The Animal Manifesto (9 page)

“Gorillas usually have a strong attachment to their own kind. Like other apes with a well-developed social structure, gorillas mourn the death of loved ones. They exhibit both care for the dead and sadness at their passing — even keeping the body close until it begins decomposing. On occasion, gorillas have also been known to ‘bury’ their dead, by covering the body with leaves.”

How we study animals influences what we find — this is the observer effect. Too often, scientists take animals out of their natural environments and communities, place them in sterile cages or labs (where they may be held in isolation for years), and come up with all sorts of misleading conclusions about their cognitive and emotional capacities. A world-renowned primatologist who conducts laboratory and field research told me, “There is an interesting, but unreported fact about captive primates: after years of testing, they burn out, bored by material, and thus, generally unresponsive. . . . so we constantly have to shift the paradigms to trick them into thinking it is new.”

By studying octopi in the wild, we’re learning they are incredibly complex creatures, and we are reaching very different conclusions about them than we did when studying them in captivity. Christine Huffard, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and now at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, discovered that octopi engage in complex mating behavior, such as fighting over conquests, flirtatious color displays, and careful partner selection. “Until you see an animal in its natural habitat, everything you think about it is really a best guess,” Huffard said. “And our best guesses about octopus mating were actually not correct.”

Huffard continued, “Each day in the water, we learned something new about octopus behavior, probably like what ornithologists must have gone through after the invention of binoculars. We quickly realized that
Abdopus aculeatus
broke all the ‘rules’ — doing the near opposite of every hypothesis we’d formed based on aquarium studies.”

Personal experiences with animals are essential for coming to terms with who they are. Consider the reflections of George Schaller, one of the world’s preeminent field biologists:

When you’re isolated in a different culture, a different country, you have to have an emotional attachment to what you do. You have to like the people, the country, and the animals. Without emotion you have a dead study. How can you possibly sit for months and look at something you don’t particularly like, that you see simply as an object? You’re dealing with individual beings who have their own feelings, desires and fears. To understand them is very difficult and you cannot do it unless you try to have some emotional contact and
intuition. Some scientists will say they are wholly objective, but I think that’s impossible. Laboratory scientists wasted years putting rats in mazes to show they were learning. They never got close enough to a rat to realise that they were not going by sight and learning, they were following the scent trails of previous rats. By overlooking this simple fact they wasted years of science.

Perhaps researchers and others who deny animals their intelligence and rich emotional lives do so because they haven’t taken the time to watch animals in situations where they can display their full repertoire of behavior. Or they do so because their acceptance of the fact that animals have rich emotional lives — that they have a point of view and don’t like being subjected to pain and suffering —might impede their research. Surely, a few mice living in an impoverished cage alone or with a few other mice cannot display the full array of mouse behavior or demonstrate behavioral variability. If the mice were born in the lab, perhaps their brains aren’t as well developed as their wild relatives, and this affects their behavior by making it less nuanced and less elaborate. Researcher James Burns and his colleagues reported in the prestigious journal
Ethology
that laboratoryreared guppies have smaller brains than wild-caught individuals. They concluded, “Any deficiencies in brain size of lab-reared fish may hinder our ability to understand the basic mechanisms of cognition and how it has been shaped by natural selection.”

In other words, just because an animal doesn’t do something in one setting does not mean that they cannot do it in another context. Also, just because an animal doesn’t express something does not mean that they’re not feeling something.

Of course, the same can be said about humans. Masking emotions can be a very important social skill, and both nonhumans and humans hide their feelings in various social situations.

Clearly, we already know a lot about the lives of diverse species and what they want, more than we often give ourselves credit for. The more we look, the more we see. As Nobel laureate and discoverer of bee language Karl von Frisch once said, “The life of bees is like a magic well. The more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.”

A natural question, given what we know about the depth of feeling and intelligence of our fellow animals, is: What do they think of humans? As we study them, they are assuredly, in their own ways, studying us.

In fact, there’s a flurry of interest lately in the intriguing question of whether animals take revenge on humans when they’re pissed off at being mistreated. Revenge is a complex cognitive reaction, involving memory, self-awareness, logic, hurt, justice, blame, and more. Anecdotal evidence is that some animals can and do take revenge. In China in December 2008, a trio of monkeys attacked their trainer during a public performance. When one of the monkeys refused to ride a mini-bicycle, the trainer hit the monkey with a stick; the other two monkeys got upset and came to their fellow’s aide. One monkey twisted his trainer’s ears, and another pulled out his hair and bit his neck; when the trainer dropped the cane, one of the monkeys picked it up and started hitting him in the head until the stick broke. In another incident, a male chimpanzee at the Kolkata Zoo in India
apparently retaliated at visitors — after a few people began teasing him and throwing pieces of brick —by throwing stones into the crowd and injuring a mother and her daughter.

Elephants are highly social, highly emotional sentient giants who have also demonstrated that they don’t like being mistreated, and revenge seems to have played a factor in some attacks by elephants on humans in some locales. Elephants surely have the cognitive and emotional capacities to remember who treated them unkindly and to bear grudges. In addition, the frequency of angry elephant-human encounters has increased. Elephant expert Iain Douglas-Hamilton wrote to me in a recent email: “I think what has happened is that the interface of human elephant conflict has increased as people expand into elephant range all across Africa, and there is also more reporting of what goes on.”

We’re certainly learning more about the extraordinary emotional capacity of elephants every day. We know that African elephants can actually form expectations about the locations of out-of-sight family members, and they can recognize up to seventeen females and possibly up to thirty family members from cues present in the urine-earth mix. They can also keep track of the location of these individuals in relation to themselves. Scientists are tapping into the phenomenal way in which elephants communicate over long distances using low-frequency infrasounds that travel through the ground. And there’s a practical application of this discovery. By using the low rumble sound of a female in heat, researchers in Namibia’s Etosha National Park are luring bull males away from adjacent farms (and those farmers’ guns).

Elephants and other animals also grieve the loss of friends and family. For instance, consider this moving account of a
funeral service for a baby who was mauled to death by a lioness:

On safari in Botswana, Peter Jackson came across a lioness that had mauled a baby elephant to death. As he watched the lioness and her cubs feast on its remains, he witnessed the rare spectacle of 100 elephants turning up to stage a funeral. On they came, until they began to assemble around the bloody remains of the baby elephant, some stamping their feet and snorting in the direction of the lion family they knew still to be near. But most would lightly touch and sniff the body with their trunks and then move to a respectable distance, standing in silent groups. Still more elephants arrived until there were at least 100 in all, the latecomers filtering their way to the body, seemingly paying their respects, then moving to the rear of the congregation.

Researchers have observed elephants mourning a black rhinoceros who had been killed by poachers, as well as elephant bulls grieving the loss of other bulls. Given all this, how much of a stretch is it to imagine that elephants might target humans whom they know have killed or injured one of their relatives?

Some have even gone so far as to speculate about whether what we’re seeing are more premeditated, intentional acts of generalized animal revenge spanning the globe and widely separated habitats. This “conspiracy theory” seems unlikely, but it’s quite possible that individual animals can and will respond to violence with violence of their own. We receive what we give. Douglas-Hamilton told me: “Simply put, if you treat
elephants nastily, they are likely to be nasty in return. There is nothing new about this or particularly unique to elephants. If you are kind to elephants, they will respond in kind. The same is true for a huge range of mammals, from Cape Buffalo to dogs.”

Elephants are an excellent example that animals are more than we give them credit for, which necessitates a change in how we interact with them. The effects of early elephantine trauma are devastating and long lasting. Some individuals cannot be rehabilitated after a decade of attempts to get them out of their misery and depression. I met some of these traumatized elephants at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust outside of Nairobi, Kenya, and saw the marvelous work that was being done there to rehabilitate individuals so that they could be returned to the wild. I also witnessed elephants who suffered from flashbacks and were unable to forget what they’d experienced years before.

Some zoo administrators are beginning to recognize that elephants are extremely sensitive beings and that zoos can’t satisfy their social, emotional, or physical needs. Thus, five major zoos in the United States are phasing out their elephant exhibits despite the fact that they’re moneymakers. Elephants in zoos also die younger than their wild relatives. Despite the absence of predators and the availability of veterinary care, captive elephants, especially Asians, don’t do very well compared to wild relatives. A review of survivorship in Asian and African zoo elephants, written by six eminent biologists and published in the prestigious journal
Science
in December 2008, concluded: “Overall, bringing elephants into zoos profoundly impairs their viability. The effects of early experience, interzoo transfer, and possibly maternal loss, plus the health and reproductive problems
recorded in zoo elephants. . . suggest stress and/or obesity as likely causes.”

As we saw under “Headline News,” a fifteen-year-old boy, Rory Stokes, believed that goldfish are mistreated when confined to small fish tanks or bowls, but to convince others, he had to demonstrate that goldfish can remember for longer than three seconds. Indeed, when he did this, proving that goldfish have a much longer memory than previously thought, it became worldwide news. Only afterward did adult scientists from Israel conduct similar experiments to determine that, yes, this teenage boy was correct.

Those of us who study and live with animals already know a great deal about the mental capabilities and emotions of animals, even if science hasn’t yet proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’re correct. But waiting for science to confirm what we already know about animals can be disastrous. Skepticism is an important trait for a scientist, but doubt can also be its own excuse, a way to avoid coping with the consequences of what we ‘re doing to our fellow beings. For scientists, doubt is especially useful as a way to avoid the truth of what is done to the very individuals being studied. Let’s consider two studies, one on empathy in mice and one on “muskrat love,” in which individuals were abused and killed, all in the name of confirming what many of us already know.

First, do you believe mice are capable of empathy? If you’ve lived with mice, you’re more likely to say yes, because you’ve probably seen it firsthand, but either way, up until a few years ago, “the science” hadn’t been done to prove or disprove
this, so it was considered a controversial claim. Then, in June 2006, researchers reported in the journal
Science
the first unequivocal evidence for empathy between adult, nonprimate mammals, that is, mice. What experiment do you think they devised?

Dale Langford, of McGill University, and her colleagues demonstrated that mice feel empathy by showing that they suffer distress when they watch a cage-mate experience pain. Langford and her team injected one or both members of a pair of adult mice with acetic acid, which causes a severely painful burning sensation. The researchers discovered that mice who watched their cage-mates in pain were more sensitive to pain themselves. A mouse injected with acid writhed more violently if his or her partner had also been injected and was writhing in pain. Not only did the mice who watched cage-mates in distress become more sensitive to the same painful stimuli, they became generally more sensitive to pain, showing a heightened reaction, for example, to heat under their paws.

One of the researchers suggested that an opaque barrier be used to separate mice so that they can’t know what’s happening to another mouse because mice who observe each other during experiments may be “contaminating” the data; the mice, in other words, were being too empathetic. It’s difficult to believe that he really meant this, but it’s a good example of a scientist shirking his responsibility to provide the animals he uses with the very best care possible. Of course, according to U.S. law, mice, voles, rats and other rodents, birds, rabbits, and fish aren’t protected from invasive research in the United States. Yet this very study shows why this law is inadequate.