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pg. 2--Inner Landscapes: The Emotional Voice of Animals search of lost or abducted young ones. "When a flock of sheep is scattered, the ewes bleat incessantly for their lambs, and their mutual pleasure at coming together is manifest." Kinship brings comfort and joy. When ties are severed, humans encounter sadness and a sense of their own mortality. So do chimps and elephants. In the PBS Nature series, Inside the Animal Mind: Animal Consciousness, both animals display grief when relatives die: "Elephants even linger over the bones of long-dead relatives, seeming to ponder the past and their own future." If animals value interconnected lives, how do we reconcile their systematic isolation and "murder" inside the slaughterhouse, fur farm or research laboratory? This is an odd conundrum that contemporary scholars seem more inclined to embrace than biologists. Plainly, the pig who confronts his killer is terrified. He trembles beneath the crushing blast of an imprecise stun gun and screams with human likeness when the knife enters his flesh. The pig's squeal of anguish differs from the grunt of pleasure after a good meal or roll in the mud. He wants to live; "the only difference is that [animals] cannot say so in words," Masson asserts. In August, 2000 a six-month-old calf escaped from a Queens, New York slaughterhouse. After hundreds of pleas to save the bewildered runaway, "Queenie" arrived safely at Farm Sanctuary, a non-profit shelter in Upstate New York. Enterprising and decisive--what some might call a "tough broad"--Queenie had made an independent decision to flee a bleak situation. The emotional voice of animals is astonishingly vast, an inner landscape shaped with perception and inclination. "The warmth of their families makes me feel warm," writes scientist Douglas Chadwick in reference to his time among elephants. "Their capacity for delight gives me joy. If a person can't see these qualities, it can only be because he or she doesn't want to." Animal Anthology: Astounding Stories IN THE WORDS OF KOKOWhen Koko's cherished companion Michael succumbed to cardiovascular disease last year, the grieving 230 lb great ape clung to her dead friend's blanket and signed: "sorry, cry." Michael and Koko shared a unique bond. Their use of words to impart wit, empathy, ingenuity, and a vast range of human emotions has been the theme of Dr. Penny Patterson's Project Koko since 1972. Dr. Patterson teaches lowland gorillas American Sign Language. Koko uses over 1000 words. As a 3-year-old, she eagerly signed "you, me, cookie" or "hurry, drink." By age 6, she challenged authority with child-like gusto, referring to others as "you nut." At 10, she vocalized basic sentences with an Auditory Language keyboard connected to a voice synthesizer. Along with the rest of country, Koko watched TV footage of last year's terrorist strike and detected apprehension among her humans. Every time she heard a siren or low-flying plane, she grew anxious and signed "trouble"...Koko and her new friend Ndume will soon occupy a
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