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BARBARA J. KING

Being with
Animals
● ● ● ● ● ●

Why We Are Obsessed with

the Furry, Scaly,
Feathered Creatures Who
Populate Our World
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Copyright © 2010 by Barbara J. King

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Doubleday Religion, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of

Random House, Inc.

“Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night (Three)” on page 169 is from The Truro
Bear and Other Adventures by Mary Oliver, copyright © 2008 by Mary
Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

King, Barbara J.
Being with animals : why we are obsessed with the furry, scaly, feathered
creatures who populate our world / Barbara J. King.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Animal behavior— Popular works. 2. Emotions in animals— Popular works.
3. Human-animal relationships— Popular works. I. Title.
QL751.K5175 2009
590— dc22
2009020030

ISBN 978-0-385-52363-9

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Ellen Cipriano

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

N First Edition

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To purchase a copy of 

Being With Animals 
 

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Contents
● ● ● ●

1. A Holy Procession of Animals 1

2. Humans Emerging: From Savanna to Art Cave 8

3. Taming the Wild? 37

4. Cat Mummies and Lion Symbols 64

5. Animal Souls 88

6. Ravens, Shamans, and Dogs Who Dream 109

7. Of Whales and Tortoises 135

8. Articulate Apes and Emotional Elephants 145

9. Dog and Cat (and Buffalo) Mysteries 169

10. Finding Compassion 195

11. Clones, Crows, and Our Future 216

EPILOGUE 227

NOTES 229

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 247

INDEX 249

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1
A Holy Procession of Animals
● ● ● ●

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

—William Blake, “The Lamb,” 1789

E V E RY O N E C O U L D F E E L I T .
Anticipation weighted the air as the
Saint Francis Day church service unfolded at the Cathedral of
St. John the Divine in New York City. Finally, the massive front door
swung open. Into the largest of all cathedrals in North America
flooded an early-autumn light, a light that illuminated the creature
that walked first through the door: a camel, head held high, its single
hump garlanded with flowers.
Anticipation turned to reverence, and twelve hundred people
turned their gaze as one. Behind the camel and its white-robed care-
taker came a royal yak, a tundra reindeer, a baby wallaby and a baby
ape, and a black sheep named Marvin. A giant tortoise named Oscar
rode on two pillows arranged on a wagon. Birds of prey, and a host of
smaller creatures from bunnies to hermit crabs, were carried or pulled
on carts.
Slowly, with calm and dignity, the Procession of Animals made its
way to the front of the church. There the animals were blessed by

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2 BEING WITH ANIMALS

waiting clergy. As much as the individual animals themselves, it was

the animal-human relationship that was celebrated. The choir sang,
and young girls lined the aisles, waving colorful flags. As the animals
slowly turned to move back up the aisle, the human congregants sang
and moved in harmony with the music.
As I watched the ritual, I saw how the joys inherent in sharing the
world with animals lighted people’s faces and enriched their voices.
Throughout the church, people bent forward to whisper a word to the
dog by their side, or to re-settle into their carriers a cat or a rabbit.
People not only came to the ceremony in the thousands, they also
brought their own animals along. When the service concluded,
people and animals walked, two by two, into the cathedral’s garden so
that clergy could bless each pet with loving words and touch.
The blessing ceremony at St. John’s is the most elaborate and
famous of any in the world, but many smaller ceremonies in other
towns and cities take place on the first Sunday in October, a day set
aside to remember the patron saint of animals. People attend not to
watch passively but to participate actively, to bring into alignment and
harmony their love of animals and their love of God.
Rituals like this, whether focused on the Christian God or some
other modern God or gods, mark an emotional connection between
animals and people that stretches far back into human prehistory. Our
species, Homo sapiens, became human by being with animals.
Deep inside a cave in prehistoric France, early Homo sapiens people
gathered in near darkness. Artists in the group had adorned the walls
with pigments, rich reds and jet blacks, in order to create spectacular
animal images. Now the group assembled in dim light, singing and
moving rhythmically together.
As they lost themselves in the pulse and the beat, some people
began to experience a slightly altered consciousness and a heightened
connection with the living creatures whose representations graced the
walls. Hunters felt at one with the animals they would stalk the next
day. A skilled healer stared at a half-man, half-bird image cruder than
N the others. Feeling the first stirrings of a transformation, he knew he

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A Holy Procession of Animals 3

would soon be released from his earthly moorings and in contact with
otherworldly creatures and forces.1
In prehistoric Turkey, at the village of Catalhöyük around 8,000
years ago, a man was buried together with a lamb. The bodies, one per-
son and one animal, were kept slightly separate in death by an unusual,
contorted position of the lamb and by the placement of a mat or blan-
ket between the two. Yet, in a place where animals were routinely
domesticated but not usually buried, the lamb was placed in a gravesite
used traditionally for human ancestors: a pit dug beneath a house floor.
In subsequent years, three other people were buried there as well.2
At around the same time in Israel, people at a place called Kfar
HaHoresh constructed a large mosaic. The material used was not tile,
but the carefully positioned bones of humans and gazelles. The image
(when viewed from above) is the profile of an animal, perhaps a boar,
an aurochs, or even a lion. Elsewhere at the site, a human skull was
buried underneath the floor of a rectangular structure and just above
a headless gazelle carcass.3
In ancient China, a hermit called Zhuangzi entered a game park
and took aim at a magpie. Preoccupied with a cicada, the magpie did
not notice Zhuangzi; neither the cicada nor a nearby preying mantis
noticed the magpie. The magpie “swept down on its prey in high
excitement and gobbled them both up.” A feeling of compassion
welled up in Zhuangzi: here in the certainty of death was the essence
of life. For months, Zhuangzi felt depressed, but also enlivened by
new thoughts: Life is about endless transformation, and death should
not be feared; realizing this, Zhuangzi felt an “exhilarating freedom”
that changed his life.4
In modern-day California, a small group of people shared an
amazing encounter with a fifty-foot-long, fifty-ton whale. In the
waters beyond San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a female hump-
back whale became tangled in equipment used by crabbers, about
twenty crab-pot ropes, each 240 feet long and with weights attached
every sixty feet. Unable to free herself, and struggling to keep her
blowhole above the waterline, the whale was in real peril.

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4 BEING WITH ANIMALS

When rescuers arrived by boat, they determined that the best

hope of saving the creature would be to cut her free, working in the
water. To swim and dive right near such a powerful—and frightened—
sea mammal presented serious risk. The procedure to free the whale
took an hour, but the mighty creature remained calm throughout, and
emitted what rescuers described as a strange kind of vibration. Once
freed, she did not bolt for the open sea. Rather, she circled her four res-
cuers in a way that struck them as joyful. She then approached each
person and nudged each in turn. Diver James Moskito said later, “It
felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we
had helped it. . . . When I was cutting the line going through the
mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me. It was an epic
moment of my life. . . . It was an amazing, unbelievable experience.”5
These examples tell a fundamental truth about how we humans
make sense of the world: we think and we feel through being with ani-
mals. Utterly unique to the human-animal realm is an emotional kind
of mutual relating. Yes, the ever-shifting light on the walls of the
ancient Grand Canyon or on the cypress trees swaying gently in a
Tuscan breeze may move us profoundly. Yet neither the light, the
canyon, nor the trees will ever actively engage with our admiring
gaze, or with our emotions. They will never give back emotionally as
animals can.
To feel that mutual kinship with another creature is a special expe-
rience, one that brings us into attunement with the whole world. It’s
a feeling deep in the chest, resonant in the heart: I share with all crea-
tures a way of being in this world. All animals, in their own ways, struggle
to live, and feel their lives in different ways. I belong here in this world, with
them.
We know these things, and in a sense we may even take them for
granted. After all, we live in a time and place where animals infuse our
lives. We share our homes with animals, and make ourselves mentally
and physically healthier by doing so. We vacation in national parks
and other animal-rich areas because we want to witness our compan-
N ion animals’ wild counterparts and their behavior. Most of us eat ani-

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A Holy Procession of Animals 5

mals and dress ourselves with animals. The sports teams we root for
take on animals as symbols, and the cereals we buy are sold to us by
talking animals. The tales we read to our children are inhabited by ani-
mals who impart wisdom; the poems, novels, and adventure stories
we read may ignite our felt connection to nature.
But why should it be this way? Why are we humans emotionally
invested in, and sometimes transformed by, close encounters with ani-
mals? Why does a multimillion-dollar pet industry in the United States
thrive even in tough economic times? Why do most major cities invest
in a zoological park and an aquarium? Why are sports teams—not
only the Lions, the Tigers, and the Bears, but also the Jayhawks, the
Mud Hens, and the Marlins— so often named for animals? Why are
the television shows Animal Planet and Nature so enduringly popular?
Why is an animated mouse named Mickey recognized instantly
around the world? Why do our emotions at being with animals so
often spill over into religious experience? In Being with Animals, we will
journey through prehistory and history, and across the globe in the
present day as well as the past, in order to answer these compelling
questions. As we go, we will bring animals, emotion, and evolution
together with religiosity, humans’ expression of religious awe. We will
look over the shoulders of scientists who offer the latest insights from
anthropology, archaeology, and studies of mammals and birds.
For me it’s a natural, bringing together these four threads. I’m an
animal lover, and have been since childhood. My personal life revolves
around family, which we define to include a rather stunning number
of domestic cats (and the occasional rabbit). My professional life as an
anthropologist is chock full of monkeys and apes; I lived for fourteen
months in Kenya in order to track and observe baboons, and more
recently have observed gorilla and bonobo groups closer to home. I
teach and write about evolutionary matters, with a focus on humans
as the apes who became upright walkers, speech talkers, and believers
in the supernatural.
I believe that one of our most profound connections with animals
lies in our emotional experiences of the world and each other. For one

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6 BEING WITH ANIMALS

animal, Homo sapiens, that world of emotion became a world of reli-

gious ritual, and it fascinates me how that happened and what part
other animals played as it came about.
And I love to tell animal stories. The stories offered in this book
are grounded in three themes. Animals— the mammals and birds of
which I write— are complicated beings. They may bond as friends, and
offer to each other comfort in times of trouble. They may also snarl,
snap, attack, maim, and hurt each other, even outside of the predator-
prey context when they are just hunting for a good meal. No animals
are “noble savages,” expressing a simple ethic of goodness and simple
compassion, and no animals are only efficient killing machines at
work in a nature run red with blood. Like us, animals tend to express
complex facets of their being. Like us, they have personalities and
moods, and animal equivalents of grumpy mornings and sunny after-
noons. All this is as true for animals when they go about their daily
lives with each other as when they interact with us.
This complexity comes about because of variation. Even within a
species, individual animals differ dramatically in how they tend to
respond to events. Some of those differences probably stem from ani-
mals’ genetic makeup. Genes matter! Genes may cause an animal to
tend to be more shy, or more gregarious. Still, a resounding principle
to emerge from recent science studies is that animals are highly
responsive to the ways that they are reared, and to their immediate
surroundings— just as we humans are.
Of course, we humans are animals. This is my second theme. It’s
only for simplicity’s sake that I write as if humans and animals are
somehow separate categories. The mutual relating we engage in with
other animals transforms us, yes, but that transformation rests squarely
in the common evolutionary trajectory that we share with other crea-
tures. We, all of us, have evolved, and changed over time. Homo sapi-
ens, those evolutionary newcomers in a scene choked with animals
and plants in thriving prehistoric ecosystems in Africa, evolved to
think and feel with other animals right from the start. To explore being
N with animals is to explore our own past, from hunting and gathering

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A Holy Procession of Animals 7

lifeways on the African savannas through Ice Age art through early
settled villages in Anatolia and beyond.
And finally, being with animals may heighten our senses through
a renewed appreciation of the beauty of evolutionary continuity or a
deepened sense of God’s hand at work in the world, or both. We find,
indeed we create, our best selves through animals because it is only
other animals who can offer us the transcendent experience of shared
ways of being in the world.
This transcendence sits, ironically, side by side with the reality that
some humans, in some postindustrial, frenzied, all-about-ourselves
societies, have lost the knowledge— and the feeling, the visceral cer-
tainty that lives in the body as well as in the brain— that we are part of
a community of animals. Yet lost cannot be the right word, because
the knowledge and the certainty is there: hidden perhaps, but there
nonetheless. It’s just as the writer Thomas Berry says: “[Animals] pro-
vide an emotional intimacy so unique that it can come to us from no
other source. The animals can do for us, in both the physical and the
spiritual orders, what we cannot do for ourselves or for each other.”6
Animals and emotional intimacy— and evolution. Let’s start
there.

www.DoubledayReligion.com
  
 
 
To purchase a copy of 

Being With Animals 
 

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