Groundhog Day – Emotional Responses – 1.4.26

WARNING – DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE ABOUT ANIMALS

Events in our lives shape our reality, emotions and moral framework. When the groundhogs invaded our farm several years ago, I had mixed emotions. When a few showed up in our back yard we thought they were harmless and cute. And the AirB&B guests who stayed at the farm enjoyed watching them. But multiple holes began to appear in the yard, the adjoining pasture, and even under the foundation of our farmhouse, creating a safety hazard to cows and guests alike.  So, we made the difficult decision to exterminate them. But as I showed up one morning to check on the steel cage traps, I found one of these creatures trying to chew his way out. His mouth was bloody and he was obviously very scared. I watched him for a few moments and had to walk away.  I found a place to sit down. And I just sat there.  I knew we had to do this, but it seemed so cruel.  We thought about just relocating them, but my brother-in-law said that all you are doing is relocating the problem to someone else. Thankfully, I would not be the one to shoot the creature in the head and dump the body. My brother-in-law and my wife had volunteered to do this.

Why did I have such a strong emotional response about killing these animals who obviously had to be removed? As Lisa Barrett states in her book How Emotions Are Made, our emotional response to any event is very much influenced by our prior experiences. The brain assigns specific “concepts and categories” to each experience so that it can make predictions using those concepts and categories. This also helps the brain hone its perceptions, and these perceptions are very much related to concepts tied to a time and place. 

But these concepts and categories are very, very different depending on one’s background and culture, creating a process that leads to what the behavioral neurologist Marsel Mesulam calls a “highly edited subjective version of the world.”  So, people who come from different cultures can and do have different emotional responses to different events. This concept is made very clear in the book The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. This book was recommended to me by a friend, who as a pharmaceutical executive, lived and managed people in various countries. The book provides practical advice and real-life examples on how to decode cultural nuances, helping to decode why people from different countries and backgrounds behave as they do. And this in turn helps to avoid misunderstandings and unnecessary conflict.

But even people who come from the same country and even the same city can have different emotional responses because of different life experiences – think of how the feeling of being an American changes today whether you are wearing blue or red lenses. In summary, one’s environment can change the way we think and change who we are – and how we respond emotionally.  In his wonderful book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, Don Miguel Ruiz calls this process “being domesticated.”

And like everyone, my relationship to animals has been shaped by events from my past – with one particular event from my childhood standing out. After my mom divorced my dad, she dated a few “bad men” before meeting her future life partner, Vernon, who she lived with for over 35 years. One of these bad men was a fellow named Ted. Ted was a big man. As a former military guy, he had boxed in the army as a heavy weight.  Ted also had a very bad temper.  Having recently separated from his wife, Ted and his four children moved into the abandoned house located through the woods and over the creek from ours.  

During one of Ted’s dark moods a stray dog had wondered into our yard. And to this day, I still do not remember why Ted put a gun into my youngest brother’s hand and ordered him to shoot the dog in the head.  We lived down a dirt road surrounded mostly by woods with only a few houses around us. So, it was easy to walk the dog into the woods and shoot it without anyone knowing or even caring about it. But I did care.

As I stood there watching this surreal scene play out, I hated that man. I hated how he treated my mother; I hated how he talked about my relatives; I hated how he thought he could come into our lives and pretend he could order us around like he was our dad. It would be many years later – after going through therapy for other reasons – that I would learn that I have the need to protect others. And that need to protect others played itself out here. I volunteered to shoot the dog so that my nine-year old brother was spared from doing so.

This moment, like others, is where my life could have turned out differently.  When my brother handed me the loaded pistol, I could have easily pointed it at the man I hated and shot him there. Ted was crazy to have given a twelve-year-old, who he knew did not like him, a loaded gun. And that’s the thing – I do think Ted was crazy. One time he became so crazed with anger that he almost killed one of my mom’s brothers with a single punch. We not only hated him, but we were also scared of him.  So, instead of shooting him, I pointed the gun at a defenseless dog and pulled the trigger. 

Up until that point, I had what could be described as a non-relationship with animals.  When we lived with our dad, we would raise chickens for eggs and meat.  We also had a goat and a cow that we would milk.  We also had other animals that we raised for various purposes.  I can remember wringing chickens’ necks before cutting off their heads to begin the process of plucking their feathers and preparing them to be eaten.  And when I was given a BB Gun, I would shoot birds. 

That all changed after that event in the woods.  I no longer shot birds with my BB gun and although I would still be involved in slaughtering animals for food because it was necessary, I hated doing it.  So, when I saw that groundhog in the trap I had to walk away. And as I did so, I became very, very sad. But I was also thankful for a brother-in-law who was willing to do what I could not. 

We got rid of most of the groundhogs that year, killing over 30 that summer. But they returned this past year, and this time we hired two brothers to exterminate them so that we did not have to be involved. They did this by various methods, including the old method of trapping and shooting them while in the cage. During this period, I arrived at the farm one day to decorate the barn for our 40th wedding anniversary celebration. I nonchalantly went to the back of the barn – and there was a groundhog, sitting in the trap. And a sadness came over me.  I gave the groundhog one last glance as I walked away to continue decorating the garage – it was Groundhog Day all over again.

The brothers arrived while I was in the barn. As they went to the back of the barn with their rifle, I knew I would hear the sound that I did not want to hear.  As the seconds became minutes, I became increasingly agitated. And then I heard the pop. And that same feeling that I had as a twelve-year-old washed over me – an emotion that included sadness, shame, disgust, shock and relief – a feeling that I cannot even properly describe. 

In the 1960s and ’70s, the psychologist Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions – happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust- which he thought were hardwired into every human. And most people accept this universalism construct of emotions.  However, as much as we would like to neatly package our emotions, it is not that simple.

I recently read an article in which the historian Rob Boddice attempts to debunk the construct of universal emotions. He argues that the universalism construct that we use to describe emotions is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment Period that postulated that all people share a common nature. Some critics now argue that this was an ideological attempt to exert power and order over a world that had become bigger and stranger. But this impulse toward uniformity continues.

Boddice argues that “by not appreciating the full range of feeling that people are capable of, we are foreclosing a deeper engagement with one another, an engagement on terms that don’t demand that everyone be the same but leave room for the great unknown of what happens in other people’s heads.” In A History of Feelings, he describes our too limited vocabulary for emotions as “vague, empty or else crude.” The danger is that this reduced language, this “emojification of emotional life”, also reduces how much we can feel.

I recently wrote about another emotion, awe, that Dacher Keltner has identified in his book, Awe – The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. And I believe that there are other emotions that we feel and emotions that our ancestors felt that we cannot event begin to comprehend. And this is why it is dangerous to take our current moral framework and to judge our ancestors based on how we see the world today.  As Tom Holland suggests in his book Dominion – The Making of the Western Mind, the influence of Christianity changed the moral framework of western civilization, Christians and non-Christians alike.

So, as we try to label our own emotions, it is ok to say, “I am not sure how to describe it or how I feel.” But what we can do is try to deconstruct or understand our own emotions, moral framework, and world view by looking back on our own life experiences to see how they have influenced our emotional responses. And I would suggest that we should be just as curious about our fellow human beings. This can help us to understand why others may have different emotional responses to similar experiences. This can also help prevent misunderstandings and improve collaboration in an environment that is constantly trying to isolate and divide us.

It took Groundhog Day for me to recall that incident in the woods that shaped my relationship with animals. And now that my brother-in-law knows my story, he can understand why I cannot do what he can do.  And I can understand why he can. I had buried that traumatic moment inside that dark enclosed space we call a brain. All of us have these buried experiences. Most are not as traumatic, but they are there. And whether we want to admit it or not, they shape who we are as humans, and how we emotionally react to events around us.