In the old city of Delhi, packed with a teeming crush of people, right by the medieval marketplace, past a labyrinth of narrow alleys and shacks adorned with neon signs, stands a red three-story building with a roof piled high with cages, adorned with two words: “Bird Hospital”.
On a hot day last spring, I took off my shoes at the hospital door and climbed to the second-floor foyer, where an employee, barely 30 years old, was registering patients. A lady of respectable age placed a shoebox in front of him and lifted the lid, revealing a bloody white parrot injured by a cat. The man standing in the queue in front of me was holding a small cage with a pigeon that had slammed into a window in the banking district. Immediately after me, a girl about seven years old came in, carrying a white chicken in her arms – its neck limp.
The hospital’s large ward is a narrow room 12 metres long, with cages stacked four tiers high along the walls and ceiling fans protected by grilles, so that while spinning they do not inadvertently strike a wing. I walked the length of the room, conducting a sort of census in my head: many cages looked empty, but when I peered closer, a bird was sitting in the gloom after all – usually a pigeon.
The hospital’s junior veterinarian, Dheeraj Kumar Singh, went on his rounds dressed in jeans and a surgical mask. The senior vet has worked here on night shifts for more than a quarter of a century, having dedicated tens of thousands of hours to operating on birds to remove tumours, easing their pain with medication, and giving them antibiotics. Singh is a novice in that regard, but when you watch him examine a pigeon, that thought never even crosses your mind: he grasps the bird quickly yet gently – the way we handle a mobile phone. While we were talking, he gestured to an assistant who handed him an elastic nylon bandage, which the doctor wound twice around the pigeon’s wing, finishing the procedure with a prosaic pop.
The Bird Hospital is one of several built by Jains. They follow an ancient faith whose main commandment is the requirement to do no harm, not only to humans but also to animals. Paintings in the hospital corridor show the extent to which Jains are prepared to submit to this prohibition. There, a medieval ruler in blue robes looks out from a palace window as a pigeon flies in, seeking rescue, its wing torn by a pursuing owl. The ruler lets the pigeon into the palace, infuriating the owl, which demands compensation for its lost meal; he then hacks off his own arm and foot so the owl can have its fill.
I wanted to visit the Bird Hospital and India primarily to see how the commandments of Jainism work in the modern world. In India, Jains make up less than one percent of the population. Despite the fact that for millennia Jains have been a minority in Hindu society, they have sometimes managed to make their voices heard. In the 13th century, Jainism managed to convert a Hindu ruler, and under his patronage, animal welfare laws came into force for the first time on the Indian subcontinent. Evidence has been preserved that tells of Jains having spoken with the Buddha himself. And when Gandhi came forward with his radical teaching of non-violence, it is said that his philosophical muse and friend was a Jain.
In the state of Gujarat, where Gandhi grew up, I have seen on chilly mornings, before the traffic starts, a procession of barefoot Jain monks: they believe traffic is inevitably violent, considering all that it does to living beings – from insects to larger creatures. The monks refuse to eat roots because pulling them from the ground disrupts the delicate ecosystem of the soil. Their white garments are woven from cotton, not silk, because silk production condemns silkworms to death. During the monsoon season, they refrain from travelling so as not to trudge through puddles, where microorganisms swarm and teem, the existence of which the Jains were certain of long ago – before they appeared under Western microscopes.
Jains live in this world so lightly and gently because they believe that animals have consciousness and feel emotions more or less comparable to those known to humans – desires, fears, pain, sadness, and joy. The idea that animals possess consciousness has long been unacknowledged in the West, but scientists who have recently studied the ability of animals to explore the world are beginning to lean in its favour. And this is not just about the obvious examples – primates, dogs, elephants, whales, or similar. Now, scientists are finding evidence that even quite alien creatures, which have experienced development on the most distant branches of the tree of life, lead their own inner lives. Recently, hardly anyone is surprised when, flipping through a magazine, one happens to read about an octopus that, using its tentacles, manages to unscrew the lid of a jar, or another that squirts a jet of aquarium water directly into a researcher’s face. For many scientists, the main puzzle is no longer the question of which animals possess consciousness, but rather – which ones do not.
There is nothing more mysterious in our world than consciousness – the state that makes every waking moment alive, the feeling that you are in a body that exists in a wider world of colours, sounds, and tangible objects, all filtered through your thinking and filled with emotions.
Even in our secular world, consciousness retains a mystical aura of secrecy. Sometimes it is described as the final frontier of science, sometimes – as something immaterial, magical, which science cannot access. One of the world’s most highly regarded experts in the field, David Chalmers, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, the same as spacetime or energy. He said: it could be connected with the elusiveness and uncertainty of the quantum world or something beyond the physical.
Metaphysical descriptions still appear because scientists have not yet managed to offer a sensible definition of consciousness. We know that the senses deliver information about the outside world to the brain and there it is processed sequentially in increasingly complex layers of neurons. But we do not know how these signals are integrated into a uniform, consolidated picture of the world, into the flow of moments experienced by the roving locus of attention – the “eyewitness” in the understanding of Hindu philosophers.
In the West, consciousness was long considered a gift from God, given only to humans. Historically, the notion has prevailed that all animals (except humans) are insentient automatons. Even after Darwin proved that we are related to animals, a large portion of scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was very recent. In their view, consciousness first flashed into existence sometime after the human ancestors diverged from chimpanzees and bonobos.
Julian Jaynes in his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (Julian Jaynes, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, 1976) tried to prove that it happened even later. He argued that language, much like Virgil, led us into deep cognitive states that allowed us to build worlds of experience.
The notion that consciousness arose recently faltered after the Second World War, when more and more scientists began to systematically turn their attention to animal behaviour and brain research. Every new year brings piles of new studies, which together suggest that consciousness is present in most animals.
It is thought that more than 500 million years ago, some kind of arms race on the ocean floor between a predator and its prey led to the appearance of the first conscious animal on our planet. This moment, when the first mind flickered into existence in the world, was an event of truly cosmic significance, because it opened up possibilities that did not exist in nature until then.
Now it turns out that alongside the world of human experience, there exists a living and full-blooded world of animal experience. Thanks to the scientists who have at least partially shed light on this new aspect of reality. But they cannot say how to treat the quintillions of creatures with which we inhabit the Earth. That is a philosophical problem, and, as usually happens with such things, we will be waiting for a solution for a long time yet.
Apart from Pythagoras and a few others, ancient Western philosophers did not care much about animal consciousness. Eastern thinkers, in turn, have been much preoccupied with what it means, especially the Jains, who have been taking animal consciousness seriously for 3,000 years and for whom it is a moral issue.
A large part of orthodox Jain views does not withstand scientific scrutiny. Faith does not grant privileged access to the truth – neither mystical nor any other. But Jains, as perhaps the world’s first culture to extend compassion to animals, have significantly expanded the boundaries of human moral imagination. The places where they worship and care for animals seemed quite fitting to me for contemplating the latest achievements in animal consciousness research.
The article was first published in the April 2019 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks