A common critique levied against animal rights activists is ‘How can you care so much about animals when humans are suffering?’ Animal advocates are often accused of a lack of empathy for our fellow human beings, the assumption being that standing up for nonhuman animals means choosing a ‘side’ or, more simply, that animal advocates “like” animals better than humans. It’s certainly true that when we open our eyes to the extremities of animal abuse enacted by our own species, it’s tempting to see humans as violent, selfish blight on our planet. Yet this is only one half of the story: opening our hearts to the plight of animals also introduces us to many incredible, selfless, compassionate human beings. Since I’ve become involved in animal rights I’ve discovered a community of people who care not just about the most vulnerable animal species in our society, but also about the disenfranchised, marginalized human beings who suffer, are enslaved or are victims of abuse. Because rejecting Speciesism means embracing the notion that we are all animals and we all deserve compassion.
This is a theme that Hope Ferdowsian’s book, Phoenix Zones: Where Strength Is Born and Resilience Lives, hammers home through its moving stories and astute observations. Ferdowsian also introduces us to many of the heroic human beings who have stepped up to give abused animals and humans a second chance at happiness. In the book’s Introduction, she describes the historical plight not of animals but of children. She narrates how in, 1874, the famous animal rights advocate Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA, intervened on behalf of an abused child, persuading the courts to grant her the legal writ of habeas corpus: a right to be considered “someone”, not “something”. It’s a strategy we’re now seeing a century and a half later in the work of Steve Wise and the NhRP on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants (described by Ferdowsian in Chapter 3). Interestingly, back in 1874, Bergh used the line “The child is an animal” as his trump card, emphasizing her vulnerability to harm: like an animal, the orphan in his case had no advocate in a position of power. Today, we use this kind of comparison as an insult: to call somebody an ‘animal’ is a demeaning expression. Yet Phoenix Zones shows, through its tales of both people and animals surviving trauma, that actually we are all “little animals”, nothing more and, most importantly, nothing less.
In fact, much of our vulnerability stems from the fact that we are animals… animal’s vulnerabilities reflect some of our core needs as social and biological creatures.
Ferdowsian challenges the “culture of disrespect” that underlies misogyny, racism, child abuse and animal abuse: that failure to look at, or consider, another. Phoenix Zones insists that women, children, people of colour, nonhuman animals all deserve to be seen. Wes, sent to live in a foster home by his mother twice between the ages of seven and nine, vividly recalls waiting in hospital, in vain, for his mother to visit. He explains how this feeling of abandonment moved him to create a sanctuary for traumatized parrots: “I understand what it means for a parrot to wait. To wait to be heard, acknowledged, to feel like you matter.” There are a lot of powerful images in the book, but that particular picture of a captive animal unable to anything but wait has stuck with me.
There’s a specific kind of vulnerability described in Phoenix Zones termed ‘pathogenic’, rooted in domination and political violence. Ferdowsian makes a convincing case that we will never fully dismantle the injustices humans suffer unless we deconstruct the same problems that lead to animal suffering: abuse of power and exploitation.
How we treat animals is in many ways a marker for whether we, when privileged, will choose to intervene when the most pervasive forms of inequality are before us… Justice demands that we treat [animals’] fundamental needs as we would the same needs in humans – with full and equal consideration. Treating animals otherwise, simply because of their easy availability and convenience, undermines justice – the instrument by which all of us, in our most vulnerable forms, can be sheltered from malevolence.
The blurb for this book warns “These are not easy stories” and indeed the very first page of Chapter 1 relates the harrowing story of the rape of a 12 year old African girl by her much older husband. Sold into an arranged marriage by her father, the girl’s story is disturbingly common. We later hear about other human survivors of trauma, from Lucee who was mutilated and forced into sexual slavery, to women and girls in the Congo where one woman is raped almost every minute. Woven into these stories of human suffering, we hear about nonhuman animals whose liberty and basic rights have similarly been denied, from the monkeys whose babies were torn from their arms in psychological experiments or infected with HIV, to the elephants who are broken and enslaved for tourist rides. One story that moved me profoundly was that of the friendship between Sissy and Winkie, elephants who suffered years of abuse at the hands of humans. Tragically, while safe in a sanctuary, Winkie had a traumatic flashback and accidentally killed her carer, Josie. Showing a level of compassion many would find incomprehensible, Josie’s family chose not to euthanize Winkie and instead asked funeral goers to donate money to the sanctuary, allowing the elephants to continue and deepen their healing friendship.
Devastating as these stories can be, Ferdowsian avoids sentimentality by taking an entirely evidence-based approach to the psychological journeys of her subjects. She has worked with nonprofits all over the world, providing health care and advocating for homeless, immigrant and other marginalized populations. She has also explored the ethical problems with the use of animals in research, during which she witnessed the same kind of trauma in animals that she’d seen in humans. As an internist and preventative medicine physician, working across the fields of medicine, public health and ethics, Ferdowsian is able to offer unique insights from human medicine. For instance, she used the tools of human physiology to study mental disorders in animals, adapting a tool used to diagnose PTSD in nonverbal human infants for use with chimpanzees. Distressingly, 44 percent of chimpanzees used in biomedical research, entertainment or the international primate trade displayed signs of PTSD, compared with only 0.5 percent of those living free. Significantly, that 0.5. percent had been previously trapped by poachers.
This might all sound terribly depressing, but the key message of this book is that just as animals can experience similar trauma to humans, they can also experience similar recovery. Ferdowsian writes,
During the course of my work, I realized I was witnessing how people and animals can thrive after severe trauma – a transformation know in medicine as the “Phoenix Effect”… As cutting-edge scientific discoveries reveal, animals can become traumatized in ways that are akin to human trauma. But they can also heal in similar ways, revealing a common scientific basis for resilience. [These success stories] point to important foundational values – principles – that can heal some of the most broken among us and cultivate even broader social progress. These ideals are found in what I call “Phoenix Zones”.
Without getting bogged down in scientific jargon, Ferdowsian identifies the common changes that take place in human and animal physiology during severe trauma and, most interestingly, looks at the common healing of the damaged brain in recovery. Chronic stress has been shown to shrink the hippocampus in both people and animals, likely due to chronically elevated levels of cortisol. Yet, after time, the brain can rebound, derangements in stress hormone regulation normalizing and the hippocampus expanding again. Ferdowsian’s book explores how the core values found in Phoenix Zones – respect for freedom, love and justice, hope, regard for individual worth, dignity – can foster this recovery, reducing vulnerability to suffering and building resilience. It also considers how these values could help solve the ethical, legal and political challenges of our time, the stories offering “a metaphor for how society at large can turn oppression and vulnerability into hope and resilience”. Take the veterans caring for wolfdogs and wolves as part of Lorin Lindner and Matt Simmons’ Warriors and Wolves project. At their refuge, the traumatized veterans find reprieve in the unconditional love and acceptance offered by the wolves. In turn they help the wolves recover from injury or death, until they shed their limps and heal their psychological wounds. Many of these veterans then camp out in the wilderness, waiting for hunters. When they meet them, they try to stop them killing any more wolves by telling their stories of the animals who have helped them through their struggles.
One of the values or ideas that resonated strongly with me in this book is the importance of returning people and animals a sense of agency. After all, the opposite of agency is learned helplessness: the brain understands that it can do nothing to affect the outcome, that nothing the victim does matters. This is total despair, the opposite of hope (Ferdowsian shows that animals can experience both pessimism and optimism in Chapter 7). We see learned helplessness in human and animal victims of abuse or captivity: a placid mental blankness in response to trauma. This is a common trait in the 99 percent of animals raised for food in American factory farms, but also for the wild animals captured and enslaved for entertainment or research, or any of the other myriad of ways we use animals in human society. Reversing this learned helplessness is the premise behind Scott Blais’ Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary, for instance, and at Diana Goodrich’s chimpanzee sanctuary where Jamie, an ex-research chimp, chooses which of her favourite cowboy boots the volunteers wear each day. It’s also the basis of Wise’s campaign: that legal cases on behalf of animals should be based on their capacity for self-determination and self-agency. These are the very arguments that made human slavery illegal. As Ferdowsian points out, slavery was not deemed wrong because of the horrible conditions enslaved people were kept in, but because it violated bodily liberty. For me, this section of the book raised interesting questions about companion animals, who I suppose are rather like sanctuary residents in this respect. Domesticated for thousands of years, they couldn’t survive without our help but we still have a responsibility to give them as much autonomy as we can within the confines of their restricted lives. The ethics of ‘owning’ companion animals at all in light of Ferdowsian’s emphasis on the critical importance of autonomy in wellbeing is a debate I’ll save for another blog!
Just as there is a slippery slope from violence against animals to violence against people, there is also a slippery slope toward compassion for all beings.
