Once upon a time, when the world was still enchanted, wild beasts were central to human development. The terror and awe that our ancestors experienced in the wilderness gave rise to language, religion, invention, and storytelling. In that indigenous, animistic world that was deeply spiritual, animals were known as sentient and often more majestic than any human. Though we hunted them for food—though their fat was rendered into oil to heat our lamps, their bones made into combs, fishhooks, and needles, their skin into our clothes and tents—we nevertheless revered animals and sent prayers of gratitude for their sacrifices.
And to a blessed few, the wild beasts, in their own mysterious ways, spoke—by the campfire, in thickets, or on windblown plains, or they appeared in visions and dreams.
The Buddha’s story began with a white elephant with six tusks holding a white lotus in its trunk. Coming to Queen Maya of Sakya in a dream, it went around her three times before entering her womb from the right side. She gave birth ten months later to Siddhartha.
“If a wild beast appeared to us and spoke in its own mysterious ways, would we know how to decipher the message? ”
Fast-forward to our modern world. Now, on YouTube, you can see dozens of videos of pachyderms practicing brushstrokes with their trunks. One video shows an elephant dip a brush in paint and slowly draw the contours of an elephant on canvas before changing paint to create a bright red flower that sprouts from the painted elephant’s trunk.
While debates are ongoing as to whether the elephant is cognizant of what it’s drawing, the fact that it uses a paintbrush to paint another elephant is both astonishing in its evolutionary achievement and tragic.
While for much of the Third World the colonization era has slowly faded, for the animal kingdom, human colonization is accelerating. The once sacred beasts have, in order to earn their keep, devolved into colonial subjects under human dominion. More and more wild animals have lost their natural instincts. They’ve learned their master’s practices, so as to survive in a defoliated, anthropogenic world.
Among humans, colonization works something like this. The subjugated give up their own ways—be it religion, language, or a set of cultural beliefs—and convert to the perceived “superior” ways of their masters. Remember the image of the “savage” Man Friday in Robinson Crusoe? Rescued from being eaten by his enemies, Friday found it best to emulate his benefactor. He learned to speak his master’s language, believe in his god, and play up the qualities he valued. Friday even received a new name.
One of the many “family talk” stories I remember of Vietnam, where I came from, involves a celebrated French-educated relative. He joined the Viet Minh, an organization that rose up against the French colonial rulers. But when he was captured by the French army and faced the firing squad along with his compatriots, this relative of mine changed his tune about being rebellious and patriotic. He spoke up, in French: “Je vous en prie, ne me tuez pas. Je suis un citoyen Français.” (“Please don’t kill me. I am a French citizen!”) My relative spoke French without an accent. Astonished, the French excluded him from the firing squad. The rest of his compatriots—without his pedigree—didn’t fare so well. My relative was left without many options. He couldn’t return to the jungle without his comrades, so he joined the French army.
Similarly, the captive elephant is well-fed for painting a self-portrait—and yes, he can even paint trees and houses—but the rest of his kind are rapidly dwindling in the wild. They’re lined up, as it were, in a metaphorical firing squad called deforestation. Classified as an endangered species, the Asian elephant is expected to disappear entirely from the wild around the middle of the twenty-first century.
The Asian elephant’s usefulness is obsolete in the modern world. An elephant can pull half its weight and carry six hundred kilos on its back. In hilly countryside, where roads are small and inaccessible to trucks, elephants were indispensable for the timber business. But logging is all but illegal now in Thailand since natural forests have dwindled to what we call reserves or parks, and the elephants, once employed to help destroy their own natural habitat, are now out of luck.
So only those that can take to painting have value to us humans. They entertain. They amuse. When existing in a limited number, they can be supported. But why stop at painting? Wild animals can actually mimic human speech. Scientists confirmed that an elephant in South Korea named Koshik can say six Korean words. They believe the elephant, isolated from its kind, imitated human speech to bond with its human captors.
Other mammals from time to time have been known to mimic human speech as well. A beluga whale at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego was capable of humming human speech patterns. Hoover, an orphaned harbor seal, was raised by a fisherman, and although his speech is slurred, he mimics the burly voice of his adoptive father. “Come over here” and “hurry” are reportedly among his repertoire.
Kanzi is a bonobo who can understand hundreds of lexigrams representing words and actions. He can apparently even construct sentences by pointing out the correct symbol on a screen, and he’s learned how to light matches to roast marshmallows.
Most famous of all, though, is Koko the talking gorilla who understands over two thousand words and uses sign language to say half of them—the equivalent of a human toddler. Koko has communicated feelings of joy and loneliness. She’s mourned deaths, communicating her sentience with ease.
It’s increasingly normal for wild animals to become inured to humans, and there are myriad stories where they seek human assistance. A famous case involves a diver who befriends and abets sharks. Her specialty? The brave woman reaches in and removes fishhooks from their jaws—a much needed service.
Others too have lived at the edge of human societies for so long that they’ve learned new skill sets: bears and raccoons open garage doors, and monkeys steal tourists’ cameras to trade them for bananas.
Thus, an old myth has turned itself upside down: Noah once built an ark that supposedly housed pairs of wild beasts with the intention of returning them to the wilderness after the great flood to repropagate the earth. But what happens if the world is now forever flooded with concrete and steel, wires and roads? Where shall the wild beasts go back to? And what does it mean when wild animals give up their instincts in order to survive in the human realm?
Often, the Buddha is depicted with a serpent as he sits under the Bodhi Tree. It’s said that Mucalinda, a giant snakelike being, emerged from the ground and formed its hood into a canopy to protect the enlightened one from the monsoon. Such is the nature of sacred beasts who once helped and guided us on our spiritual path.
Alas, the age of enchantment is all but ended. If a wild beast appeared to us and spoke in its own mysterious ways, would we know how to decipher the message? Where we were once in commune with the wild, we no longer can hear its music, and the loss is profound.
There was rumor that before her passing, Koko, the talking gorilla, left a poignant last message to the human world. Later, it was dismissed as a hoax, but while it might be factually untrue, the rumor speaks to our own longings and fear. The message was: “Save earth. Save us. Save yourself.”