Locked-In and Out of Luck

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

You’re a healthy man in your early thirties and a soccer enthusiast. One evening, while your wife is out, you are engrossed in watching an exciting match on your TV. But, all of a sudden, you don’t seem to be watching it anymore. There’s a good reason for that, but you don’t know it yet. Meanwhile, your wife, a nurse, returns to find you slumped over on the couch, slipping in and out of consciousness in a highly confused state. She is naturally very concerned and sees that your skin has turned a bluish-purple color, a sign that you are cyanotic, owing to prolonged oxygen deprivation. She calls for an ambulance to take you to the hospital. 

In the hospital, you are still in an alarming condition and are put into a coma. Yet, instead of becoming entirely unconscious, you become perfectly clear and alert although you cannot move your body. Worse, you can’t seem to communicate to your doctors. You feel that you are "locked-in" to your body, its involuntary prisoner. You become very frightened and think, "Will I be like this for the rest of my life?"

All this reads like an episode from a medical horror story of the sort that Edgar Allan Poe wrote, but it’s not a case of ghoulish fiction. In fact, it’s a brief summary of an actual case of an Israeli guy named Gil Avni. In this blog you will learn a lot more about Avni and what he experienced while in this dreadful locked-in state, but first I need to provide some background information in order that you have a proper context for what follows. 

The Back Story

Some years ago, I became aware of the work of a German researcher named Michael Nahm, who was investigating a phenomenon of which I had never heard, which he had labeled terminal lucidity. It referred to something that was astonishingly paradoxical that occurred to some people on the verge of death. These individuals had usually been profoundly demented, often suffering from Alzheimer’s or other severe forms of end-stage dementia, and in many cases had been mute for years. Yet, by a seeming miracle, they suddenly "woke up," and were able to carry on lucid conversations, inquiring about health of various family members, etc., as if they had never been away. And, then, typically, some hours later or the next day, they died.  

I was tremendously excited to learn about this phenomenon. It made me wish I could still be active in doing research, so that I could do my own studies of terminal lucidity (TL). But since I couldn’t, I wrote to Nahm, and as a result, we had a very warm and cordial series of e-mail exchanges for the next year or so, and I eventually made contact with other TL researchers and wrote about TL in my blogs.

I had only sporadic contact with Nahm until just recently when he wrote to me about his latest research, which dealt with the case of Gil Avni, and attached the draft of an article he and some colleagues he had written about this kind of locked-in experience. [The paper will be published in the upcoming issues of Journal of Scientific Exploration, so stay tuned for it!] In this blog, I will be drawing extensively on the draft of this paper, with Dr. Nahm’s kind permission. 

Interestingly enough, the three principal authors of this paper were Nahm and two other researchers I knew very well. One was my dear friend and longtime colleague, Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, and one of the world’s most renowned NDE researchers. The other, to my happy and delighted surprise, was a nurse named Madelaine Lawrence whom I had first met fifty years ago (!) when she had taken a graduate course in transpersonal psychology with me. We eventually published some research together (PDF) and stayed in touch for a few years before each of us went our separate ways. But over the years, Madelaine became one of the world’s leading authorities in the study of states of awareness in comatose patients. So I was really glad to learn about her career and look forward to making contact with her again after all these years!

Now, with this as background, let me return to the case of Gil Avni and begin to tell you his remarkable story.

Being Comatose

But before getting into Avni’s experience, we need a brief preface about what it’s like to be comatose, as Avni was for forty-four hours. We know from the research of Madelaine Lawrence and others that between 25% and 40% of comatose patients are able to hear and understand what had been said in their environment during the time of their supposed unconsciousness. Another study found that only 27% of patients had no awareness at all while comatose.

In a recent book devoted to the experiences of patients who recovered from medically induced comas like the one into which Avni was put, it was found that for some, it can be quite frightening. Nahm et al provide a brief summary of some of these cases.

For example, the patients may have experienced being cruelly tortured for prolonged periods of time or may have spent years from a subjective perspective in seemingly other realms of existence – even if the coma itself lasted only days or weeks. These bewildering experiences frequently appear perfectly real or even "more real than real" to those who report them.

Being Avni

Because of space limitations, I will be forced to give only a very brief description of Avni’s experience. It will include more about what led to his becoming comatose and what he experienced during the forty-four hours of his ordeal. For this purpose, I will draw on and slightly edit the abstract that Nahm et al provide:

Gil Avni was diagnosed with a cerebral edema and suffered severe anoxic brain damage that had already affected his brain stem. He was put in an induced coma to minimize the brain’s oxygen consumption. Still, he was expected to die within hours. However, the patient recovered unexpectedly. It turned out he had been fully conscious throughout the 44 hours he was in this coma. [My emphasis.] As a result, he was able to describe in detail every occurrence and conversation that had been held at his bedside throughout this time. This locked-in experience had an utterly traumatic impact on the patient, as I (KR) will note later.

Eventually, his doctors decided it was time to bring him out of his coma. This took some time, but when he woke up completely, to the surprise of everybody, all his critical symptoms, including his pulse and blood pressure, rapidly returned to normal. As Nahm et al write:

In order to facilitate communication with him (he was still weak and intubated), the nurse handed him a letter board as well as sheets of paper and a pen. One of the first things Avni communicated was: "I was in full consciousness since Thursday evening. I heard everything they said, word for word."

It was later determined that every conversation Avni reported was confirmed as being completely accurate according to the testimony of the individuals whom Avni claimed to overhear while comatose. 

As the authors continue:

  

On Sunday morning, the endotracheal tube and other medical devices were removed. Soon after, Avni left the hospital on his own account. To this day, none of the physicians and ICU nurses involved in Avni’s case has a medical explanation for his sudden and dramatic life-threatening breakdown – much less for his prompt recovery to full health. Only the aspiration pneumonia improved comparably slowly. It took three months until Avni’s lungs were healthy again.

But while Avni ultimately recovered physically, psychologically, it was another story. For some time afterward, he would wake up screaming. Indeed, his PTSD was understandably very severe before it finally began to subside. 

At this point, I need to interrupt this narrative to tell you that if you get Amazon Prime, you can watch an extremely compelling documentary about Avni where you see him, his wife, and the various medical personnel who attended him during his ordeal.  It lasts an hour and twenty-two minutes, and it is emotionally very powerful.  It also shows you what happened to Avni afterward.  It’s called 44 Hours, and I highly recommend it. View the film's trailer on YouTube.

But I am now going to tell you about some remarkable things that were not mentioned in the documentary, but only in the article Nahm sent to me. As you will see, there was much more to Avni’s experience than I have told you, and what it was, was even more extraordinary.

For this concluding portion of Avni’s story, it would be best for me simply quote directly from one section of the article by Nahm et al. It begins by informing us that one of the doctors taped Avni’s eyes shut to prevent damage to his corneas. However, that did not prevent him from seeing, as you will now learn. It turns out that while comatose and apparently close to death, Avni also had an extensive NDE. Here’s how Nahm et al describe this aspect of Avni’s experience:

From then on, he followed the events that occurred during the next two days chiefly via his sense of hearing from this in-the-body perspective, although he also experienced occasional OBEs again during which he seemed to perceive his environment visually.

Typically, Avni entered the OBE-state in particularly distressing and emotionally intense situations. This happened for example when the visitors came to say their goodbyes. In this situation, he was able to perceive them visually and memorized the clothes they wore. He even saw his sister, who had to wait in a corridor of the hospital in about 30 to 40m in distance to his room. She was not allowed to visit Avni at his bedside because she was pregnant and he was treated with nitric oxide, a substance that may cause harm to developing fetuses. Still, Avni saw her (crying) and followed the conversations she led, e.g. with her husband, and was later able to describe her clothing. In discussions with Avni, his sister and other visitors, members of the team producing the documentary were able to corroborate that he had described the events that occurred accurately and gave correct descriptions of their clothes.

Other elements that link his case to NDEs include the perception of an attractive bright whitish light. He perceived it in the OBE state in the distance when he was initially transported through the hospital corridors into the room where he was to be put into the coma. But Avni did not want to get closer to this light. Moreover, he felt the distinct presence of a spiritual entity throughout the entire time he was in the coma. When he was in the OBE state, he could even perceive it as a shadow-like figure inside his room. 

Apparently, this entity was already present when he arrived in the hospital room and stayed with him until the decision was made to wake him up from the coma. Throughout that time, it encouraged Avni to stay alert and awake, and not to give up hope for recovery. According to Avni, who regards this entity as a kind of guardian angel, it approached him and touched him with a finger after the decision to wake him up was made. This touch felt like a tremendous jolt of electricity-like energy, and the being informed him that it was now time to leave him because its duty was fulfilled.  

So, Avni was never alone throughout this soul-crushing ordeal. He was comforted by this Presence, which he understandably came to regard as his guardian angel. It was this Presence who instructed him as to what to do and who gave Avni hope that he would recover. As indeed he did, against all expectation and to the astonishment of everyone involved in his case.

And now you know why.

A Letter To My Friends

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Some years ago, when I was in my early 80s, I began my book Waiting to Die with these less than immortal lines: “What is it like, waiting to die? Of course, it’s different for everyone. I can only say what it’s like for me. On the whole, it’s rather boring.”

But now that I am approaching the dreaded age of 90, full of Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, I have to admit it’s still boring, but in a very different way. This essay will attempt to explain just how.

At this stage in my alleged life, I find myself seemingly stuck in what appears to be an interminable bardo - somewhere after my life is over but before it has actually been allowed to expire. I have joked for years that God being the Supreme Ironist has seen fit to keep me in an arrested state of mortality. Imagine – I have devoted my professional life to the study of near-death experiences, and yet I seem to lack the ability to croak. So, I remain, still here, still waiting to die, like a prisoner languishing in a cell (i.e., my body) while serving an indefinite sentence.

So, yes, waiting to die is still boring, but frustrating! What does one have to do to leave this world, especially now that we are all suffering the indignity of having to live in the era of Trump’s seemingly forever reign? It’s enough to send a person back to ponder the mysteries of theodicy.

 

It makes me think that perhaps the Gnostics were right, that this world is actually being governed by a demiurge, a kind of cosmic abortion, a false creator of a fallen world.   

Of course, I am jesting, I don’t really think I am being punished for my sins. I just think I am incompetent when it comes to dying.

My spiritually-oriented friends tell me that if I am still here, I must not have completed my work or the raison d’être for my life. To which I say, balderdash! Just another New Age bromide, if you ask me. 

Nevertheless, as long as I’m still here, I need to do something besides reading interesting books and watching tennis, which I try not to do at the same time. But what? After writing more than a hundred blogs in the past five years, I’m blogged out. And having written more than twenty books, I’ve written my last book. I don’t have hobbies; I’m too poor to become a philanthropist; a late life of crime does not seem to be in the stacked cards. I need a creative outlet of some kind, but what?

Recently, a dear friend suggested that I should write something along the lines of “how to live.” Surely, she said, you’ve lived long enough now to have acquired some wisdom about life that you could impart to others. “Pshaw,” I protested. I don’t have enough self-delusion to think I have any special wisdom to share about how to live. Besides, I have always rejected any notion of being a kind of “spiritual teacher.” I’m a researcher, not a self-help expert or guru. I may be a jerk, but far be it for me to offer any advice to others about how they should live their lives when I can’t even figure out how to live mine.

Still, pondering what my friend had suggested, it did occur to me that I could still write something that at least my friends might find worth reading.  And so, with his long prologue now drawing to a close, let me finally start in. 

Living with Cancer

I have a friend named Jim who lives in the mountains of Colorado. I call him “a friend” though we have never met and until recently I had very little direct contact with him. Most of what I had previously learned about Jim was told to me by my daughter, Kathryn, who is Jim’s next-door neighbor. Kathryn has a deep friendship with Jim.

Jim, who is 73, was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer seven years ago. It is inoperable.

In dealing with it, he has had to contend with many painful tests and treatment regimens, some of which make him “radioactive” and requires him to be isolated until the treatment runs its course. Of course, he has had to deal with chemo as well. He now suffers from anemia, too, and is often very tired.

Kathryn has told me a lot about Jim’s life, as it is now and as it was before he got sick. She has also told me that Jim has a been a regular reader of my blogs and apparently has read a number of the books I’ve written about in my blogs over the past several years.

Well before Jim became ill, he ran an IT company for about twenty years, and made enough money that he could retire in 1997, a wealthy man. He was so successful that he was elected into a kind of IT Hall of Fame.

But Jim loves the rural life. Before he became ill, he was a dedicated hiker. He also fostered old dogs for many years. Jim has been married for over fifty years to a woman named Kathy, who he has recently told me, is “the love of his life.” But they don’t live together because Kathy loves living in Denver while Jim loves living where the wild elk roam. But Kathy visits him often and continues to take good care of him. Here’s a recent photo of Jim and Kathy.

Recently, Kathryn told me that Jim had been doing some writing on what he’s learned from living with cancer, and that what he had written really impressed her. She felt that Jim had acquired considerable wisdom based on what his cancer had taught him.

For some time, I had admired Jim from afar, but had never taken the trouble to tell him how I felt about him. So, the other night, I sent him an e-mail with the subject head, “You’re My Hero.”

Here’s what I wrote to Jim:

Dear Jim,

No, really, you are. Kath has kept me informed - in great mesmerizing and painful detail - of all the multitudinous things from which you suffer and the various soul-crushing treatments you have had to endure, including those radioactive ordeals, in order to treat your cancer and keep it at bay as much as possible.

But what has amazed me and filled me with admiration for your spirit are all things you have been able to take pleasure in despite how crappy and tired you feel most of the time. Watching your beloved elk, reading, writing out your thoughts, enjoying the company of your dog Hannah, etc. Making sure you take the time to enjoy life as much as possible as long as you can.  How many people, having to deal with what you do, would be able to do likewise? Damn few, if you ask me, which I’ve noticed you haven’t.

So I have an idea. When you’re not too tired (I know you are now because of your anemia), I think I would be great if you wrote something about how to live while living with serious cancer. From what Kathryn has told me, you have a lot of wisdom and living with cancer has taught you a lot. How about sharing what you have learned with a wider audience? You might be able to help others cope with serious illness by writing about how you have dealt with yours with such courage, grace and wisdom.

I often think of you, Jim, especially at night when I go to bed, and I send you continued best wishes for your life during this difficult stage of your journey.

*************    

Jim responded warmly to my letter and then offered to share some of his writing with me. He also gave me his permission to share his wisdom with you. What follows is what Jim feels he has learned from living with cancer.

Born Dying – Master

I never liked the war metaphors. People talk about “fighting” cancer, as if it’s a battle you can win if you just swing hard enough. That’s bullshit. Cancer isn’t something outside me - it’s in me, part of me, tangled in my biology. I don’t battle it. I live with it. And living with it has taught me things I never expected.

Empathy

Sickness stripped away the old illusions - merit, control, toughness, being smarter or stronger than the next guy. Those stories crumble quick when you’re counting out pills or watching your body change. What’s left is empathy. You see fragility everywhere, in yourself and in everyone else. Instead of judgment, you start to feel for people. You realize everyone’s stumbling with the cards they’ve been dealt.

I spent years being critical, impatient, wanting things sharper, cleaner, better. Illness softened some of that edge. I still cut through the bullshit, but I understand now that most of us are just trying, and trying itself matters.

Gratitude

Not the Hallmark kind. The raw kind. The kind that sneaks up on you in the morning when you realize you woke up again. Gratitude for Kathy, who stays through the mess. For friends who drive an hour just to sit with me. For Hannah’s head resting heavy on my lap. For the five-mile walk I can still take, even if it leaves me tired.

Gratitude is the anchor. It makes the ordinary matter: coffee, sunlight on the cabin deck, a neighbor plowing the driveway without being asked. Ordinary is everything when you know your time is shrinking.

And here’s the truth: if you have gratitude, you pretty much have enough. That’s the connection. Enough isn’t about money or possessions. It’s about being able to see what’s right in front of you and know it matters. Gratitude and enough are the same thing said in two different ways.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Cancer has taken everything: sex, wine, food, hiking, my dog fostering, driving, and energy. I’m still grateful for what it hasn’t taken yet - my ability to feel all the things that allow me to live with cancer. When that’s gone, then it’s time for the morphine drip to go full throttle.

Knowing Myself

Here’s the truth: I had to get to know myself - who I was, and why I was who I was, mistakes and all. That was the hardest work of all, harder than cancer itself. But doing that work made the rest possible. It let me face the illness in a way a lot of people can’t. Without that kind of self-examination, the fear and the anger would have eaten me alive.

Rolling With the Punches

When I was a kid, my father showed me a little about boxing. Not how to hit harder - I was smaller and weaker than the other kids - but how to slip a punch, how to roll with it so it didn’t flatten you. That lesson stuck. I didn’t know it then, but it was practice for this. Cancer throws punches you can’t block. You don’t win by swinging back harder. You survive by rolling with it, by bending without breaking. That early lesson has carried me farther than any idea of “fighting” the disease.

Presence

Illness is the great equalizer. It forces presence. You can’t pretend forever stretches out ahead of you, so you stop living as if it does. You stop chasing, stop measuring, stop comparing. You start noticing. You live in hours, sometimes in minutes, and that’s enough.

Presence isn’t a trick of meditation apps. It’s clarity born of necessity. It’s knowing that the small moment you’re in is the only one you’ll ever really own.

Living Every Two Years

You can’t live day-to-day. If you did, you’d be a sociopath, because day-to-day living is just survival with no horizon. What works for me is waking up each morning and assuming I have two years left. That’s long enough to matter, short enough to stay real. And when the time comes, I’ll adjust it to one year, or less if that’s what it is. That posture makes the days livable without falling into either denial or despair.

No Regrets, Just Understanding

People like to talk about regrets at the end. I don’t buy it. If you really look back, you know why things happened the way they did. You see the forces in play. Instead of regret, you get understanding.

That’s been my way through. I was wrong most of my life - about success, about control, about myself. If I was always wrong then, I’d be a fool to think I’m not wrong now. But that’s the point: understanding grows out of wrongness. Regret doesn’t help you. Examination does.

Born Dying

So here’s where I land: cancer is not a war. It’s not courage or weakness. It’s biology doing what biology does. But inside that, there’s still room for choice - not in the outcome, but in the posture you take toward it.

My posture is simple: empathy, gratitude, presence. That’s what makes living with cancer possible. It doesn’t erase the pain or the fatigue or the fear. It just keeps me human inside it.

We are all born dying. I just happen to know it more clearly than most. And maybe that’s enough.

Bookends and Other Endings

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

I wrote a book the other day. Well, I exaggerate; it actually took me a couple of days. And though I did some original writing for the book, I didn’t really write it as much as I compiled it by using excerpts from some of my previous books, articles I had written, a few of my blogs, etc. I wrote it for my kids (I have three) who are now all middle-aged, but to a father like me, they are still my kids.

I didn’t really expect to write any more books. I had to give up writing the last of my books several years ago. After that, I’ve turned to the blogging life and over the last five years, I’ve cranked out more than a hundred blogs. So, what made me to decide to write this book? Thanks for asking. I will tell you.  

I was led to do so as a result of reading another book, as I describe in the brief preface of my new book, a portion of which I will quote here:

The genesis of this book came about adventitiously as a result of my coming across a very curious book about the beginnings of Zionism. Of course, that is a well-known development that is familiar to most people, but what made this book so arresting and riveting to me was the way this history was narrated. The book entitled Melting Point by an English author named Rachel Cockerell consists entirely of quotes from the dramatis personae from this period – excerpts from diaries, letters, speeches, newspapers, etc. There is no interpretative commentary at all. This gives the book an immediacy, you-are-there quality as you witness history unfolding as it happens.

The story takes us from the beginning of Theodor Herzl’s first Zionist congresses in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 to the creation of the state of Israel exactly fifty years later. 

But, it turns out, that’s not the real story of this book. Instead, it is one that has been virtually forgotten so that few people alive today are aware of it. But did you know that long before Jews were able to come to live in Israel, quite a few of them, indeed many thousands, mainly Russian Jews, were able to form a colony of Jews in – of all places – Galveston, Texas! Some remained there, some eventually moved on to and settled in other parts of America.

The man mainly responsible for creating this haven for Jewish refugees was during this period the most famous Jew in the world. But today, like the Galveston migration itself, he is completely forgotten. His name was Israel Zangwill, an author who at the time was hailed as the Jewish Dickens. In 1908, as a celebrity in New York, he wrote a play called "The Melting Pot," which was a huge hit and thrilled then President Teddy Roosevelt who was there on opening night.

But the man who was really responsible for the Galveston caper was a close colleague of Zangwill by the name of David Jochelmann, who turns out to be Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather, something she only learned in the course of her research for the book. The author is the one who brought this whole forgotten episode in the history of the Jews to light as well as her great-grandfather’s pivotal role in rescuing these Jews from the pogroms of early twentieth century Czarist Russia.

There is much more in this book than what I have delineated here. We meet other people from Cockerell’s family who settled in New York during the jazz age, and later in London, all of which I found engrossing. Really, it is one helluva story, as the reviews of the book I’ve read make clear.

Anyway, musing about this book and what I had learned about the lives of all these Jews, it occurred to me that I might try, however belatedly, to educate my own children, now all middle-aged adults and no longer kids (except to their father), about what Jews had contributed to the world as well as telling them more about their father’s own journey as a Jew that led, in the end, to his forsaking his own sense of Jewish identity.

************************

I gave my book a somewhat whimsical title: Pastrami on Rye: A Potpourri of Pieces from the Life of a Jewish Apostate. But the book isn’t really humorous. I wrote it not just to entertain my kids (and whoever else might read it) but to tell them about my own Jewish past as well as what Jews had contributed culturally to our world. 

Now I know that very few of you are Jewish or care about such things, but since, as I will explain below, this will be my last blog, I will beg your indulgence for a few more minutes.

As I explain at the beginning of my book, it is the story of how I grew up Jewish and how I grew old only to forfeit my sense of Jewish identity. And what happened in between my youth and old age to bring about this radical change.   

The book has three main sections: (1) My life as a Jew; (2) Jewish contributions to the world of music and entertainment; (3) Israel. I will say more about the last section of the book here. 

The road that led to my apostasy, that is, to my abandonment of the religion into which I was born, even if I had never practiced it, led me to pick up a book entitled Dark Hope. I was in my early seventies then and had recently ended my career as an NDE researcher. Dark Hope had been written by an Israeli scholar – actually, as I was soon to learn, he had been a recipient of a MacArthur award and was a distinguished Indologist. But as you will learn from the chapters in this section, David Shulman was also an Israeli peace activist and had spent years trying, mostly in vain, to protect Palestinians from the violent depredations of Israeli settlers who felt that Palestinians had no right to occupy and work on the land where they and their ancestors had lived for generations.

 

Reading the book was not only deeply disturbing to me, but was a really a revelation. I had been only vaguely aware of the chronic and seemingly unending strife between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, but Shulman’s book shocked me into appreciating for the first time the full extent to which the Palestinians were brutally treated by the Jews while Israeli soldiers stood by and did nothing to intervene in the mayhem, much less arrest the Jews who were able to attack the Palestinians with impunity. [Palestinians aren’t permitted to carry arms, so they are left to only throw rocks.]

 

Reading Shulman’s book, as you will see when you read the chapters in this section, had opened a crack, a fissure, in my up-to-then Jewish soul, and, in the end, it could not be closed or mended. It ultimately led to my undertaking a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see things for myself. And once I did, I realized that my identity as a Jew could not only not be sustained; it was indefensible.

************************  

I had planned to publish the book, but I changed my mind, knowing that very few people, including almost all of you, no doubt, would be interested to read such a book, so I just had my webmaster, Kevin Williams, create it as a PDF file. If by chance, any of you would be interested to read this book, just click on this link to view and/or download the PDF file.

Now on to other matters.

As I’ve mentioned, this will be my last blog. Yes, I know I’ve said that before. Last year, I actually announced my retirement from blogging, but eventually finding my hands at a loss what to do with themselves, auto-eroticism no longer being an option, I returned to blogging for a while and wrote another dozen or so blogs. But now I’ve really reached the end of the blogging line. My health issues, and especially my increasingly deteriorating vision, just compel me to call it quits. "To everything there is a season," and all that. [Of course, I might decide to change my mind again. What is that old cliché? Never say never….]

I refuse to spend more time talking about my afflictions. If I can’t joke or kvetch about them, why bother? No one is interested to read about the troubles of an old man, and even I find the subject tiresome and pointless. Besides, many people my age have it worse.

I will just make one general comment, though I have the feeling I have written about this before.

Some years ago, I wrote a book about various classical composers. One of them was the English composer, Edward Elgar. After the death in 1920 of his diminutive wife Alice, who was a large and vital presence in Elgar’s life, he entered into a final, fallow period I called a long diminuendo.

I’ve been in one of my own for the last seven or so years. I’m just marking time until the end.

Still, I’m grateful not only for the life I have had, but even for the life I have now. There are still things I enjoy, such as tennis. I lived during the golden age of the sport when the three greatest players of their time played:  Roger Federer, whom I worshipped; Rafael Nadal, whom I admired; and Novak Djokovic, whom I detest. And now new stellar players like Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, have come to dominate the sport and given me many thrills. And I can still read interesting books, even if I can no longer write about them in my blogs. Finally, but not least, I still enjoy the company of my longtime girlfriend, Lauren, who takes very good care of me. And picks me up when I fall, as I did last week.

Here we are when I was still semi-vertical in a recent photo taken in my living room.

By the time you read this, Lauren and I will have celebrated my half-birthday on Friday, June 13th, when I turned the corner heading toward 90. No male member of my family has even come close to living to that age. Will I make it until then? Do I want to? Guess.

I will just leave you with a slight alteration of the lyrics of an old Woody Guthrie song (of course all of his songs, like me, are old now):

"So long, it’s been good to know ya. It’s a long time since I’ve been home."

I am looking forward to going home – someday – just not yet.  I still want to be here for Wimbledon this summer….

Autism and Telepathy – Part II

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

A couple of weeks ago, I offered a blog dealing with the Telepathy Tapes, which presented evidence that many autistic children develop telepathic and other paranormal abilities. One of my dear friends, a woman named Deborah King, who had an autistic child named Patrick (now an adult) told me about some of her own uncanny experiences with her son, and in that first blog she kindly recounted some of these extraordinary instances with Patrick.

So I invited her to prepare a blog in which she could describe more of her experiences with Patrick and write about autism generally. What follows is Deb’s account, which I believe you will find fascinating as well as indicative of the special gifts and sensitivities of autistic persons.

Back in the early 90s, when we first started tracking Patrick’s behaviors, including his paranormal and intuitive ones, autism had only recently made its debut in the DSM-III in 1980 as a distinct diagnostic entity. We had no choice but to track everything, as we were building the autism plane as we were flying it, so to speak. Not even the experts knew much at all. Every behavior was significant to us, including the “anomalous” and seemingly paranormal or telepathic ones, and we recorded all of them in an endless stack of journals and records. However, we were hesitant to share these with anyone other than other parents in our autism network. At that time, estimates from the CDC indicated that about 1 in 500 children were estimated to have autism, and currently the CDC reports that about 1 in 31 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Many factors have contributed to this dramatic increase in autism rates, including increased awareness and detection, changes in diagnostic criteria, and a complex interplay of genetic and environmental influences. 

Although we know much more now about this complex interplay of factors than we did decades ago, the telepathic and paranormal abilities of individuals with autism have just begun to be examined through the pioneering work of Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell and Ky Dickens, through the Telepathy Tapes podcast.

Patrick’s telepathic abilities soon became everyday occurrences. When I went shopping and would return with endless amounts of grocery bags for our four children, several dogs and cats, and my father who lived with us, while our other children would eagerly search through every bag for the items they were waiting for, Patrick would go straight to the bag that contained exactly what he wanted - every time. He would read my moods impeccably, no matter how hard I tried to put on a happy face. 

One day, I was sitting with a pile of bills, internally upset because I did not know how we were going to make ends meet that month. Patrick watched me intently, and of course, I said nothing to him. A few minutes later, he vanished up to his room, returned with a one-dollar bill, and handed it to me. He just looked at me with those big blue eyes and said nothing. I tried not to cry, but it was hard, and I managed a "thank you, Patrick" and gave him a big hug. If nobody else in my universe knew what challenges I was internally carrying, Patrick always did. 

On one occasion, I remember a teacher telling me that she was flustered because she could not find a stress ball that she used in the classroom for Patrick when he became frustrated. She said nothing to Patrick, but was taking her classroom apart, trying to find it. Patrick pulled her by the arm, down the hall, to the lost and found, and there it was. She was flabbergasted when telling me about it - as she could not understand how he knew what she was looking for, and how he knew where it was. By this time, this was behavior we had come to expect, and we were not surprised at all. During Easter egg hunts, Patrick would always find the most eggs, including the "prized golden egg" that contained the coveted cash prize.  This did not go over too well with our other children, but Patrick's glee at "winning" the hunt was always infectious and ultimately made all of us very happy.

Patrick's connection with animals was in a category by itself.  On one occasion, we took him to a local farm that raised emus. At the time we visited, these large birds were more aggressive than they could be on other occasions because they had chicks. "Please keep your distance," the owner cautioned. Of course, Patrick was on his own energetic wavelength, and for some reason unknown to us, bolted in a flash into the field towards the emus and their chicks. We became frantic, fearing that he would get kicked with their powerful legs and sharp talons as they instinctively protected their young. We ran after him, but before we could reach him, he managed to get right into the middle of the emus and their chicks, lie down on his back, and appeared totally happy and relaxed. Nothing, and I mean nothing, happened to him. 

We just stood and watched as the emus not only perceived him as non-threatening, but they seemed to react as if he actually belonged there. As we came closer to try and retrieve Patrick, they hissed at us, but not at him. The owner was astounded and assured us this was quite "unusual."  It was not until years later that we read about Temple Grandin's amazing ability to communicate with animals non-verbally, which, of course, is how animals communicate with us. Her book, "Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior" (2006), helped us to understand even more about Patrick's amazing, non-verbal communication with animals. 

I will close with something that happened very recently, as if on cue, after I was asked to share some of these experiences for this blog by my friend Ken. 

We walked out of the house on a Sunday morning on our way to church, and Patrick stopped dead in his tracks and said, "Loki is here." Loki, a neighborhood cat with an amputated left rear leg, does have a real home, but makes the rounds in our neighborhood searching for treats. Sometimes, we see him daily, but more often, we can go months without a Loki visit. We looked around, and there was no evidence of Loki anywhere. I told Patrick that we needed to get going, or we would be late for church. He insisted that we wait for Loki, as he and Loki have a special bond. Patrick, now much more verbal than he was as a young child, looked at me and said, "Loki is here. I will call him."  

I was becoming more and more impatient, but Patrick called for Loki, and again, no evidence of his feline friend.  Just as I was about to insist that we could not wait any longer, out of nowhere, Loki came running out of the woods behind our house, running faster as a tripod than any other animal with four legs could run, and went straight to Patrick. Their usual exchange of affection and silent communication ensued, in a conversation that only they understood (see the picture of Patrick and Loki below). 

We were very late for church as a result, but we didn't care. Patrick has taught us to stop our rushing about, make space for what is really important in life, and most importantly, to trust in the power of the unseen world - that he is more familiar with than most of us ever will be. He may have special needs, but to us, he has special gifts and has taught us so very much in a way that words never could. Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell and The Telepathy Tapes are teaching us more about the special gifts that individuals like Patrick have, and more importantly, what we can all learn from them.

Telepathy and Autism

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

[Author’s Note. This is a two-part blog. It would be best for you to read the first part and listen to the video whose link I have provided before going on to read the second part of this blog.]

Have you heard of The Telepathy Tapes? If not, you’re about to. I keep being urged by various professional friends of mine to listen to them, but I’ve always been too busy with more important things, such as filing my nails and remembering to take my inhaler, so as to continue breathing. However, after reading the following enthusiastic recommendation from a good friend of mine, I decided to put my nail clippers aside and listen to the first episode. Here’s what my friend sent to me to get me to sit on my duff and lend an ear, actually two, to a really amazing and provocative podcast…

I have been incredibly inspired over the last two weeks listening to all 10 one-hour episodes of The Telepathy Tapes. The host Ky Dickens describes how she embarked on a heart and mind-bending journey into the mysterious world of telepathy in non-speaking individuals with autism. 

She features personal stories and expert interviews, uncovering a phenomenon she never thought possible. Through a mix of personal anecdotes, scientific exploration, and interviews with experts like Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a Johns Hopkins-trained neuropsychiatrist, she unpacks the mysterious connection between parents and their non-speaking children who seemingly can read minds. 

The first episode takes you on a journey across the globe, meeting families who have experienced this phenomenon firsthand. These interviews bring listeners into a world where telepathy may not just be possible, but commonplace. 

This opens up a conversation about the potential of the human mind that mainstream science has largely ignored, inviting us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about communication and consciousness. So inspiring!!! And as word of this spreads rapidly, this has the potential to be a profoundly inspiring game-changer. I can't recommend these interviews highly enough.

You can find the first episode here:

All 10 episodes can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/@TheTelepathyTapes

The first episode in the series takes about 45 minutes. Like most podcasts, it has a series of annoying commercial interruptions, but you can click on them to skip them. So, when you have the time, sit back and enjoy learning about the connection between autism and telepathy.

**************************

The first person (of three who almost insisted that I stop what I was doing and start listening to The Telepathy Tapes is a dear friend of mine named Deb. I knew that she had raised an autistic child, and that he had exhibited some evidence of telepathy or other paranormal abilities. So, when I decided to write this blog, I asked Deb if she would be willing to describe some of her experiences with her son, Patrick.  

What follows is her account of some of these uncanny experiences. I hope they will intrigue you and induce you to listen to more of these Telepathy Tapes about this fascinating phenomenon.

Patrick is my beloved "bonus" son, who I have raised, together with my husband, Bob, since he was a little tyke. He is now 34, and has been one of the greatest spiritual teachers in my life. He was largely non-verbal in his younger years, and it was then that he began to teach me how to communicate soul-to-soul. No words necessary. Just deep feeling, tuning in, and somehow reading the intuitive and spiritual cues that most of us verbal folk miss on a regular basis. For Patrick, speech was often not only confusing, but a distraction from his uncanny ability to tune into the most important things - that were felt, and not spoken - largely by the unseen world.

The first time his "sixth sense" gifts became crystal clear to me was at about age 8. I had retrieved a robin's nest that had fallen from a tree in front of our house during a storm, and brought it into the house to show it to him and have him touch and hold it. I then read him a story from the library about how mother robins built their nests, laid their brilliant blue eggs inside, and hatched their young. He watched and listened intently, but responded only with one word: "eggs." This one word made me very happy. At least it was a word, and he spoke. 

Over the next few days, we read the story several more times, and the nest continued to fascinate him. He stared and stared at it. It was what followed next that was something I will never forget. He gently pulled me by the hand to lead me outside (as he often did when he wanted something but could not communicate in words) - and led me to the underside of our deck in the backyard. There was nothing under the deck except some old gardening equipment of my Dad’s, and was not a place that we ever took Patrick to play. It was an unfinished area, muddy, and dark. He looked at me with wide eyes and repeated that one word: "eggs." 

I didn't know quite what to make of this, looked around, and saw nothing. I asked him what he wanted, as his receptive vocabulary always far exceeded his expressive vocabulary, and he then pulled my hand again, this time leading further under the deck to a corner where the muddy ground met the concrete foundation. I was more than a bit confused, and then I saw them: tiny blue robin's eggs, cracked, with sadly no viable chicks. I was stunned - not only because he led me there after touching the nest and hearing the story - but because the tree from which I had retrieved that nest was in the front of the house, and nowhere near that area. 

Of course these were eggs from a different nest, I thought, and I was happy because he was making an important connection between the nest, the story, and the eggs. But how did he know that those cracked blue eggs were there, in the dark corner of that muddy spot under our deck, where he never, ever went? Not only did he never go there, but it was quite difficult to even reach, and we kept him out of the yard most of the time anyway as he often "eloped," wandered, and had wandered off in the woods behind our house in the blink of an eye many times. Still quite startled, I led him back inside the house. After we were back inside, he insisted (again by pulling my arm towards the direction he wanted to go, this time more forcefully) that we put the nest (which he had picked back up) out onto our upper deck, and repeated the word "eggs."  

I tried to explain to him that mother birds liked to choose where they put their nests, that there was no tree there, and that the nest would be unprotected and would probably blow away. "Eggs," he repeated. 

I smiled, and we came back inside. Later that evening, my husband moved the nest up onto the railing of the deck, so that we could sweep the endless number of Maple "helicopter" seed pods that had whirled their way onto our deck that Spring. That was that - or so we thought.  

Patrick watched that nest each and every day, apparently hoping that a mother bird would take up residence in his nest, and lay her eggs there. Although endearing, it was almost painful to watch at times, as no mother robin in her right mind was going to lay a clutch of eggs in that location, and my husband and I secretly hoped that the wind would blow it away and it would be "out of sight, out of mind," so to speak. That was our mistake. 

Close to two weeks passed. Through wind, rain, and many more Maple helicopter pod aerial "bombings," that nest never moved more than an inch or two, and we could not explain it. There it sat, as if glued by some invisible force to the top of the deck railing. Patrick watched it each and every day. He just stared and stared at it, looking up to the sky every now and then as if to catch a glimpse of the mother bird that he desperately hoped would finally come flying by to determine that Patrick's recycled nest was acceptable, and lay her eggs there. Day after day he silently watched. 

One morning, I went upstairs after my morning coffee to wake him up for school. He opened his big blue eyes, smiled from ear to ear, and said, "eggs." His smile made my heart sing because he often did not smile or show positive emotion outwardly. Patrick ate very few foods at that time, so he was clearly not asking me for eggs for breakfast, as he never ate them. I smiled a big smile back at him, gave him a tight morning hug, and started to try to get him dressed for school - but he was not having any of it. He started screeching, moaning, flapping his hands (which he often did when he was excited, agitated, or frustrated), and loudly repeating the word "eggs" while insistently pulling me down the two flights of steps from his bedroom to our deck.  

"Eggs!" he yelled, sounding quite excited this time, looking again at his beloved nest. I gasped when I saw what I thought was absolutely impossible! A mother robin, sitting, quite contently, on "eggs." Tears of joy came rushing down from my eyes. I could hardly believe what I was seeing, and, more importantly, what I was feeling. How did this mother robin choose this "fixer-upper" nest that was sitting right there, out in the open, no tree in sight, completely unprotected by anything at all? But more importantly, as with the remnants of the cracked blue eggs under our deck, how did Patrick know they were there that morning? How did he know that she was there? 

Although we were able to see glimpses of the eggs underneath her, and watched her intently with Patrick every day, we never saw them hatch or fledge. We came home one day after a bad rainstorm, and the nest was just gone. Although we looked and looked, we could find nothing, and never knew what became of them. But the bigger question in our minds was exactly how Patrick had "known" all of this. We could not explain it then, and we cannot explain it now - at least not completely. We just knew, that he knew. And if this seems extreme, I would be the first to agree that it was. 

I believe, however, that Patrick's strong intuition and ESP had likely been a part of his inner life for quite some time, but we were unaware of his experiences as there was no way he could tell us about them. We simply had to be led by the arm, by Patrick, and shown. Something "extreme" was needed to get our attention. This was the first of many times over the years to come, that Patrick "led" us to things he intuitively knew, especially about the natural world around him, as well as the humans that he could not communicate with verbally. At that time, he could not speak much at all, spell, count, or dress himself, did not use a communication device (these were not nearly as commonly used then as they are now), was still in diapers, and could not do much of anything else that a neurotypical 8-year-old could do, but he could do that. It wasn't wishful thinking. He really did that.

This opened our eyes and hearts to many other similar experiences, both big and small, over the coming years. We kept journals about everything regarding Patrick's in-home behavioral program, the team we had hired, and the expert autism consultants we searched for around the country who were few and far between back then. We made it a point after the "sixth sense eggs occurrence" as we called it, to add entries about many of these "anomalous" experiences. This came naturally to us given our academic training, as did a healthy amount of skepticism, but over the years, Patrick made believers out of us.

Why Nietzsche Wept and Why We Don’t

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

[Author’s Note. Recently, in writing to a new friend about the problem of empathy, I was reminded of this blog from a few years ago, but also for reasons that will become clear, because her father had loved going to the track for watch horse races. And, finally, this blog makes reference to some of the books I wrote about last week and provides further information about them.]

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”  

-- Genesis

I haven’t been able to go to a zoo for many years. I just can’t stand to see animals penned up or in cages. Even when artificial environments or islands are created for them to give them a little more space to pad around, they are obviously still confined. However delighted children may be to see the animals in their storybooks alive and at close range, from the perspective of the animals themselves who are often bored or dozing in the sun (at least when the sun is shining), they are still inhabiting an open-air prison. Are human prisoners, when they are allowed to go out in their yards for an hour of exercise, any less free than when in their cells? Honestly, I don’t see how any adult visiting a zoo can feel anything but shame and revulsion. Of course, I realize that most adult visitors do not feel any such thing when they wander about gawking at encaged or otherwise imprisoned animals. It’s easy to banish any disquieting thoughts when you see monkeys frolicking about on the trees inside their cages, apparently having a good time. Why shouldn’t you enjoy watching their antics? 

But to me, this just shows a blatant if habitual failure of empathy. We view animals from our own privileged perspective as human beings free to move about as we like and, later, to leave them behind as we head for own homes. But what do the animals feel?

We can turn to literature, to fiction, to get some idea. For example, about ten years ago, by chance, I happened to pick up a book by an author, Benjamin Hale, of whom I had never heard. The book was called The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. It turned out to be the absolute best book I had read in recent years. It tells the story of an encaged chimpanzee named Bruno who is being used for various psychological experiments. At first, he is a brute, a mere beast, covered in his own shit. But one of the psychologist’s assistants takes an interest in Bruno, and believe it or not – remember this is fiction – teaches him to speak. Bruno eventually becomes quite literate. He becomes, if I can put this way, fully human. The assistant, a young woman, even takes him to live with her. (Eventually, he becomes an actor when, after escaping following the woman’s death, he hooks up with a Falstaffian Shakespearean actor.) 

I know this sounds fantastic, and it is of course, but we eventually learn that this book, which is being narrated by Bruno himself who speaks almost as if he is as erudite and articulate as Vladimir Nabokov, is being dictated to a woman named Gwen. At this point, Bruno has been placed in prison. His crime is not having escaped; it is because, in a rage, he has killed the psychologist who, at the beginning of the book, has tormented him with his cruel, self-serving experiments.

But what you learn from this book, which is also riotously funny, is to see the world through Bruno’s eyes, and it is – devastating. What we thoughtlessly do to animals with no regard to their welfare, to treat them as things, not conscious beings like ourselves, for our own ends, now strikes us with the force of a sickening and shocking revelation. 

I was so bowled over by this book, I did something afterward I had never done. I wrote the author a fan letter, and he actually responded with a cordial note of his own. Do yourself a favor, friends. If you have a taste for a Nabokovian fantasy, with a more than a touch of Kafka, drop everything and order a copy from Amazon. You will thank me. It may even change your life. 

Oddly enough, just recently I came across another book by one of my favorite authors, T. Coraghessan Boyle (I call him TCBY), called Talk to Me. It, too, tells the story of a chimp named Sam who becomes literate after he learns to sign. Sam, too, is exploited by an ambitious psychologist who wants to make a name for himself. And as with Bruno, Sam escapes, and after various adventures during which Sam is re-captured and encaged when he again is subjected to the tortured life of a cruelly confined animal (this time by a different psychologist), he is rescued by a woman who has loved him for the start. She is able to abduct him and they come to live together for some time. 

After a time, when Sam is still living with the woman, Aimee, who loves him, Aimee is visited by a priest who has heard about Sam and is curious to meet him. He is thunderstruck by what Sam is able communicate to him.

“That’s fascinating,” he said. “Amazing, really. To think that he can express himself, that he can talk – it changes everything, doesn’t it? The church teaches us that animals don’t have souls, or not immortal souls, in any case, but when you consider Sam … allowances have to be made, don’t you think?”

“Sam has a soul, [Aimee] said. “I’m sure of it.” 

The idyll will have to end badly, of course. What seems to be a farce will culminate in something like a Shakespearean tragedy.

The second psychologist discovers them and comes to take Sam back, but Sam is having none of it. He viciously attacks the psychologist, maims and blinds him, and then runs off. Again, the motive is revenge! As you can imagine, this does not end well for Sam. 

But again, this author has allowed us to see the world through Sam’s eyes. The way humans, especially the men in the book, treat (and mistreat) Sam is revealed as a horror show of heartless exploitation. Aimee’s love, alas, is not enough to save him. Aimee even has to kill him, mercifully with poison, before the authorities arrive to take Sam away, sparing him an even worse fate.

But we don’t have to rely on literature and fantasy to learn the lessons of the need for empathy for the creatures we so routinely and blithely incarcerate but who, unlike Bruno and Sam, must remain mute. They have voices, of course, but they cannot speak their anguish using human language.

Yet there was in fact one in real life who could. Perhaps you are not familiar with a certain inhabitant of the Bronx Zoo who spent some time there more than a century ago.  

His name was Ota Benga. He was a pygmy. If you had been alive in 1906 and living in New York, you could have seen him in a cage where he lived with an orangutan. A sign gave you this information about him:

The African pygmy, Ota Benga,

Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.

Weight 103 pounds. Brought from

Congo Free State, South Central Africa,

By Dr. Samuel P. Verner.

Exhibited each afternoon during September. 

The Times covered the exhibit’s opening, noting that Benga and the orangutan “both grin in the same way when pleased.” According to an article about Benga:

The Minneapolis Journal decreed, “He is about as near an approach to the missing link as any human species yet found.” [The zoo’s director, William Temple] Hornaday professed to be puzzled by the outrage, explaining that Benga had “one of the best rooms in the primate house.” But the zoo eventually released Benga to an orphan asylum.

Ten years later, Benga committed suicide, shooting himself in the heart. It turned out he was not 23 when he was encaged; he was only 13. So it was when he was actually 23 that he killed himself.

Encaged animals, not being allowed to carry guns, cannot usually find ways to commit suicide. They must live and suffer the indifferent gazes of passerbys or the delighted shrieks of children.

Of course, our unthinking cruelty to animals doesn’t just apply to those we capture from the wild and then imprison to suffer the immiseration of perpetual confinement. No, hardly. Obviously, there are many kinds of animals we humans confine or restrict in other ways or simply use and exploit for our own pleasure or convenience.

Take horses, for example. Certainly, many people who keep horses love and care for them and develop a personal connection to them. In such cases, there is a kind of reciprocity, even if it isn’t between perceived equals.

On the other hand … In recent years, as I have become more infirm and, in consequence, more sedentary, I have spent a lot of time watching television dramas adapted from famous nineteenth century English novels, often courtesy of the BBC. In many of these dramas, we see a team of horses chugging away, mile after mile in all sorts of weather, toting along a young girl on her way to becoming a governess for some well-to-do family. I’m sure you have seen many such programs. Our attention, naturally, is on the young girl, wondering what her future will be. 

But I often think about the horses, all trussed up and shackled to the carriage, who have no say in the matter. I wonder what they are feeling and what they are thinking. I don’t imagine them to be “dumb brutes,” simply submitting in an unconscious way to whatever demands their master may choose to enforce upon them, seemingly oblivious to the welfare of his horses. For him, they are simply there to do his bidding in blind submission to his will. But for me, I can’t help wondering what the horses themselves feel and if they ever, like quadruped slaves, yearn to break free.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the greatest philosopher of his age, was sensitive to the suffering of harnessed horses. You may know the famous story about this philosopher who, one morning early in the year 1889, while taking a walk on the streets of Turin, saw a man flogging his horse. Nietzsche, overcome, went to hug the horse, but broke down completely – and went mad. He was already veering toward madness, but it was seeing the beating of a horse that sent him over the edge into the abyss of lunacy from which he never recovered. He spent the last dozen years of his life lost to this one. The psychiatrist, Irvin Yalom, about whom I wrote in an earlier blog, based one of his best known novels on this incident, calling it When Nietzsche Wept. 

And then there are race horses. When I was young, I liked to go to race tracks to watch these magnificent animals. But no more. It hurts me to see the jockeys using the whips on their horses, urging them on. Horses clearly love to run and maybe some of them love to win the chase, but have you ever seen one pull up lame? And then we know what is likely to happen to that horse. He or she is done for and will have to be euthanized. Each year, between 2017 and 2019, over a thousand horses died in this way. “The sport of kings” is a blood sport for many horses who have to be sacrificed for our pleasure. We blot these scenes out of our mind and after seeing such a calamity, by the next day we have probably forgotten it. Horse racing continues. See you at the next Kentucky Derby.

I don’t think I have to continue this doleful parade of the way we treat many animals other than our pets. You can think of plenty of examples for yourself. Think of all the cattle we raise, for example, only to be slaughtered. What do they feel when they are being herded into the slaughterhouse? You think they have no idea what fate awaits them? Our relationship to many of the animals we raise for our pleasure can be defined by what I call “the three egregious e’s:” we eat them or exploit them or exterminate them. 

On this last point, we human beings have managed to exterminate or cause to go extinct virtually all large terrestrial megafauna. By the end of the century, the elephants and the rhinos will be all but extinct, and probably the lions and tigers, too. If there is still a survivable world, the children growing up then will do so without having direct knowledge of these animals. Maybe there will still be zoos where a token lion will pad around restlessly in a cage, but otherwise children will only know these animals from reading books, just as today, they have to read books about the bygone bison or passenger pigeon. For many animals, aside from our beloved pets, this world has been and continues to be nothing but an abattoir. 

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker who specializes in environmental issues, wrote a well-received but depressing book a few years back called The Sixth Extinction. Her wide-ranging research convinced her (and many others, including me) that we are currently witnessing the sixth major die-off in the evolutionary life of our planet. Most people know only one, when the dinosaurs were wiped out about 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. But we are, Kolbert avers, definitely in the midst of one now. And from what I’ve read, it is affecting our animal  kin more than us humans. According to recent reports, in the past several decades, human population has doubled whereas animal populations on average have declined almost a staggering seventy percent! Our animals are seemingly disappearing from our earth at an alarmingly accelerating rate.

One writer, whom we shall meet in a subsequent blog, has already sounded the tocsin: 

How are we to recalibrate our relationship with animals that live in complex societies and have a sense of themselves as individuals? The question becomes more urgent as the future of such species grows increasingly perilous. They are penned in, harassed and hunted, subjected to experiments, eaten, used in medicines … We think that, because we found ourselves on this globe, we have a right to use it for our own sustenance. Animals have the same claim. They, too, didn’t choose to be where they are.

It may of course be too late, just as it may be too late to arrest the onset of devastating climate change, but certainly one contributing factor to our present desperate plight has been the persistence of a seemingly ineradicable anthropocentrism that privileges human life above all others. But human beings are not on the top of some kind of imagined evolutionary ladder. Evolution more resembles a bush with many branches rather than a ladder with humans at its pinnacle.

Unfortunately, however, human beings are incontestably the alpha predator on the planet. We have no serious terrestrial predators (it’s only the viruses that can do us in). Some animals, such as bears and tigers, may maul us to death if they get close, but animals don’t have guns, much less missiles and bombs. We can and have killed animals at will and with impunity, often just for sport, and have done an excellent job of destroying their habitats as well. All this is well known. The question is, at this late hour, what can be done?

It occurs to me that in the nineteenth century, we virtually abolished slavery. In the twentieth century, the woman’s suffrage movement finally triumphed. In our own day, we have found our way to begin to protect the members of the LGBTQ community. All of these achievements have been possible because of the extension of legal rights to these populations. And because we need urgently to revision our relationship to our animal brethren, perhaps it’s time to consider in effect a bill of rights for animals.

Animal welfare efforts, while laudable, have failed. Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, whose 1975 groundbreaking book, Animal Liberation, seemed to promise a new day for animals, recently expressed disappointment that his movement, as important has it has been, did not achieve more. We need something more, something more radical, before the door of opportunity closes on our fingers.

Recently, a number of thinkers and animal rights activists have begun to wage a last ditch effort to achieve a meaningful way to establish a moral and legal framework for animals. My next two blogs will explore this new approach for animal justice and we will begin by returning to the Bronx Zoo.  

Here is a preview of who we will be meeting there:  

According to the civil-law code of the state of New York, a writ of habeas corpus may be obtained by any “person” who has been illegally detained. In Bronx County, most such claims arrive on behalf of prisoners on Rikers Island. Habeas petitions are not often heard in court, which was only one reason that the case before New York Supreme Court Justice Alison Y. Tuitt—Nonhuman Rights Project v. James Breheny, et al.— was extraordinary. The subject of the petition was Happy, an Asian elephant in the Bronx Zoo. American law treats all animals as “things”—the same category as rocks or roller skates. However, if the Justice granted the habeas petition to move Happy from the zoo to a sanctuary, in the eyes of the law she would be a person. She would have rights.