Even those of us who do not have pets or ride horses or live on farms tend to be fascinated by humans' relationship with animals. We are drawn in by the mystery of interspecies relationships because we are aware that they hark back to some place that existed before language. Such relationships are mysterious because they are silent, whatever the commands that we speak or (too often) yell, and this is the quality that also makes them intensely personally felt. In the absence of understanding what a bark or howl actually means, we complete the conversations we have with animals ourselves.
This is why we feel the death of animals keenly. Having a relationship with an animal poses the most fundamental questions about what it means to exist, about how we experience happiness, need, fear and, ultimately, loss. We ask, in such moments, what it means to say that we are friends with or “love” a pet. Does the animal really have feelings or just love the food that is in the palm of your hand? (And if it does, then what do we learn from that?)
The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness
, by Mark Rowlands, Granta, 246 pages, $24.95
Why should the pet, if it does, obey our instructions? When does punishment suppose a moral sense that is ridiculous to attribute to this other animal? What does it mean when we watch a dog, say, cavort through being a puppy and then, so much faster than we do, age and ultimately die? Are we really such different creatures?
Answering questions of this order is the mission of Englishman Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons From the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness . The pet in this case is not a dog but, true to the book's title, a wolf called Brenin. The author, a philosopher, purchases the wolf cub on something of a whim while teaching in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama. The Philosopher and the Wolf is a memoir of their relationship and a catalogue of the epiphanies and contemplations that their living together leads him to. His book is a ruminative and often challenging set of reflections about the meaning of life.
Early on, Rowlands makes an early distinction between wolves' ways of living and “simian” ways – those of the ape family to which we, as humans, belong. “Dogs,” Rowlands writes, “call out to something in the deepest recesses of a long-forgotten part of our soul ... a part of us that was there before we became apes. This is the wolf that we once were.”
In the fork of his evolutionary schema, we simians come off badly – this despite the students' lunches Brenin eats, the fights he gets into and the damage he wreaks if ever he is left alone for more than 20 minutes.
Relying in large part on the work of celebrated naturalist Frans de Waal – he of the sex-mad bonobos and our “inner ape” – Rowlands concludes that the ape family is the one less to be admired. It is less dedicated to the welfare of the group and inherently more calculating, and so capable of premeditation and, subsequently, evil.
What is most important when the time comes – and it always will – is to live your life with the coldness of a wolf — Mark Rowlands
And what is the driver? Lust, of course, and the urge to power over our brethren. These two appetites are, to his mind, the consequence of our inversion of the importance of the reproductive function and pleasure as the actual point of sex . (A wolf may have it only once a year, and blithely.) As a result, we simians are scheming and nasty and dishonest, whereas, Rowlands says, “A wolf cannot lie to us; neither can a dog. That is why we think that we are better than them.”
Rowlands is hardly the first to romanticize beasts (“Sometimes I get a feeling: it's the strangest feeling. It's that I used to be a wolf and now I'm just a stupid labrador”) and he is in a long line of thinkers using the animal world to explore the thorny question of what, if anything, distinguishes our species. It has been argued, for instance, that humans, but not animals, are capable of free will, or that we alone are the species that can imagine love and our eventual deaths.
