Animals Pleased and Pleasing

Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, by Jonathan Balcombe; Macmillan, 2006.

Jonathan Balcombe is an Animal Behaviour Scientist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and this upbeat book is a pleasing look at the uses and meaning of pleasure in animal physiology and evolution. Evolution is economical: if something healthy and beneficial for an animal (like eating, exercising, resting, playing, mating, and mutual grooming) is also pleasurable, then the pleasure is not incidental. Evolution "uses" everything in maximizing the survival of individuals and species, and in conducting them into ever-more novel morphology.

If then, evolution "uses" pleasure, who are we to cancel it from the lives of other animals, asks Balcombe? Do we not have a moral obligation not to "deprive other animals of opportunities to reap the rewards life offers?" Balcombe gives ample examples of pleasure-seeking behaviour in animals and demonstrates their built-in tendency to grasp a "fulfilling natural life".

The rights we have learned to extend to other humans are not based on their capacity to reason, but on their capacity to feel. "It is sentience -- not language, architecture or a proficiency with chess openings -- that crucially qualifies an individual for moral protection," says Balcombe. Animal nerve cells are the same as ours, and what we all have sentience about, is the amount of pleasure or pain we are receiving. That, not how widely their genes are being spread, or how numerous their numbers are, is what governs the behaviour of individuals -- not excluding the behaviour of fish and insects.

Like infant humans, infant animals become well-adjusted adults because of the pleasures they receive from mother-love (the same pleasures the mothers get from it): warmth, physical caresses, encouragement to learn. And as with us, learning is facilitated by the pleasure taken in the process. The question is, are we intelligent enough, learned enough, sensitive enough to acknowledge the harm we do when we imprison farm and laboratory animals, and separate infants from mothers, and companion animals from their own kind?

Animal psychology is as complicated as our own, for animals too experience conflicting desires, e.g. for both combat and cooperation, for movement and for sleep, for play and for solitude. There is appetite for variety itself, and animal behaviourists can see a constant yin-yang rebalancing in animal activity whenever animals are permitted to live freely according to their nature -- mirroring that constant movement-to-balance that we perceive throughout the cosmos as a whole.

Note: see below: The Whole Hog, by Lyall Watson.