Can There Be Friendship Between Human Beings and Wild Animals?

ABSTRACT

We examine the concept of friendship and then ask whether friendship is possible between humans and wild animals. We answer that such friendships may be possible if certain conditions are fulfilled. We consider a range of examples.

KEYWORDS:

• Friendship
• wild animals
• form of life

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See infra Smuts (2001).

2 See Donaldson and Kymlicka (2013).

3 The Elephant Listening Project at Cornell University maintains that forest elephants are the last truly wild species of elephant, and it is true that at present, with dwindling numbers, they roam relatively freely in the forest. See https://elephantlisteningproject.org. But, threatened by poachers and zealously defended by the Cornell researchers, they are nonetheless in a space dominated by humans, for good or for ill.

4 See, for just one account, World Animal Protection, ‘How plastic pollution is affecting seals and other marine life’ (November 17, 2017) https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/news/how-plastic-pollution-affecting-seals-and-other-marine-life.

5 Personal visit by Martha Nussbaum, June 2018.

6 The claims in this section are further elaborated in Nussbaum (forthcoming).

7 On the octopus, see Godfrey-Smith (2013); on crocodiles, see Bradshaw (2017); on fish, see Braithwaite (2010) and Balcombe (2016).

8 We shall not discuss coyotes, the topic of Delon’s paper in this Symposium, for the reason he gives: they are ‘liminal’ animals, regularly interacting with humans, though not domesticated.

9 Life; Bodily Health; Bodily Integrity; Senses, Imagination, and Thought; Practical Reason; Affiliation; Relationships with Other Species and the World of Nature; Play; and Control over Environment.

10 See Nussbaum (1978).

11 See Nussbaum (2006).

12 See the excellent discussion in Bekoff and Pierce (2010).

13 de Waal (2016).

14 Skeptics typically use the word ‘animal’ to refer to nonhuman animals. We also sometimes use it in that way for ease and economy, since adding ‘nonhuman’ each time is cumbersome. But in our sentences, the fact that humans are also animals is to be taken for granted; so ‘animals’ is a clumsy shorthand for ‘nonhuman animals.’

15 Key findings in this literature can be found in the following books accessible to non-specialist readers:

de Waal (1989); de Waal (1996); de Waal (2019); and many other publications of de Waal’s; Jonathan Balcombe (2016); Damasio (1994); Peppeberg (2008); Ackerman (2016); Emery (2016); Meijer (2019); Slobodchikoff, Perla, and Verdolin (2009); Bekoff (2008); Bekoff and Pierce (2010); White (2017); Whitehead and Rendell (2016); Poole (1996); Moss (1988).

16 Smuts (2001).

17 See Poole (1996).

18 The insight that animals can sometimes be superior friends because of human society’s prejudices and obtuseness is a strong theme in Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, discussed in Nussbaum (2013). Effi, married at age 16 to a much older man, becomes deeply unhappy and has a brief affair, which she regrets, and the marriage becomes a happy one with the birth of a child. But the husband’s discovery of the by then long-ago affair makes him disown her and deny her access to the child (although he loves her and would like to forgive her), in obedience to social norms. Her parents, too, treat her as a ‘fallen woman’ and refuse her their support. She dies, miserable and alone. Only the dog Rollo, her faithful companion, mourns at her tomb. As the novel ends, Effi’s father says that animals know something that we don’t seem to know. This something would seem to be the value of unconditional love.

19 Townley (2011).

20 See the discussion of this film and its implications in Nussbaum Wichert and Nussbaum (2019).

21 If space permitted, we would consider whether there can be friendship between humans and working elephants, who are in their natural setting and in their elephant group, but who are constrained by the work they are required to do. Usually working elephants are horribly abused. Sometimes, however, as in the case of James Howard Williams (‘Elephant Bill’), there is such profound respect for the intelligence of the elephants, such gentleness, and such a commitment to teaching by positive reinforcement only, that friendship does seem the right description – for Williams and the elephants who, with him, helped the British during World War II: see Croke (2014).

22 See Siebert ‘Zoos called it a ‘rescue.’ But are elephants really better off?’ July, 9 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/magazine/elephants-zoos-swazi-17.html (The organization won an injunction to stop the airlift, but it was carried out anyway by stealth in the dead of night, and the judge said that nothing more could be done, because the elephants were now on US soil).

23 A salient case was the 1951 movie Bedtime for Bonzo, in which a psychology professor (played by Ronald Reagan) tried to teach a chimpanzee human morality, proving the superiority of nurture over nature. Nobody associated with this movie seems to have had any interest in the real moral lives of chimpanzees in their own group.

24 Orcas weigh up to six tons, common bottlenose dolphins between 350 and 1400 pounds.

25 See Whitehead and Rendell (2016).

26 See White (2017).

27 See Ninemsn, ‘Berlin Zoo’s baby polar bear must die: activists’ March 21, 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20070701010523/http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=255770 (summarizing the views of activists against the zoo’s adoption of Knut).

28 See Amos ‘Knut polar bear death riddle solved,’ August 27, 2015 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34073689 (explaining the cause of Knut’s death).

29 Van Hooff, born in 1936, is still living.

30 See Bekoff (2008).

31 See Nussbaum Wichert and Nussbaum (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Nussbaum Wichert

Rachel Nussbaum Wichert worked as a Government Affairs Attorney in the Wildlife Law Program at Friends of Animals, an international non-profit animal advocacy organisation based in Denver, Colorado.

Martha C. Nussbaum

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. She is a Founding President of HDCA. Her most recent book is THE COSMOPOLITAN TRADITION: A NOBLE BUT FLAWED IDEAL (2018).