By Dr. Michael W. Fox

Nobel laureate and one of the founding fathers of ethology, the late Prof. Konrad Lorenz, said, "Before you can really study an animal, you must first love it."

In a shamanic sense, through empathy we can connect with and be one with the animal, like Martin Buber’s "I-Thou" experience that he described with a beloved horse. The taboo of anthropomorphizing animals is thus transcended, possibly through a kind of counter-transference where, given sufficient intimacy with the animal, we zoomorphize ourselves: we "morph" into the animal’s consciousness, being able to anticipate her actions, understand her intentions, needs, and motivational state.

Ethology is close in its scientific methodology to phenomenology and existential psychology. Behavioral socio-ecology looks at adaptive processes, their ontogeny and phylogeny, as does cognitive ethology that explores the animals’ umwelt or perceptual world, while sociobiology is traditionally more genetically deterministic.

The Very Rev. Dr. James Parks Morton has defined ecology as the "science of the body of Christ through which we of the Earth community learn our sacred connections." From this metaphysical perspective I would define ethology as the science of the spirit of animals through which we of the Earth community learn respect and compassion for all our relations.

The existential, phenomenological approach of ethology, which some critics do not regard as scientific, is one of observation and description. As one of the other founding fathers of ethology, Nobel Laureate Nikko Tinbergen once said, "When you put two animals together, you have an experiment." Observation and identification of behaviors and detailed description in various contexts lead to the construction of an "ethogram" – a listing of the animal’s repertoire of behavioral action patterns, displays and vocalizations in various contexts and emotional/motivational states, like sexual (including courtship), parental, agonistic, allelomimetic (group coordinated), self-care, mutual care, eliminative, ingestive, exploratory, investigative (including social), hunting, predator defense, den or nest-making, and play behavior – including self-play, play with another (social play), and play with an inanimate object that in some species can link with tool-using behavior.

Some behaviors are highly ritualistic in that they are predictable, stereotypic fixed-action patterns. These are called displays and their ritualistic form helps reduce ambiguity and therefore misunderstanding. When a dog growls and snaps, you know his intentions and [maybe] the cause of such an agonistic display. But since similar ritualistic signals or fixed-action patterns can be displayed in different contexts -- a dog will snarl and snap when the context is playful rather than threatening – we learn through the

ethogram that animals are aware of context: in one context the threat is serious, in another it is not. This gives us insight into animal consciousness and awareness and of their ability to "ethologize" or interpret each other’s behavior, motivational state, needs, wants and intentions. We find elements of humor, deception, misunderstanding, mirroring or mimicry, and altruism in how they communicate and relate.

The objectifying (and objectional) Cartesian/Newtonian umwelt mechanomorphizes the animal, reducing complex and context-related behavior and consciousness to numerical, statistically verifiable probabilities. Subjected to Darwinian/sociobiological selective filtering, the adaptive, evolutionary and genetic determinants of what and how animals do what they do, and when, may be deduced or induced. Yet such deductive and inductive reasoning that imposes on the animal anthropocentric projections, like intentionality and purposiveness in terms of survival and adaptability and genetic investment in mate or offspring, may lead to erroneous conclusions. For example, many studies of animal play conclude that play helps refine hunting and fighting skills or escape from predators, the sheer joy and bonding function of play, including interspecies play, being off the conceptual screen.

Ethology enables us to better understand the ethos or spirit of animals. With better understanding of their behavior, we can improve methods and standards of husbandry or animal care. We can also gain insight, especially through studies of their care-giving and care-soliciting (epimeletic and et-epimeletic) behaviors, of their capacity for empathy, altruism and elemental moral and ethical sensibility. It’s all very well to put a Darwinian/sociobiological spin on such behavior, but in my mind it should move us to consider the moral status we give to nonhuman animals and to the ethical, philosophical and socio-economic ramifications of animal rights.

Empathy in animals and altruistic behavior give us biological evidence of an evolutionary process of increasing social and mental complexity converging and giving rise to an innate moral sensibility and capacity to make ethical decisions for the good of the pack (in the wolf) and of the Earth community (for the human), where self-interest through empathy becomes synonymous with the interests of others. Altruistic behavior is thus the most enlightened form of selfishness.

There is one human quality that animal studies may never be able to shed comparative, biological and evolutionary light on, and that is our imagination, animal play notwithstanding. The power of imagination to manifest materially or behaviorally – ideas ("mnemes", acting culturally like genes) that we mentally conceive – is a power, like our power of dominion, that demands more of us than the "biophilia" and "conciliation" of Harvard Biologist E. O. Wilson.

As for the neo-Darwinian view of the human species being the supreme, most highly evolved being on Earth, according to a family friend, Darwin used to write on his hand a daily reminder "not superior." The essence of his evolutionary theory is more subtle than the fundamentalist vernacular Darwinianism of human superiority and of competition and survival of the fittest. He drew attention to cooperation and interspecies co-evolution, that contradicts the social Darwinism of the industrial age that puts humans at the top of an Aristotelian great chain of being; and that interprets evolution as increasing technological perfection, industrial growth, and scientific progress, even reasoning that genetic engineering is a natural evolutionary progression for the human species, and that being natural is therefore neither immoral nor unethical.

Darwin’s view of cooperation resonates with Peter Kropotkin’s thesis of mutual aid. He coined the term anarchy to describe the absence of a ruling species and of a hierarchy in the ecosystem of Russian steppes. The term holarchy may now be more appropriate considering the negative connotations of anarchism.

The ethos, spirit or nature of animals, is intimately linked ontogenetically and

phylogenetically with their telos, or purpose in being; and with their ecos, the ecosystem environment in which they have co-evolved with other species in a mutually enhancing, sustainable and regenerative "holarchy" of interdependence.

The intimate linkages between ethos, telos, and ecos have been disrupted by the domestication effects on animals’ ethos and telos. The same may be said for the post-gatherer-hunter civilization effects on the human ethos and telos, of agrarianism, sedentarism, urbanization and industrialization. The profound ecological, environmental,

social and psychological consequences on human species are part of the "price of progress," as some see it, or of human adaptation and evolution. But all to what end?

The etymology of human implies our origin from humus, invoking humility and humaneness. If we are to learn anything from animals wild and domestic, it is that we are animals too, affected for better or for worse by what we have done to the Earth and all who dwell therein. Through the animals we can discern the better attributes of their ethos that make us human – empathy, compassion, altruism, playfulness, curiosity, adaptability and creativity, attributes that are so often lacking in society today.

The Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin saw evolution as a creative convergence of two axes – consciousness and complexity – that more recently has been cast in a creative, cosmogenic process by Thomas Berry, who urges us to see the universe as a communion of subjects and not as a collection of objects.

It calls for the recovery of our animal heritage of empathy and altruism; a redefinition or clarification of what it means to be human, and the incorporation of bioethics into our daily lives to help restore the linkages – or sacred connections – between ethos, telos, and the Earth Mother of us all.