What's Going On With The Animals?

The Animals Are Getting Restless
Is something going on with the animals? This question places us deep into my theory of network consciousness and unfortunately without the benefit of a proper foundation. However recent incidents of animals attacking humans afford such a remarkable window into how animal consciousness works it’s worth it to begin here.
To review: in the last several weeks a killer whale at Sea World grabbed its trainer’s leg and dragged him down to the bottom of the pool for a number of minutes. And, the bite was hard enough to break the man’s ankle. Also within the last few weeks, the New York Times ran a front-page story about sea lions attacking tourists, swimmers and fishermen in the San Francisco bay region. Last month, the feature article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine was about elephants attacking villagers in Africa and India: villagers have had to build fortified and booby-trapped pits around their villages for protection. There have been reports of turkeys running wild: and last spring the New York Times carried a story of a college student being attacked by a deer while crossing a wooded area on campus. The girl finds herself huddling in the fetal position while being pummeled by hooves, asking herself in absolute astonishment: “I’m being mauled by a deer?” Sea Rays are reputably docile, and yet one killed Steve Irwin, the famous crocodile man. The ray might have felt cornered by Irwin and his cameraman, but then shortly after his death, a Sea Ray in Florida flopped into a fisherman’s boat and stabbed him in the heart as well. Fortunately he survived. It’s not unusual for joggers to be mauled by mountain lions in California and the Rocky mountains: yet in the northeast the normally timid black bear has been increasingly attacking campers and hikers. Several summers ago in the Adirondacks a bear stole a baby from a carriage and killed her. New Jersey has also had a number of bear incidents.
Experts have weighed in with the following explanations: global warming, environmental pollutants, decreased feed stocks, more human activity in wilderness areas, decrease of wild habitat, people feeding animals and desensitizing them to an innate fear of humans, and then the flypaper catch all explanation, animals after all will be animals, in other words, animals are wild and therefore unpredictable. All but the final are contributing factors to some degree, but none of these are causal. In fact, each is but a thread of what I see as the overarching theme.
What’s particularly interesting with the Sea World incident is that the Killer Whale was the “beneficiary” of thirty years of state-of-the-art scientific principles of positive conditioning, administered by a core of committed trainers and caretakers, no expense was spared: no need of the animal ever went unmet. So the consensus that has seemed to coalesce around this incident is that something inside the animal “snapped,” and to most critics it’s because a magnificent creature of the wild being held captive in a cage, no matter how gilded, must be miserable. But this doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head either: something deeper is going on once we take all the evidence about recent events into account. The animal didn’t break down, snap, instead thirty years of expert conditioning unraveled in a second because something finally was expressed.
I would like to call attention to a parallel rise of aggression in the domestic dog. I’ve been a dog trainer for many years and when I started in the sixties, cases of aggression were unheard of in such breeds as Golden retrievers, labs, cocker spaniels, poodles, basset hounds, beagles and many others. Most owners of such dogs never even bothered to train them beyond rudimentary house manners given that behavioral issues were unheard of. These days however I see cases of aggression in all breeds of dogs and most tellingly, and at younger and younger ages. A woman called me recently about her 7 weeks old beagle snarling at her.
All the usual suspects have long been rounded up, inbreeding practices of the show dog world, puppy mills, backyard breeders, irresponsible owners, but still the rates of aggression are rising. And this despite an almost universal rate of compliance with neutering and early spaying, widespread availability of training, unlimited access to behavioral information, no kill shelters, breed rescue organizations, foster dog programs and so on.
From my experiences working and living with dogs, I’ve learned that the rising rate of aggression in the domestic dog is because of everything we do, or more specifically, because of what we believe about dogs, and which is symptomatic of animals in general.
The most important thing I’ve learned about dogs and which allowed me to decipher the intricacies of the animal mind, was that a person has to give a dog “permission” to bite them. There is no such thing as an accident and dogs don’t “turn.” So if I am bitten, it always means to me that I went too fast, that I failed to be in tune with the dog. Which brings me to Steve Irwin. I’m sure he was a great guy, and he certainly did a lot to preserve wild habitat and the like, but I could never quite understand why he had such wide appeal to the public as an animal lover. Showmanship seemed to trump everything: Irwin was always “pushing in” on the animals, provoking a dramatic response for the benefit of the camera and to thrill the audience with a death-defying quickness of reflex. I never understood what this kind of showboating had to do with a profound understanding of animals and when I heard of his death, I immediately was reminded of something I had read about an American Indian medicine man instructing the young about dealing with snakes. He taught that one must make an animal their brother, showing respect at all times. In cultivating this kind of reverence for animals, one day if one comes upon a snake, the snake will sense this calm and compassionate energy and rather than being scared, it too will remain calm. The medicine man noted on the other hand, that when a white man surprises a snake, since the white man always shoots at snakes, the snake will instantly struck with a venomous bite. I believe that the Sea Ray that stabbed Irwin, felt him pushing in on it because this is what the Crocodile Man as showbiz personality does for a living. Animals always go by what they feel, not by what they see so even if Irwin was just swimming nearby, the animal could feel him wanting to push in and do something dramatic for the show.
So my first premise is that nature is a “networked-intelligence” with every living being in communication with every other living being. My second premise is that fundamentally, animals evolved in conformance with this “network consciousness” so that they can “pick up” what’s going on within other beings as the fundamental kernel in their processing software. In other words, the purpose of behavior is first and foremost, not about species survival or the reproductive success of genes, but rather, it is a trans-species system of communication, this is the real force that drives the gear wheel of evolution. In fact the anatomical and physiological makeup of organisms is in service to the implementation of this communication capability. So when animal B observes animal A, the actions of animal A energizes as well as informs animal B based on physical changes that occur within B simply by virtue of what it’s watching. Animal B doesn’t have to think about what A is doing in order to arrive at a highly nuanced appreciation of its behavior, and neither is it going by instinct.
I’m saying that the behavior of an animal is not fundamentally about its own internal calculus of how to make a living: and neither is it fundamentally an expression of its genes “trying” to propagate themselves, but rather, first and foremost, the behavior of any animal represents a “radiation” of its energy: just as an X ray, gamma ray, electron or photon, i.e. the “behavior” of an atom, is an emission of the atom’s internal energetic composition. So when animal B observes animal A, it’s the “radiation” of animal A in the form of its actions or even inaction: that affects animal B and according to a universal template so that every interaction subscribes to a network protocol just as all transactions in an economy are formatted according to the laws by which that economy evolved, and just as every chemical interaction between atoms and molecules subscribes to the laws of electromagnetism. It’s impossible for any interaction to occur outside the energetic parameters of this network consciousness.
To date we have only envisioned two kinds of “inputs” that can affect patterns of behavior or the evolution of organisms, 1) the environment an animal finds itself in, and 2) the genes the animal finds in it. I’m suggesting that network consciousness is a new and far more fundamental class of input so that the radiation of all animals has a combined effect that creates an “atmosphere” so to speak, in the same way that the gaseous makeup of the climate from the combined respiration of plants creates the atmosphere of the planet. The “climate” of network consciousness is the fundamental input influencing all animals.
Now in my model of network consciousness, the method of transfer by which energy moves from one individual to another, and from one species to another: in other words is communicated according to a network standard, transpires through a process that can be termed displacement. And in order for there to be such a transfer via displacement, there must first be a universal medium in which all organisms are participating so that the actions of one organism immutably impact another, and in a manner that is network coherent. For example, in an economy every participant is affected, or displaced, by the currency of exchange, money, exactly the same way, at least in the quantitative sense. Money is money, energetically it can be represented quantitatively: one’s net worth is one’s net worth so that on a quantitative basis, Warren Buffet can be compared to Madonna. Thus, no matter how two investors earned their money, they can come to terms in any business deal depending on who is investing what portion into the deal.
If the economy is to be viable, there must be but one currency that holds a universal value throughout the network, no matter the transaction, no matter the participant. Consumers, entrepreneurs, merchants and retailers in an economy are not left to figure this out for themselves any more than they are free to print money to suit their economic situation or need. There is an overarching network standard that sets the network-wide governance so that every exchange of money is network coherent.
In animal consciousness, this medium of displacement is emotion: although what I mean by emotion is fundamentally different from both the conventional and scientific sense of it, at least as things now stand. In the model I’m promulgating emotion is universal to all animals, the human animal included, so that wondering whether or not animals have emotion is not a matter of anthropomorphizing, because that would be akin to wondering whether or not animals feel the weight of their bodies pressing down on the earth. As if there could be a form of gravity that affects only humans, distinct and apart from whatever is keeping rabbits, deer, and water buffalo on the planet.
In my view, emotion is first and foremost energy and it is so fundamental we can consider it a principle of nature as basic as gravity and electromagnetism. Emotion is what animates animals: emotion is animal energy. And because it is energy, like any other energy in nature, it subscribes to the same laws of physics by which everything in nature is composed and through which all natural processes unfold. It is my contention that emotion is the physical embodiment of the laws of nature, so that an animal’s traits and behavior will prove to be intelligent and adaptive, because both are based on the same laws.
However this built-in capacity for adaptability in animals has been misattributed to either instinct or thinking, because so far in the evolution of organisms, only two kinds of capacities have been entertained, a genetic and a mental capacity. But if these were seminal, then it would be more logical to expect mankind’s primate first cousins, the great apes, chimps and orangutans to have been the animal most likely to leave the wild and reap the overwhelming evolutionary benefits of being granted access to the human hearth, rather than the dog.
I’ve discovered that there is a third dynamic separate and distinct from genetic or mental capacity, an “emotional capacity”, the capacity to feel potential energy even in the presence of a high rate of change. For example, if you look at the difference between a domestic dog’s ability to go anywhere in man’s world, versus the domesticated cat, you can begin to see the overwhelming affects of a behavioral plasticity due to emotional capacity. If you load your cat into the car, it hunkers down and at best endures the ride because the high rate of change, the intense flood of sensory data of a moving car, is more than the cat can process. Whereas the dog is likely to fly into the car and seeks to stick its head out the window to turbo-charge the scent canals. The cat is going on nerve, instinct, whereas the dog is emotionally aroused and processing the experience from another faculty of intelligence, one that is independent of the brain as a matter of fact. The dog is picking up the potential energy inherent in the kinetic energy of the vehicle.
In my reading of nature, species of animals vary first and foremost in terms of emotional capacity. Predators have a higher emotional capacity than prey species; predators which evolved by hunting a prey which fights back through a coordinated herd defense, have a much higher emotional capacity than predators that can physically overpower their prey, be it singly or in numbers. This for example is why the dog evolved from the wolf rather than from the African wild hunting dog, which can physically overpower their prey by virtue of overwhelming numbers and a hunting strategy that exhausts their prey. (As it turns out, there have been only two land animals that evolved along this third track, human beings and canines. Killer whales and dolphins would be the aquatic counterparts and thus we find these species as the performance staples of aquatic theme parks such as Sea World.)
Emotional capacity is a carrying capacity, how much emotional energy (as a monolithic, quantifiable value, as in how much money someone can fit into their wallet) the individual can hold and/or conduct: before an instinct (or a thought in the case of humans and probably some primates) is triggered and thereby overwhelms the ability to feel potential energy.
Emotion is a computation of change, an evolved mechanism by which an animal can feel the potential energy inherent in change, and an animal’s physiology and “psychology” evolved in direct response to this as a method not only of capturing: but more importantly of harnessing the energy of change. The actions of animals are then its means of radiating this captured energy, which then informs other animals as to how the network has shifted in accordance with an input of energy due to changes in the natural landscape, climate changes, etc. For the moment this might seem quite abstract, but as we go we will bring it more and more down to earth, for displacement of emotion as a universal medium is as down to earth as the global thermostat that links all organism into a living network, or the displacement of water that allows aquatic organisms to sense an intrusion into their network. It’s how mechanical motion becomes electro-chemical nerve energy that is network coherent, just as water flowing through a turbine can generate electrical power that consumers on the power grid can tap into.
Unlike other models for behavior and emotion, in network consciousness emotion isn’t seen as a self-contained phenomenon in that any given individual’s feelings are a direct result of its genes and personal experiences, any more than the daily weather can be seen as isolated from the vast cosmological and meteorological forces that affect the whole system on a time scale and reach far beyond that day’s weather or the local topography. When we interpret behavior in terms of a network consciousness, we will find that behavior at its bedrock is a trans-species system of communication whereby the feelings of one animal, which is the basis of all its actions, destabilizes and affects the feelings of another, and in a dovetailed way. It’s not pre-scripted per se, any more than economic transactions are predetermined: it’s just that all behavior has to conform to a network script that transcends species’ presets, as for example in any chemical or atomic interaction, E must always equal MC squared.
And then, under specific conditions, when A meets B, the neuro-chemical energy of having been destabilized by one another, can be reconciled, again according to an overarching emotional protocol. At this point, two animals, no matter their experiences or genetic makeup, can connect with each other. They become social, in other words, they communicate directly via the primal mechanism of network consciousness rather than according to their respective genetic make-ups or according to past conditioning.
Occasionally nature affords us a rare window into these workings, as when the lioness adopts and nurses a gazelle fawn, or a dolphin rescues a drowning person, a few years ago there was a highly publicized story of a gorilla in a zoo rescuing a human baby who fell into the gorilla enclosure. One of the greatest examples was the young hippo bonding to the 100 year old tortoise after the 2004 tsunami, so that the tortoise comes to the hippo’s call, they lay together and consort in ways that completely befuddle their biologists keepers.
However the tendency is to see such incidents as a veritable miracle, as an aberration in the natural order of things as if these animals had somehow found a way to transcend their wild natures, that the social, nurturing aspect of the lioness somehow found a way to overcome its predatory makeup. This brings us to a critical disconnect in how humans apprehend nature and which is thematic to the larger point I will be making about what’s going on with animals in their relations with man.
What we have so far failed to see in such “oddities:” is that we are in fact looking not at anomalies: but rather the gearings of animal consciousness laid bare. We miss this because at present, we think of animals as self-contained entities of intelligence, “intentional agents:” as beings endowed with an onboard, autonomous computer so to speak, of some degree of sophistication, albeit then subordinated to a specie’s-specific instincts that influence or override whatever rational capacity we might ascribe to the animal. We see the essence of any being’s uniqueness as deriving from the particulars of its evolution and the specific blend of genes, rather than its evolution being predicated on the network element common to all organisms. We see the responses of animal A to animal B and vice versa, as two individuals trying to figure each other out, and this approach obscures the network coherency in whatever form their interaction takes.
Where we once were geo-centric in how we saw earth’s place in the universe, today we are “thought-centric.” By this I mean that we are instinctually designed to see intention and reasons in the things animals do, either in the individual itself, or in its genes. On the surface, this seems as self-evident as the notion of the sun revolving around the earth once did. But thought centric theories always lead to self-defeating logic loops because they never get down to energy proper. A thought-centric theory always ends up contradicting itself.
There are only two ways to interpret the behavior of something, be it the weather, chemical reactions, the movement of planets or the behavior of animals: either we interpret behavior in terms of energy, or in terms of thoughts. There is no alternative: either we have an energy theory, which works according to an immediate-moment dynamic, or a “personality theory”, which works according to a who-did-what-to-who-and-when interpretation of events. A person has thoughts and so only a person does things for a reason. For example, a lumberjack cuts a tree down for a reason, whereas a beaver cuts a tree down according to a natural law.
Even though a behaviorist or a scientist might talk in terms of instincts and genes and sound scientifically objective, if they aren’t talking about an immediate-moment dynamic shaping behavior in real time, as for example when chemists talk of molecular behavior by as a function of electrons, neutrons and protons interacting according to natural law, by definition such researchers are operating from the instinctual minds’ default setting, a personality theory. Charles Darwin and B.F. Skinner were interpreting animal behavior and evolution according to a personality theory since the only way they had to account for either adaptability or learning in real time, in the immediate-moment was via thinking, either in the individual, or in effect, in its genes as in the reason behavior evolves is genes replicating. And as mentioned above, anytime a thought-centric personality theory is applied to a natural system of energy, this leads to a self-defeating logic loop because the natural laws by which the system actually works, have not been identified. For example: the idea of the earth as the center of the universe was due to a personality theory in that a Supreme Being was said to have created all things. Things were the way they were for a reason, by design rather than by a natural process.
Modern evolutionary theories are likewise thought-centric because they fail to identify a real time dynamic shaping evolution. They focus on the random mutations of genes in the past, being selected by random environmental disturbances in the future. It’s all time contextual. The self-defeating logic loop here is that other than occupying space, this means that 99.9% of all animal interactions are simply organisms going through the motions given that 99.9% of the time mutated genes of adaptive value are not involved in the interaction. This then leaves the Malthusian principle as the guiding principle of evolution, that there are more animals that there is food to sustain them, and the problem here is that is rarely the case, as many scientists are now pointing out. (We will return to this point at length, but please see Stove’s book “Darwinian Fairytales” for a compelling argument on this point) Meanwhile, the self-contradictory nature of behaviorism, which likewise has no immediate-moment mechanism for adaptability in real time, i.e. learning, is revealed by the following conundrum, if an animal isn’t thinking, then it must be mindless.
So this is the big problem with modern evolutionary theories. Unlike any other evolutionary process, the rising and falling of mountains, the movement of continents, the formation of the universe, all of which depend on an immediate-moment dynamic that runs by natural laws, Darwinism proceeds with a model that has absolutely no precedent in nature. “Abracadabra”, things are the way they are because that’s the way they apparently happen to be. Reasons become purpose: genes multiply for the reason of their self-replication.
Another self-defeating logic loop is the notion that while Man may have evolved from nature, a high capacity human intelligence has emerged to the degree that Man is now to a great extent detached from the mechanics of evolution. Most would say we are now more apart from nature than we are a part of it. David Brooks’ in his column in the New York Times of 11/30/06: writes: “Human beings have divided selves. … Brain researchers distinguish between the conscious, intentional parts of the mind and the backstage automatic parts. ” Brooks uses the metaphor of a boy riding an elephant to illustrate the interplay between the two. “The boy is the conscious mind, the prefrontal cortex and such. The boy can plan ahead. The elephant is the unconscious part of the brain, the amygdala and other regions. It produces emotions and visceral reactions. It processes information and forms intuitions.”
In my reading of animals this is an incomplete schema. We must add to the conscious and the subconscious mind, the “network-conscious mind,” the source of what I call drive energy, and I will show that this is the true root of animal consciousness, pure emotion and true feelings. The deep-seated mechanism of network-consciousness provides the architecture for the subconscious and conscious mind that sits upon it as their foundation.
On the other hand if we are going to believe that evolution is true, which I do, and if we intend to be truly consistent from top to bottom, then there can be no part of human nature sitting apart from nature and thereby capable of transcending it. Consciousness, be it animal or human, is not something that emerged from evolution, but would have to be the mechanism by which nature evolves because first must come the software, the “how” of converting physical energy into information, i.e. animal consciousness, and then comes the “hardware,” the brain. Without the software, the hardware has no basis on which to evolve. Just as computers evolved in response to a network wide operating system, the binary code, likewise animals didn’t evolve to have emotion any more than they evolved to have gravity. Animals evolved in response to gravity: and likewise, animals evolved in response to emotion.
So to have a consistent theory of evolution, the activity of human beings must subscribe in the immediate-moment, to the protocols of animal consciousness as a networked-intelligence, just as every day’s weather no matter how unique, is a sub-function of vast cosmological, geological and meteorological forces. All of it, all activity, from plate tectonics to geopolitics, to beavers making dams, to earthworms churning soil, to the life cycles of parasites, to art lovers taking in the Whitney museum, must be a function of consciousness and an integral cog in the great wheel of evolution.
Therefore since humans remain intimately connected to nature as a networked-intelligence, and since animals evolved to “pick up” the emotional states, in other words, the energetic signatures, of other animals so that under certain circumstances, they can feel – one-for-one – what another is feeling, the relevant question is what then are animals picking up in us? What energy are we radiating in our thoughts, words and actions?