Grieving Penguins?
I have written about grief and penguins before, but the topic is clearly still relevant because the winner of the 2020 Ocean Photography Awards was Tobias Baumgaertner who seems to have captured a particularly poignant instance of this grief.
As the BBC reports, a volunteer told Baumgaertner that two penguins “had recently lost their partners and often appeared to be comforting each other.” The photographer then sat around for hours in low light and eventually snapped this picture of the two animals gazing at the city lights of Melbourne, Australia, where they reside. The news story also reported that these two penguins habitually return to the same spot, thereby reminding us of the fact that many animals grieve and grieve together.
To the dismay of many, however, I imagine, Madison Dapcevich of Snopes.com, the online fact-checking website, poked holes in this lovely story by rating it only partially true. Here’s what Dapcevich thinks is undetermined about the photo:
The relationship between the two penguins and their emotional state in the photograph remains unclear. The suggestion that the two birds were “widowed” was based on speculation.
On the surface, it would appear that Dapcevich’s doubt about the identities of the penguins as widow and widower rests on the belief that we can’t know for sure whether these two penguins are indeed the same two penguins that the volunteer had recognized from earlier. Digging a bit deeper, it is possible to sense that this surface doubt is accompanied by a hesitancy to ascribe “grief” and “consolation” to animals. Dapcevich says as much by including a reference to “the scientific community” who advised the photographer to stop making any claims about the motivation of the penguins because “anthropomorphizing animals can have a negative influence, especially those living in such close proximity to urban areas.”
What I’d like to propose is that the fact checker and the “scientific community” may be missing something important in this story. That is, can we acknowledge the propensity to anthropomorphize, or ascribe human emotions and tendencies to non-human animals, while also learning something important about grief from this picture? What if the facticity of the image—i.e., whether it most certainly does capture two penguins consoling each other and therefore provides proof of animal grief—is less important than what the gesture of the two penguins can teach those of us who are grieving?
The undeniably truthful aspects of this photo are these: two penguins are sharing time together; one penguin is making an effort to connect physically with the other; both birds are looking at the scene in front of them. Within those simple facts exists a powerful aspect of grieving; namely, that the physical presence of another, the simple act of being with, is frequently the only comforting act another creature can provide to me when I am in the throes of sadness. This image is not important to me because it may or may not show two grieving penguins. Rather, it is important to me because it reminds me that pictures of penguins can (re)teach me that the close presence of another human is sometimes all that I need to help me through a difficult moment.
Let us agree, rhetorically and ethically, that anthropomorphization causes more harm than good. Ascribing a human value and emotional system to animals actually prevents us from communing with or understanding animals because it subordinates animal activity and animal thought and animal feeling to the cares and worldviews of humans. But what if we flip the equation? What if we allow a banal animal activity, and even a photographic representation of that activity, to instruct us on how we might be more humane to and with each other? In the case of these Melburnian penguins, I need not see anything other than two penguins passing time together in order to learn something about how to grieve and how to assist others in grief.
The instruction is simple: be with another. Permit bodily closeness, say nothing, stare off into the distance, and be with another. What if this is the prerequisite for active grieving, for opening to the lessons of grief?
Healing is slow; it hurts; it unfolds in a nonlinear fashion. Grief is the time signature of that slowness, the wisdom resulting from the pain, and the optic perspective afforded from the haptic experience of nonlinear movement.