Dear Marion,

Your account of the study of animal behavior seems to me to raise
interesting and important questions.

1) How is our "understanding" of animal behavior related to our
treatment - protection, exploitation, destruction of animals? If
I understand correctly the premise of Genesis is that animals are
distinct from humans, that God gave to humans "dominion" over
animals, the power and authority to use them or abuse animals
without restriction. In this context the satisfaction which God 
is said to derive from "offerings" of animals killed or "sacrificed"
on his altar appears to me an extraordinary exhibition of the
human psyche. One of the most distasteful facets of my medical
education was the insensitivity and obtuseness with which my teachers
referred to the killing of experimental animals as "sacrifice".
Sacrifice to whom? I remember vividly an incident in physiology
lab when students were taught about cardiac function by vivisecting
healthy, beautiful turtles. I found the process so nauseating and
disgusting that I refused to participate and turned to the section
instructor, a demure looking Indian woman: "How can you countenance
this butchery?" I challenged her, and with a gentle Indian smile
she replied: "I'm not doing it, you are."

2) There is a fundamental difference between "understanding" which
arises from observation and understanding which arises from 
communication. Sitting on the porch in Konnarock I observe
the hummingbird perched above the feeder as if it were his own,
and swooping down on hummingbird intruders as if ready to
impale them on his sharp beak. In describing him as territorial
and aggressive, I project onto him and his world a pattern of
behavior which would be meaningless to me, had I not experienced
it independently in my own existence, and of which I could never
acquire knowledge from the hummingbird. Similarly, when chickdees 
and titmice crowd around the feeder to pick up seeds, I declare
that they "must be hungry"; but what would I know about hunger
had I not felt it myself. Can I know anything about the conscious
or unconscious motives that compel the birds? When the deer on the
law, immediately after I've gotten up out of my chair, suddenly
bound away, I infer that they were "frightened" by my sudden
movement. How can I know what fright, if any, they experience?
I've observed often enough, that when startled by a sudden
unexpected loud noise, I perceive myself to flinch, long before
I become conscious of the sound. I infer that the noise triggers
a spinal reflex the "information" of which "travels" to the
sensory cortex much faster than the sound "arrives at" and is
"processed" by the auditory cortex.  But what then is "hearing"?
Is is the spinal reflex or the auditory perception? Or neither? -
but rather a general name for the reaction of the organism to "sound"?
In that case, is it meaningful to equate the "hearing" of one animal
with the hearing of another? Should one speak of animals' hearing at all?
Given that we must assume such "hearing" to be as different from our
hearing as their bodies are from ours.

3) Finally, and by far most important, there are the issues
concerning the purported understanding which derives from
"communication" with animals, important because understanding
among us humans is so obviously tenuous, fragile and superficial.
Your account of biology students "interacting" with apes in the wild
or in the zoo, reminds me that all of us animals are to some extent
responsive to each other's behavior. When I walk down the road,
and a dog barks and snarls at me, my adrenergic response indicates
not my understanding of the dog, but my fear that he (or she)
will bite me. Pavlov's dog, who, if I remember correctly, started
salivating at the sound of the bell, had not acquired an "understanding"
of music, but a conditioned reflex that the bell-sound meant meat.
Isn't learning a language, for example, a systematic assimilation
of stimuli and their ordered integration into the nervous system?
I'm reluctant to conclude that my mother "understood" her dogs,
or that her dogs "understood" my mother, when I contemplate the
limitations of my mother's "understanding" of me, and conversely
also the limitations of my understanding of my mother. 

I make much effort to "understand" your letters, but I'm not at
all sure, to what degree I succeed. As to my ability to make myself
understood, that's an ominous topic which I'd rather broach in
another letter, if at all.

Jochen