Sacred Music: Are Animals Spiritual Beings?

Chimpanzees dancing themselves into a trance state beneath a waterfall. Wolves howling at a full moon. Cats eating catnip til they’re writhing on the ground and chasing imaginary mice. Are these animals undergoing something like what humans refer to as spiritual experience?

University of Kentucky neurologist Kevin Nelson, whose book The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain will be published in January, thinks maybe so.

“Since only humans are capable of language that can communicate the richness of spiritual experience, it is unlikely we will ever know with certainty what an animal subjectively experiences,” he tells Discovery’s Jennifer Viegas. “Despite this limitation, it is still reasonable to conclude that since the most primitive areas of our brain happen to be the spiritual, then we can expect that animals are also capable of spiritual experiences.”

We won’t know for sure until one of Dr. John Cunningham Lilly’s dolphin friends opens up and translates a cetacean sermon for us (clicking in tongues?).

But Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, agrees with Nelson’s ideas. “For now,” he says. “Let’s keep the door open to the idea that animals can be spiritual beings and let’s consider the evidence for such a claim.”

Let’s! And as anyone who likes to watch rock videos on YouTube all day knows, evidence abounds.