threads

a question of empathy, non-humans, and where we draw lines

In St Magnus Cathedral’s graveyard, a lone jackdaw is sitting in a bare-boned sycamore. This time last week the tree would have been all dressed up in autumn colours, but Storm Ashley has disrobed it, and now it is stark, naked, a harbinger of the bleaker months to come.

I am sitting here, amongst the graves and the sycamores, whiling away the final hour of my trip to town, waiting for the boat home. Usually I’d be working in the library, but today the sky is blue and the sun still holds a breath of warmth and the air is unusually still. So, I sit in the graveyard instead.

The jackdaw is at the top of the sycamore, and it seems a little nervous. It keeps cocking its head, inspecting me with one blue-grey eye, as if to say: who are you, you do not belong here, this is the corner for the corvids.

I smile, for this jackdaw does not know I have spent three springs and summers following its southern relatives around a Cornish graveyard. This jackdaw does not know how many secrets of its society I have come to learn.

It has no inkling that I know some jackdaw couples are like teenagers that can’t keep their hands off one another; that others are cool and distant and yet still remarkably efficient at coordinating their efforts to raise young.

That pairs often get together when they’re very young, and then stay together for life, forming strong, secure and tender bonds. But that sometimes a male might take on an extra jackdaw wife. That the original jackdaw wife will be very displeased about this turn of events, but might, in the end, let her lay her eggs in the same nest.

That some jackdaws are bold and cheeky. That others are nervous.

That they learn from one another.

That most do not take quickly to humans. That all of them remember human faces. That they are more fearful of human men than women.

That they (and other corvids) have cognitive abilities comparable to the great apes.

This jackdaw inspecting me from the sycamore tree has no idea how much I have seen of jackdaw life, of jackdaw relationships, of jackdaw intellect. How much humanity I see in them. How much jackdaw I see in humanity.

But the same can be said of all non-human species. The more we look, the more we are able to grasp the threads that bind us together. Sometimes those threads are whisper-thin. Sometimes those threads are thick as umbilical cords. But there is always a thread.

Those threads, I think, become visible to humans in two ways: first, by spending time with animals, by paying attention to them, by understanding – in an embodied way – the commonalities between us. Second, by learning the facts of those commonalities. By learning about evolution, DNA, the web of our existence, the similarities and differences between our brains, our emotions, our social lives, how we perceive the world. But this, I think, is not as effective as the first.

I learnt many facts about rhesus macaques before spending every day with them for six months, but it was not until I was living within the soap opera of those monkeys’ lives – watching the alpha female influence her sisters, friends and hopeful mates to terrorise those who dared not fear her; watching grandmothers loving on their grandkids; watching females work together to avoid harassment by the males; watching females who usually disliked one another bond over the excitement of a newborn baby; watching some individuals exist happily on the edges of groups while others were the life and soul of their social circles – that I really felt the threads that bind us.

I think anyone who spends time with animals – domestic or wild – would agree. We can know the threads in theory. We can draw phylogenetic trees, we can talk about how great apes feel empathy and meerkats teach their babies and rooks make friends. But to feel those threads – to hold them in our hands, to have them remind our small human bodies: look, you are not alone and you are not so special and you are part of something so vast and so beautiful – that involves spending time with other beings, not just knowing the facts.

That some humans simply never get the chance to do this is, I think, a real problem for our species’ attitudes towards non-humans. A human-centred view of the world, relegating all other life to a rung below us in some imagined ladder, is a dull view, a two-dimensional view, a lonely view, and, sometimes, a dangerous view.

The threads that bind us are important. They give context to our odd human lives. They are a foundation from which empathy for non-human life is built. But that isn’t to say that these threads are easy to hold. They lead us into a thinner world; a world where the boundaries between us and other living things become membranes rather than walls, a world where hearts are tugged by more creatures than we can hope to help, where empathy is stretched, where life can sometimes feel too intricate, too delicate, too brutal.

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Years ago, in the middle of a busy spring researching jackdaws, I found two rook fledglings who had fallen from their nest. Rooks are wonderful birds. They are loud, a little clumsy, quite gentle, with complicated brains and complicated social systems. We’d spend weeks ringing jackdaws so that we could individually identify them, and occasionally a rook would end up in our hands. Whereas jackdaws are full of gumption and sass, rooks are more like chilled out surfer dudes. Whatever will be will be seemed to be their mantra.

The two rook fledglings had not yet learned to be wary of humans, and they hopped up to me through the leafy undergrowth. They both looked fully grown; the same size as adult rooks and fully feathered. Their parents were above us, alarming. They were warning their chicks of danger. I took the scene in: the fledglings, their robust bodies, their parents protecting them, and I thought, well, it’s probably best to leave them. It’s too soon for them to fledge but they’ll probably be okay. I’ll come back and check tomorrow.

I found them the next morning, two limp bodies in the leaf litter. I stroked their feathers, looked at their half-closed eyes and felt the tug of all those threads connecting us – pain, pleasure, relationships, joy – and it seemed unbearable that I should be stroking their bodies when I could, easily, have saved them.

That same spring, hundreds of jackdaw chicks died in the nests I was monitoring. They starved. This happens naturally, every year across Europe, in almost every jackdaw nest. The adults have more chicks than they can raise to adulthood and the youngest usually die. Once the chicks had died, I gathered their bodies for analysis, dissected them and extracted their DNA. All these chicks had died naturally. But so had the rooks. So why did I feel so deeply for the two fledglings on the forest floor and not for all the chicks I knew would starve without intervention?

I’d subconsciously drawn a line between them. I’d drawn a line that meant I felt deeply for one species and not the other. I’d drawn a line that held no logic, not really, except for self-protection, I suppose. If I’d let myself really feel for all the hundreds of dying jackdaws around me, and, beyond that, all the thousands of wild creatures that suffer and die every day of every year, I would have lost the plot.

But I hate that a line had to be drawn, and I hate that I never dissected the location of this line at the time, or dissected the dissonance of it.

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Empathy is one of the reasons I love our species so much. It is unusual, our level of empathy. It is something that makes us special (although, I should add, it is not unique to us). But our empathy is not limitless, and so we all must draw a line somewhere.

Where we draw this line is often, I think, not rooted in logic or reason, and often contains elements of dissonance. We might extend our empathy to a pet pig but not a pig sent for slaughter. We might extend our empathy to a bee but not a wasp. We might extend our empathy to an elephant but not an octopus, a whale but not a shark, a vole but not a rat.

These lines we draw are a product of our life experience, culture, education, and so many other factors. But one thing is for sure: everyone draws a line somewhere.

Some lines, of course, are clearly wrong. When a line is drawn within the human species, for example, between a person’s family, friends, those that think like them, those that look like them, and the rest of the human species – well, that person is not stretching to the limits of their empathy. They are hoarding their empathy. Or, perhaps, ignoring their empathy. They are ignoring the thickest, strongest threads that exist. They are ignoring their humanity.

Beyond this, though, when we are thinking of how far to extend our empathy, I’m not sure there are any clear answers. This is especially true given that empathy for non-humans relies on a certain understanding of them, whether through time spent in nature or through education. I do think the world would be a better place for non-human animals if more of the human species spent time in nature, finding and feeling the threads that bind us. But there are so many reasons this is not always possible, and it is a question of socioeconomics, structural inequality, politics, culture, and rarely a question of individual action.

And then, even if every human could see these threads, could find their common ground with the ravens and the squirrels, the rats and the pigs, even then, a line has to be drawn somewhere, doesn’t it? The natural world is brimming with suffering. Starvation and predation are common but brutal ways for animals to die. We cannot feel deeply for every living thing. We cannot wish to intervene in every instance of suffering. The tax would be too high. The cost too much. But how can we balance this with being the kindest and most compassionate versions of ourselves? Where is the right place to draw our lines?

I don’t have any answers, it is just something I think about often. I suppose I wish others thought about it more often, too. We are a wonderfully, beautifully empathetic species, but we are also excellent at burying our heads in the sand when it comes to knotty ethical questions.

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Another jackdaw lands on the sycamore tree, next to the first. They chatter to one another. One leans in to preen the other. Just like when humans hug, when birds preen one another their heartrates and stress levels decrease. I smile as I watch them. I smile in the exact same way I do when I watch humans hold hands as they walk down the street.

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