part of parables and allegories, if not lies. Myth and religion, we may say, are philosophy by other, sometimes subtler, means.

Myth and religion teach us a manner of interpreting our experiences. They form, or at least inform, our values; stimulate our emotions; advise us how to act prudently and justly; and tell us who is equipped to undertake what action in what circumstances. They serve to infuse the human spirit and weld the societal bond. And they raise to the level of consciousness the permanent memories of the human soul. Evolution has selected us for practical tasks, not for the refinements of abstract thought.⁸ Philosophy is not evolutionarily adaptive. Hence few are good at it. And those who are good at it are often led astray by the implications of their insightful but customarily, and almost necessarily, incomplete abstract intellectual schema. Myth and religion offer, as an at least sometimes wiser alternative, practical advice, often presented in the form of parables, tailored to the requirements of the society in which they arise.⁹ Jean-Jacques Rousseau advised his philosophically over-optimistic Enlightenment colleagues that “a thinking man is a depraved being.”¹⁰ The intellect, Rousseau observed, has the capacity to lead us away from truths which intuitive feelings and early societal traditions readily impart.

Unfortunately, one of the difficulties of reporting oral myths is that there is no satisfactory way of determining how faithful are their current forms to their originals, or even whether there is an “original.” Just as there are quite significant differences in the interpretation of the relationship of humans to animals between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2,¹¹ written by different persons perhaps centuries apart, so too there are different versions of aboriginal myths. As sagely said by !Unn/Obe, a Ju/Hoan woman of southern Africa, “Yes, of course, some people tell stories one way, some another. Perhaps it is because people sometimes separate for a while and go on telling stories. But in all these stories about the old times, people use different words and nouns for the same things. There are many different ways to talk. Different people just have different minds.”¹² Different versions of the same stories, while containing significant similarities, will have variations that alter the message, sometimes slightly, sometimes rather more substantively. And just as Western philosophy altered over the centuries to incorporate the effects of newly emerging social and economic classes, increased secular education, and new technological capabilities, so too new aboriginal experiences in changing social, economic, and political conditions will have influenced their myths to incorporate a relevant response to those new conditions. Without a written record we lack the evidence to know what is old and what is new. And, as with the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, so too with aboriginal accounts, we do not know which versions more closely reflect the early mind of a people.

A part of the problem is that we have grounds for distrust when the myths are reported by those with an ideological axe to grind. A century and more ago the forms in which those myths were presented sometimes showed a lack of understanding of, and sympathy for, aboriginal culture. By contrast, since the middle of the nineteenth century, and most especially in recent decades, those myths have sometimes been manipulated to read as a telling critique of Western mores, particularly as a wiser alternative to Western environmental degradation. Thus, for example, the form in which the famous nineteenth-century environmentalist speech of Chief Seattle of the Duwamish is customarily reported is a 1970s invention of an American film director, bearing very little resemblance to early reports of that speech, which are not themselves without grounds for suspicion.¹³ The version now customarily encountered corresponds far more to modern Western environmentalist ideals than to Amerindian forms of thought and expression. What we are offered is a distortion of the reality. If one wants to understand the import of aboriginal myth one must endeavour to be faithful to traditional forms of thought. Accordingly, several appealing legends have been omitted from this volume because I could not feel confident of their authenticity. Aboriginal myths contain both beauty and wisdom; they do not need to be distorted.

As societal belief systems change to accommodate new eventualities, the prevailing stories are adjusted to meet the contingencies of the new circumstances. Thus when Christianity was adopted as the official religion of Rome, and then spread across Europe, it retained a number of earlier myths, yet Christianized, or denominationalized, and localized them. Thus were the holly, the maypole, and the Christmas tree incorporated into the Christian myth to hinder a psychological discord between the traditional and the new. One popular story was that after the Christian slave Androcles removed a thorn from the paw of a lion in distress, the pair became fast friends. Later Androcles was forced to engage a lion in combat in the Roman amphitheatre. The king of the beasts recognized his benefactor and greeted him with kindness. In Western Europe the story was transformed into a Catholic St. Jerome and the lion,¹⁴ in Eastern Europe to an Orthodox St. Sergey and the bear.¹⁵ The underlying moral message was that saintly persons would be compassionate to other species. As the Christian world later commercialized, then industrialized, different aspects of the Christian tradition were emphasized to encourage congruence between economic and religious imperatives. Just as with the Christian tradition, then, we can be confident that as societal circumstances altered in other societies, so their myths will have been adjusted to meet the needs of the changing popular consciousness and the permanent spirit of the people, although the changes will have been less than those that occurred in the West. All this should encourage us to be careful in the interpretation of any particular myth and what it means to society. And the further removed from contemporary consciousness and experience the myth is, the more circumspect we need to be.

We should not assume that treating animals well in myth or religion means that they were well treated in fact—in whatever culture. A medieval father may well have related the story of St. Jerome and the lion to the children...