by Joe Hutto
This was the sad and all-too-recent dark ages in the study of animal behavior and experience. Institutions such as Keller Brelan were established and dedicated to the exploration of common barnyard animals and primates and their apparently unremarkable intellectual abilities as lights flashed, bells rang, and then perhaps a kernel of corn or a piece of Purina “monkey chow” might automatically tinkle out into a dish as a reinforcing reward to a staggeringly correct response. These were merely the most meager insights into the workings of the animal mind. In spite of making contributions with new techniques for the training of animals without the use of punishment, there was little advancement in understanding the experience or intelligence of other creatures. These were somewhat embarrassing times in human intellectual and scientific development, as academics blindly perpetuated various archaic cultural traditions and concepts by nervously trying to divorce our species from any relationship to the “beasts of the field”—the old “dominion over all things” concept. For, surely, the thinking went, no creature other than human was capable of having actual thoughts or could have an integrated experience of its own life as perpetuated by the conscious abstractions of learning, memory, communication, and society. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of people such as Konrad Lorenz, Dian Fossey, and Jane Goodall, most scientists and thoughtful people now generally uphold that many other creatures share in a fully integrated life experience, satisfying all the criteria for true consciousness.
I am not an authority on consciousness, but I have pursued the subject as an ardent student for many decades. My many explorations into the lives of other creatures have in essence been an exploration into the nature of consciousness and the way in which other creatures envision the world. My objective has always been to simply try to see the world through their eyes. Of course consciousness involves everything that resides in empirical opposition to science.
The nature and definitions of consciousness have at last been explored in earnest by many scholars, and a few ground rules have been established in actually agreeing on a comprehensive set of criteria that can be said to define the basic elements of the conscious experience. Basically, these criteria are relatively easy to satisfy and first involve the simple recognition or awareness of having an actual body, or some sense of “being.” Second, a creature may also have the experience of recognizing that its body is operating in a particular space, a location, or at least some rudimentary sense of place. Third, a creature must then typically have some sort of memory that will provide the integrated continuity created by body, space, and time, and consciousness may then be said to occur. Clearly, these elements can be found in most any organism that is relatively well organized biologically, with little necessity for extraordinary or so-called higher brain function that might be found in dolphins, apes, or humans.
At least from the perspective of one of the more self-conscious creatures—a human—it appears that the most fascinating outcome of biological existence is the mysterious phenomenon of self-awareness—of the conscious experience. However strange and abstract, it could be that the most important elements of consciousness are the emotional and experiential revelations that are provided. Even though the tenets of consciousness seem simple and the criteria defining consciousness easy to satisfy, as we all know, the behavioral and experiential elements—these provisions—may be varied and complex. Various forms of representational information that facilitate communication between one organism and another—the sharing of consciousness—can further define the experience, and it could be said that human consciousness is characterized by our elaborate, language-based representational system. However, a vast number of creatures, including mule deer, also have highly evolved systems of communication that could be considered differing forms of “language,” such as using scent, body language, and senses far more acute than our own. Also, consciousness can have unfortunate consequences in the extreme—the burden of “existential consciousness,” the haunting awareness of our own mortality. Some scholars suggest that this particular awareness sets the human experience apart from other creatures. I disagree.
My involvement with mule deer, as well as highly socialized creatures of other species, has given me reason to suspect that humans have no privileged access, either to the conscious experience, or to the familiarity with, and prospect of, certain mortality. There are many creatures that appear to acknowledge the inevitability of death as a provision of their lives. I suspect that now, in contemporary times, it is only through the exposure to combat or extraordinary disaster that a modern human can come to realize that the expectation and dread of death resides in the depths of our most primal and visceral organic experience, and as such is not peculiar to the human conscious experience or any other characteristic peculiar to superior human brain function. Do not be consoled that some other creature with a basic awareness of its own existence clings to its life less desperately or with less passion, or faces death with less fear than you or I would. The creatures with which I live fully understand the implications and are no strangers to the most dreadful reality. It is the daily condition in which they live, and they know full well what is at stake at all times. If you have seen your buddy take a large-caliber bullet to the groin, or watched the animal standing next to you as it is grabbed by some great predator—unlike the usual antiseptic theatrical stereotypes—perhaps you have seen the look of real, deathly fear in a creature’s eyes, and found the similarities of the horror and desperation to be unmistakable and indistinguishable.
And now, after observing the mule deer for more than seven years, it is my suspicion that the observation, consideration, and acknowledgment of the mysterious inevitability of death is not an exception among many advanced life forms, but is often characteristic. How often have I observed an animal displaying a desperate attempt to understand and learn from the death surrounding it? Learning the significance of the death among members of its own species can take on the proportions not of an obligation, but of an obsession. Interestingly, many of the predatory species with which I have lived and worked have shown less need for an understanding of the phenomenon of death, perhaps because it is simply the everyday milieu that provides them with sustenance. The so-called “prey species” are logically and of necessity more concerned with the significance of mortality—and its probability.
The fawn Elvin dying with the entire herd responding and gathering around.
Mule deer visit the sites of recently deceased herd or family members repeatedly—often multiple times per day, and perhaps for weeks. Obviously, the intense, concentrated effort to understand and extract some significance could only be described as laborious and excruciating. Mule deer have made a study of death. After observing these reactions for so long and with such frequency, I am persuaded that their behavior offers strong evidence of a dedicated inquiry that may involve certain fundamental questions: Who is dead? How will the death of this particular individual change my life? What may have caused this death? Can this happen to me? What are the valuable lessons that can be learned from this particular death? In fact, many animals, certainly mule deer among them, do not simply walk away from death and just “go on with their lives.” To the contrary, death clearly has profound emotional consequences for these creatures. The exhausting experience of investigating death gradually pervades their lives, and the disappointment that fills their once bright, eager, and optimistic eyes is heartbreaking. They appear to become worn down physically and emotionally. I see the immediate, dramatic, and permanent changes in personality that accompany the death of fawns and other close affiliates and family members. Clearly death has profound emotional consequences for these creatures. Deer grieve. The days when we could conveniently separate our experience from other creatures with the familiar reference to anthropomorphism has come and gone. Another vast underestimation of the experience of many other creatures, the term anthropomorphic—like the term habituation—has all but lost its usefulness in any informed discussion of animal beha
vior. Like it or not, we share most if not all of our most important qualitative behavioral characteristics with other creatures and can quibble primarily about quantitative differences. That ship has sailed and has been proven empirically to be a boat lacking integrity that will no longer float. But it is important to remember that when we talk in terms of shared traits and experiences like language and consciousness, any organism may manifest these experiences in ways that are entirely peculiar to that individual species. Although many species may be said to have “language,” for example, the experience of so-called language may differ in profound ways. So, in referring to the experiences of grief or mourning, it is not meant to suggest that we necessarily experience the loss of an affiliate in the same way, but without question humans and many other living things share some version—some common approximation—of sorrow with the elephant, the dolphin, and the deer.
I have all too often observed a doe in a condition of exhaustion and despondency after losing a fawn. Days may pass as the apparently grieving mother finally gives up the anguish for a fawn she clearly knows is dead—whose ravaged remains she has examined multiple times each day for a week—whose remains she may have faithfully guarded night after night from the onslaught of scavengers, including coyotes. Eventually, as she lies or stands in solitude, rarely eating, occasionally looking longingly into the distance with pathetic resolution, she voices her “lost fawn” call. And even though the degree of inconsolability can vary greatly from one individual to the next, the stress on these mothers—physical and emotional—can be overwhelming. Recently, I closely observed the familiar doe Rag Tag after losing one of her fawns to a lion at fourteen weeks. In her sixth year but having only recently returned from her summer range badly stressed from poor nutrition, the loss of her fawn sent her into a decline that claimed her life in less than two weeks. Early one morning, in desperation, I literally watched her abandon the remaining fawn, retreating among the willows a half-mile up the gulch, just below the bones of her mother, Raggedy Anne, and there in secrecy she chose to make her deathbed. I observed the closely affiliated doe we named Rodenta lying near Rag Tag in her final hours. Now we are struggling to supply nutritious food and preserve the life of Rag Tag’s surviving doe fawn—Rag Doll, who is known as Molly. Every evening for weeks, Molly mewed for her mother’s return, and the confusion and sickness in her small spirit was palpable. Only yesterday evening as darkness and danger neared—a full six weeks since her mother’s death—she finished her grain, and as we became surrounded by the night, she suddenly remembered and once again longed for the protective comfort of her mother’s side. Calling repeatedly, she ran to the edge of the meadow—desperately searching for that familiar face and those penetrating eyes that say to a young deer, “Follow me, and I will keep you safe.”
Yes, without question, that conscious provision—sorrow—born of attachment, loss, and regret is an experience we have in common with other living things.
If I could choose the one perfect existence—that personal utopian ideal—an existence that would keep me entertained and satisfy all my ecological, social, and even spiritual requirements, and assuming I could somehow be physically sustained, I would surely be content with a permanent life within the rich experience of the mule deer. Ignoring the fact that I may be attacked by some large predator or even mistakenly shot for the company I keep—and in spite of certain physical hardships, enormous frustration and frequent heartache—I have never in these seven years had a moment when I longed to be somewhere else or to be involved in other activities, or ever tried to imagine better company. Without exaggeration, every moment spent with these deer has been the most extraordinary gift. The experience of sharing life with a creature that appears so seamlessly interwoven into its ecology has, by association, immersed me in an unexpected ecology of perfection that I have certainly never found in my own ordinary human existence. With amusement I observe my changing mental landscape and, like a few previous involvements, notice that when leaving the company of the deer, life immediately loses a measure of richness and significance. Now there is some absurd but distinct dread of the prospect of simply being me—the resumption of some necessary and tedious human identity encumbered with paper, electronic devices, mechanical transportation, and the inherent stress bound into the human cultural experience. But this magnificent ecology that has given rise to a most magnificent animal has now changed.
Rag Tag, at one time a healthy doe.
Rag Tag, starved from a summer in the mountains and a hungry fawn. She will be dead within a week.
Molly, waiting in vain for her mother’s return.
By accepting a distinct but unspoken invitation, I have been allowed to become a member of an exotic society, and within this society I have developed relationships that may have numbered in the hundreds. Do not for a moment think of these animals as pets—an inaccurate concept including some implication that would involve dominion, stewardship, husbandry, or control over these animals. Our relationship exists entirely of their choosing. While living on this mountainside in their unimaginably complex world for most of each day—and now, after more than seven years—I find that I become increasingly humbled by the extraordinary company I keep. My admiration and respect for their intelligence, resourcefulness, and physical prowess are unbounded. While sharing their life and their experience in this exquisite but rugged ecology, they are clearly, on every fundamental level, my superiors. I can only be a weak, impotent, and incompetent member of this rich and highly developed society. That my comparative impairments, handicaps, and severe challenges are so thoroughly indulged by my affiliates is testimony to some unexplainable but distinctly privileged membership that they have afforded me.
Orphaned Molly called for her mother every night for a month.
Molly survived the winter. Photo by Dawson Dunning.
Of course, a few of these animals have simply chosen and rejected me outright, but many—perhaps most—have become acquaintances, some have become friends, and some know me as a family member. I cannot say that I have never achieved this level of intimacy with another species, but I have never sustained this level of intense involvement with a creature so complex, intelligent, and capable of sharing so much communication for so many years. Above all, I will always be amazed and mystified that this remarkable animal has contained, somewhere within its fascinating realm of complex behavior, the capacity to allow such an improbable and unexpected membership in its community. It is no testimony to my talents but entirely a result of the deer’s mysterious willingness to be accepting.
Again and again it seems impossible, as I am reminded that my life has been thoroughly interwoven with this phenomenal animal for so many years. And after sharing so much history, it is hard to know how this has changed me; it is hard to remember who I once was, and harder still to understand who or what I may have become. My identity has undeniably been reshaped and redefined by this community—this family into which I have in some strange way been assimilated. Increasingly, it appears that my world—my frame of reference—has been irrevocably changed. Perhaps, at last, I am in fact seeing a different perspective—seeing the world through another creature’s eyes. Now, when a bullet passes through the body of one of my family members, or a throat is pierced by the teeth of a 180-pound cat, there is no more displacement or refuge from my attachment—that mindless, objective space where previously my emotions would have safely resided. Now there is only the shared pain and agony and the loss of one that I care for deeply. Now with that understanding comes the recognition of the magnitude of all that the deer have lost, the magnitude of their individual disappointment, and the magnitude of the loss it also represents in the order of their community. It is all about shifting perspectives—the deer’s, and, now, mine.
I now realize that the objective, safe haven wherein we conveniently assign all unpleasantness in this world—“the natural order of things”—was always a house of cards, merely a childish and inadequate domain lackin
g a fundamental grasp of a more wondrous and confounding, but stark and undeniably pernicious, reality.
These animals are facing grim new challenges, and I wonder whether their vision of life can continue to include a world that offers them any sense of joy and optimism—for I know this animal, and the potential to experience great joy is a natural and defining part of who and what they are. But now it appears that, for them, there is no refuge, no solace, and no place of safety where they can for some brief moment be restored. They are tired, they are sick, their bellies are not full, their young do not survive, and mule deer populations are under assault at all times and from every direction.
Epilogue
For all its current advances, the mule deer, so different, so
uniquely American, so young and promising, is nevertheless a
species marked for extinction. That is not inevitable, but very
likely, given the circumstances mule deer find themselves in.
—Valerius Geist, Mule Deer Country (1999)
As anyone with a knack for the obvious knows, everywhere there is an inexorable tide of humanity washing across the landscape, and the various creatures that seem to loom so large in this ecology are of little consequence in comparison to the forces that are in play—the forces that perpetuate our humanity. I fully recognize that in the grand scheme of our civilization, these creatures, this ecology, and certainly my observations of them bear very little significance. In fact, I have known for many decades that land management and wildlife management are well intended but relatively petty forces on the landscape, and in the long run the fate of all this is primarily directed and driven by the hands of political and economic interest. Any veteran wildlife management employee understands this principle as a given and is simply resigned to do the best he or she can in an ecologically imperfect world. We all know with complete authority, for example, that, without a second thought, these forces would gladly let the seas boil over before they would do anything that would affect the price of gas at the pump or would insult the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Manage your wildlife, but never lose sight of the fundamentals. That is just the way it is—that is just the way it works, and the fundamentals ultimately leave precious little room for negotiation. The welfare of a mule deer is not a force that can effect, much less drive, cultural and economic change. In addition to these stark realities, I now see that I have inadvertently set myself up for an even more complicated fall by the company I have chosen to keep.