What led me to explore the Minds of Mammals? Like all great quests, I suppose I’d have to admit it was a desperate search – in my case for meaning and purpose. I could tell you about specific moments that emboldened me: Like one warm summer evening under a copper beech tree when I met a goat herder. She shared her belief with me that people enter a cycle of renewal every seven years (it was 2016, and I felt galvanized, was I in such a year?). Or when my friend who is a brilliant conservation poet and whose literary gifts were unleashed later in life told me to take a leap of faith now (and I felt brave, as though a gush of wind lifted my wings). But looking back it was likely overdetermined. Call it destiny. Or a moral imperative. Or that simply, as the daughter of a psychiatrist and an ardent animal lover, I was always going to interlace the two as I tried to make sense of the world. Either way, it was no accident.

Back then (in 2016, that is), a freshly minted psychiatrist myself finishing up my training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, I entered my early thirties with a mix of excitement and restless uncertainty. (OK the truth is, more than restlessness I felt terror at the looming possibility that sure, I was “on track” in my career, but was I going to end up alone? Maybe that’s besides the point – or is it? More on this later.) My training had felt like a years-long walking meditation, each person I encountered a turn in an elaborate labyrinthian education in the human condition. I surely had seen enough to recognize the hallmark symptoms of illness, and in some instances I may have even understood the proximal causes of them. What I truly yearned for though, was a deeper grasp of the universal drivers of suffering and peace. Not just for my patients, but more selfishly — for myself.

That year I was introduced to evolutionary neuropsychiatry by my cherished mentor Gregory Fricchione (read about his work and the Benson-Henry Mind Body Institute here!) and for the first time, I became acquainted with rather convincing explanations tying attachment to the survival needs of our species as well as our struggles and triumphs. It was then that I learned how attachment is the quintessential mammalian experience; it is vital to our survival, and all hope and despair spring from it.

At the time, I was working on a brain/body medicine service. I became fascinated with the evolution of attachment and our responses to separation stress. With this intellectual overlay stuck like cellophane to my nerdily oversized, blue-rimmed glasses (which I totally still wear), I started to see doctoring differently. All of a sudden I was going beyond the confines of discrete definitions of “illness” and seeing the phenomena of attachment and separation everywhere. As life imitates art, I couldn’t resist seeing my own life differently as well. Why hadn’t I prioritized my personal life? How was I still single? And what would I truly want at the end of my life? Would my career be enough to have a warm send off someday? (Nope.) Would I wrap myself up in my diplomas at night? (Nope again.) Or would I care most about my emotional legacy, the people I love and feel loved by?

To love, I would learn, is our evolutionary birthright as mammals. This sentiment steeped within me like tea leaves in water as I developed expertise in the public health impacts of early childhood adversity and the social determinants of health. At the same time, in learning all of this I couldn’t help but turn a critical eye to our society’s thinking about non-human animals and their rights. With our undeniably shared evolutionary heritage, abilities, and instincts, how is it that we lived in a world where elephants could be separated from their families and trapped in small enclosures in zoos? Or even worse, as I recalled from my summer visits to south India — forced to wear chains in temples — at once both deified and subjugated?

Or a world where orca calves could be kidnapped from their pods — snatched from their mothers —  and kept in the equivalent of bathtubs? Most often with unrelated whales who don’t speak their language, all for human entertainment? I had always loved animals, though now I felt incensed by the lives so many of them were made to endure on our planet.

So that was how I, a single lady psychiatrist with my loyal dog Sunny by my side, set out on a quest to understand the Minds of Mammals. Little did I know that this journey would only be more profound as I met my husband and became a mom myself. Along the way, I have been advised by extraordinary colleagues and friends (who are far more intelligible on the topics of evolutionary neuropsychiatry and animal rights than me). I continue to receive support from these colleagues, friends, and my husband (who I might add, is far wiser than me). Everything good you may find here is a credit to them; everything mistaken and misguided is attributable to me alone.

What is the purpose of this site then, you might ask? It’s simple, really: to explore our shared evolutionary heritage and highlight what the Minds of Mammals can teach us about the human experience and relatedly, nonhuman animal rights. My humble aspiration is to precipitate conversations about both through our writings and guest interviews. 

Happy exploring!

Kavitha (Kolappa) Porchet