"In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development."
--19th-century British psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan
You probably know that a "muleskinner" is someone who drives a wagon pulled by a mule or a team of mules. And you might think that the word derives from their hard use of the animal. You might imagine, as I once did, that a muleskinner was so called because they were known to "skin" their famously obstinate beasts with whips in order to make them behave. Maybe we can thank the whipcracking sound effects on Frankie Laine and Tennessee Ernie Ford's recordings of "Mule Train" (which were released within a few weeks of each other in 1949) for putting that notion in our heads.
But that's not where the word "muleskinner" comes from. As it turns out, mules are as intelligent as they are willful, and they do not respond well to brutality. People who were able to control mules were not called "skinners" because they flayed their charges but because they were able to outsmart the animal. In the 19th century, one colloquial meaning of "skin" was to fleece in a game of chance; a "skin-game" was one in which the mark had no chance because the deck was stacked and all the other players were colluding against him. So the old saying "there's more than one way to skin a cat" might not be so gruesome after all. So a muleskinner was more a mule charmer than a mule flogger. Haw.
It takes talent, not just a capacity for cruelty, to be a good muleskinner. Because, as the horseman observing the mule team backing up against the wishes of the wagon driver during the parade before the Christmas tree lighting in Argenta last week said, "The mule's got his own mind."
And the mule's mind is mysterious, sometimes even to the mule, just as our minds are sometimes mysterious to us. In the moment, the mule is considering many things. The driver who wants him to go forward is just one of them. The noise of the crowd, the proximity of his nose to the rear end of the horse just ahead of him, the terriers yapping at him from the sidelines, the mule takes this all in and decides the best course of action is to balk.
B.F. Skinner, whose name is just a delicious coincidence, might have disagreed. He might discount the notion of a mule (or any of us, for that matter) having a "mind" that matters--Skinner believes that consequences drive behavior, that we learn to press the levers that deliver us what we desire and avoid what we dread. Given time and the right kind of reinforcement schedule, we might make mules fly airplanes. But we can never make them poets.
I was taught not to anthropomorphize the animals because there were unbridgeable gulfs between us and they didn't experience the world through the same sort of emotional and intellectual filters that we did. That it was sentimental and dishonest to ascribe some qualities to animals--that what we perceived as our labrador's love for us was really just something that had been encoded in his genes, that thousands of years of evolution had made him a machine for enlisting our empathy. He only seemed to care for us, his real game was to skin us for shelter and food.
Because animals, we were told, don't have observable mental states--they don't have a mind; they are just a matrix of actions and reactions. This is the central tenet of stance of behaviorism, that all human and animal behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning, in terms of rewards, punishment, competition, and consequences--but not emotion or thinking. Animals did not "consider" things the way we could.
Experience has taught me different, and maybe science is beginning to catch up. Animals do have emotional lives, they are capable of feeling grief and sorrow and bewilderment. They are capable of kindness. A rat will push a lever that delivers a pellet of food until he realizes that pushing that lever causes another rat to feel an electric shock. (Would you do the same for another person? Probably, unless someone you perceive as an authority figure tells you to keep shocking that human because it's teaching them a lesson.)
A rat will endeavor to rescue another rat it thinks is in difficulty. It can be argued that rats are capable of altruism and selflessness.
And it can be argued the other way. It can be argued that the rats who rescue other rats are really doing so for selfish reasons. They are annoyed by the terrified rat's squealing and save him to shut him up. Or they enjoy playing with the other rat, and don't want to be deprived of his company.
But human behavior can be similarly deconstructed. You don't really "love" your mother--you're just not comfortable with the idea of yourself as someone who doesn't love his mother. You're just conforming to societal expectations because you understand that being branded as a non-lover of mother might make you a pariah. Maybe you just think you love your mother because you lack the imagination to do otherwise.
You can twist your head up thinking about this stuff if you want, but the truth is you are what you do. Of course you love your mother. And of course your dog loves you.
And human beings are not so special after all.
I'm reading a book co-written by Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, called animalkind. Its central argument is that animals possess rich interior lives, that they are complex creatures whose abilities often outpace our own. And that they deserve, at the very least, our respect and compassion.
Most of you probably won't want to read animalkind because it will make you feel bad, and I doubt it will lead me to change any of my behaviors, probably because my conditioning is ingrained. I doubt I'll ever be able to resist a rare ribeye or to forgo leather shoes and jackets. If I can--and I do--accept the pain and suffering of people in the world's poorer regions as the lubricant for my relatively smooth operation, it would be hypocritical of me to shame those who believe that animals exist solely to fulfill human need.
But just because I'm too weak to act on my convictions doesn't mean I don't understand how things are. The mule has its own mind.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 12/10/2019