LEVIATHAN 002

I was in Michigan for a Bio study trip in 1999. I can't really recall what the study was, something with the gestation of certain breeds of sheep on a farm? Anyway, the owner of the farm that we were studying at came to meet with us – he was a very kind man. He decided to bring us on a tour around the farm, to get our bearings... and I remember there was one thing he said that I kept with me beyond even the study we were conducting.

We were out in the fields where the cows roamed, and he told us that, long ago, farmers found a certain pattern among these animals. They found that each one of them had a partner... but it wasn't a sexual partner, it was separate from them. An entirely different cow. The two partners would eat together, sleep together, mimic each others quirks, et cetera... the farmers found that the cows made friends. Not multiple friends though, just one. A partner that they would spend the rest of their time on this Earth with.

And that was interesting to me, because it's not really a normal thing among animals to make friends. And when they do, you'd expect some, I don't know – some smart animal to do it, like a monkey or a dolphin. Not a cow. You see, friendship is a fairly abstract thought – a desire to copulate is natural among all living things, because it continues the species. It strengthens the big picture. But friendship – there's no big picture to that. It's really a singular event, tied to the lifetimes of only two members of a species. There's no biological, evolutionary reason to keep friends – we just do.

However, those same farmers also discovered another thing. They found that when they slaughtered one of the cows, its partner would completely break down. It would stop eating, spin in circles for hours, try to sleep for exorbitant amounts of time – some cows even attempted to eat their own fecal matter, or drive their heads into a wall over and over and over again...

At first, the farmers thought that the cows had been suffering from some sort of parasitic infection, but found no traces of any such thing. Soon, however, they found it was something else – the cows were trying to kill themselves. And now, this was really interesting. Because unlike friendship, which is completely benign to evolutionary process, suicide actually impedes it. Suicide is a completely emotional construct – and it was crazy, because at the time everyone thought that only humans could consider such an abstract idea. And yet cows – cows, of all things – could feel this way. And that's when psychologists started thinking, well, maybe its not that suicide is an abstract concept, per say, but rather the connection between the feeling of either having someone to relate to, or being completely alone.

Every since that discovery, nearly all farms have universally adopted killing both partners at the same time, so neither cow has these symptoms. Whether this was out of sympathy or that a mad cow makes bad beef, no one really knows.