Journal 14—What The Crow Knows
Ross Andersen, author of What The Crow Knows delves into the world of consciousness and animals as through the beliefs of the religious group of Jains. Jainism is a religion born and cemented through Vedic texts of India. They believe that all living creators (not simply just humans) have conscious thought and deeper cognitive realizations. “…Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals” (Andersen 1).
Andersen visited an animal hospital in Old Delhi where he observes the veterinarians taking very good care of birds, many of which are brought in by Indian citizens. These birds come in very damaged, typically from natural causes or human intervention. They take selfless care of these animals until they are ready to be released into the wild again.
I very much agree with this text and throughout all parts of which Andersen delves into the realm of consciousness beyond the human scope. As a practicing vegetarian and past vegan, it also hits close to home. My entire life, I’ve thought of animals as companions and colleagues to humans, rather than a tool for our survival (which was the typical train of thought for thousands of years as humans were hunter-gatherers). This text introduced me to the Jain religion and enlightened me to their ways. They treat all organisms as if they have consciousnesses, many of which could be interpreted in a different state than of which we deal with on a daily basis. To explain my thoughts further: we know and experience consciousness all the time. It’s simply a part of our humanistic high-thinking. Just because animals do not act like humans—such as doing the complex tasks that we do today—does not mean we can decipher through their actions that their consciousness is inexistent. What if they look at us and consider us also as lower-functioning lifeforms because we don’t do what they do? Essentially, they may not understand our daily lives and what we do as much as we cannot sympathize and understand their methods of living.
Science cannot even explain our level of consciousness, a way to clearly define consciousness, or why we have such in the first place. We have no idea when consciousness came to fruition, whether that be before birds and humans diverged evolutionarily, or if we both evolved our own, separate, unique trains of consciousness.
“Mammals in general are widely thought to be conscious, because they share our relatively large brain size, and also have a cerebral cortex, the place where our most complex feats of cognition seem to take place. Birds don’t have a cortex. In the 300 million years that have passed since the avian gene pool separated from ours, their brains have evolved different structures. But one of those structures appears to be networked in cortexlike ways, a tantalizing clue that nature may have more than one method of making a conscious brain” (Andersen 5).
This tells humans that we are not positive that we are the only organisms with a consciousness. We cannot belittle the works of evolution to ascertain that we’re the only intelligent species on the planet. We simply could just not understand how other organisms live, as much as they probably don’t understand us.
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