WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP
by
JEFFRY MOUSAIEFF MASSON AND SUSAN MCCARTHY

Published by Delacorte Press Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. 1540 Broadway New York, New York 10036

Excerpt on p.  85 from "Passer Mortuus Est" by Edna St.  Vincent Nbllay.
From COLLECTED LYRICS, Washington Square Press. Copyright 1959 by Edna
St.  Vincent Millay.  Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett,
literary executor.

Copyright  1995 by Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher,
except where permitted by law.

The trademark Delacorte Press8 is registered in the U.S.  Patent and
Trademark Office.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Masson, J. Moussaieff
Ueffrey Moussaieff ), 1941 When elephants weep : the emotional lives of
animals / Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Susan McCarthy.

p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-385-31425-6

I.  Emotions in animals.  I.  McCarthy, Susan.  11.  Title.

QL785.27.M37 1995

591.5 I-de2O  94-23819 CIP

Designed by Rhea Braunstein

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

June 1995

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

BVG

   Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Searching the Heart of the Other

1 In Defense of Emotions

2 Unfeeling Brutes

3 Fear, Hope, and the Terrors of Dreams

4 Love and Friendship

5 Grief, Sadness, and the Bones of Elephants

6 A Capacity for Joy

7 Rage, Dominance, and Cruelty in Peace and War

8 Compassion, Rescue, and the Altruism Debate

9 Shame, Blushing, and Hidden Secrets

10 Beauty, the Bears, and the Setting Sun

"The Religious Impulse, Justice, and the Inexpressible

Conclusion: Shaling the World with Feeling Creatures

Notes

Bibliography

Index

 Acknowledgments

In the process of researching this book we talked to many scientists,
animal trainers, and others whose expertise was invaluable. We would
particularly like to acknowledge the help of George Archibald, Mattie
Sue Athan, Luis Baptists, Kim Bartlett, John Beckman, Mark Bekoff, Tim
Benneke, Joseph Berger, Nedim Buyukmihci, Lisa De Nault, Ralph Dennard,
Pat Derby, Ian Dunbar, Mary Lynn Fischer, Maria Fitzgerald, Lois Flynne,
Roger Fouts, William Frey II, Jane Goodall, Wendy Gordon, Donald
Griffin, David Gucwa, Nancy Hall, Ralph Helfer, Abbie Angharad Hughes,
Gerald Jacobs, William Jankowiak, Marti Kheel, Adriaan Kordandt, Charles
Lindholm, Sarah McCarthy, David Mech, Mary Midgley, Myrna Milani, Jim
Mullen, Kenneth Norris, Cindy Ott-Bales, Joel Parrott, Irene Pepperberg,
Leonard Plotnicoy, Karen Reina of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Diana Reiss,
Lynn Rogers, Vivian Siegel, Barbara Smuts, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,
Ron Whiffield, and Gerald S.  Wilkinson, among others, for their
patience in talking to us.  We are also grateful to Jennifer Conroy,
Joanne Ritter, Mike Del Ross, and Kathy Finger of Guide Dogs for the
Blind in San Rafael.  Any errors we have made and any wild

ix

speculations, particularly those deemed scientifically disreputable, are
not to be laid at their doors.

More personal thanks are owed to our friends and family also for their
support and real assistance, especially Daniel Gunther, Joseph Gunther,
Kitty Rose McCarthy, Martha Coyote, John MeCarthy, Mary Susan Kuhn,
Andrew Gunther, Barbara and Gerald Gunther, Thomas Goldstein, Martin
Levin, and Bernard Taper; and Daidie Donnelley, Fred Goode, Justine
Juson, Marianne Loring, Jane Matteson, Eileen Max, and Barbara
Sonnenbom.

We also want to thank Elaine Markson for being a wonderful agent; Tony
Colwell for having faith in this idea all along; Steve Ross for his
enthusiasm and his indispensable help in making this the book it is; as
for Kitty, only Kitty knows what Kitty is owed.

x

   Prologue:

"The Indian elephant is said sometimes to weep."

CHARLES DARWIN

Animals cry.  At least, they vocalize pain or distress, and in many
cases seem to call for help.  Most people believe, therefore, that
animals can be unhappy and also that they have such primal feelings as
happiness, anger, and fear.  The ordinary layperson readily believes
that his dog, her cat, their parrot or horse, feels.  They not only
believe it but have constant evidence of it before their eyes. All of us
have extraordinary stories of animals we know well.  But there is a
tremendous gap between the commonsense viewpoint and that of official
science on this subject.  By dint of rigorous training and great efforts
of the mind, most modern scientistsespecially those who study the
behavior of animals-have succeeded in becoming almost blind to these
matters.

I was led to my interest in animal emotions by experiences with
animals-some traumatic, some deeply touching-as well as by the seeming
opacity and inaccessibility of human feelings compared with their
undiluted purity and clarity, at times, in my animal friends, and
especially of animals in the wild.

In 1987 I visited a south Indian game reserve known for its wild
elephants.  Early one morning I set out with a friend to walk in the
forest.  After a mile or so we came across a herd of about ten
elephants, including small calves, peacefully grazing.  My friend
stopped at a respectful distance, but I walked closer, halting about
twenty feet away.  One large elephant looked toward me and flapped his
ears.

Knowing nothing about elephants, I had no idea this was a warning.
Blissfully ignorant, as if I were in a zoo or in the presence of Babar
or some other story-book elephant, I felt it was time to commune with
the elephants.  Remembering a Sanskrit verse for saluting Ganesha, the
Hindu god who takes elephant form, I called "Bhoh, gaiendra'L-Greetings,
Lord of the Elephants.

The elephant trumpeted; for a second I thought it was his return
greeting.  Then his sudden, surprisingly agile turn and thunderous
charge in my direction made it all too clear that he did not participate
in my elephant fantasies.  I was aghast to see a two-ton animal come
hurtling toward me.  It was not cute and did not resemble Ganesha.  I
turned and ran wildly.

I knew I was in real danger and could feel the elephant gaining on me.
(Elephants, I later learned in horror, can run faster than people, up to
twenty-eight miles an hour.)  Deciding I would be safest in a tree, I
ran to an overhanging branch and leapt up.  It was too high.  I ran
around the tree and raced into tall grass.  Still trumpeting menacingly,
the elephant came running around the tree in close pursuit.  He clearly
meant to see me dead, to knock me down with his trunk and trample me.  I
thought I had only a few seconds to live and was nearly delirious with
fear.  I remember thinking, "How could you have been so stupid as to
approach a wild elephant?" I tripped and fell in the high grass.

The elephant stopped, having lost sight of me.  He raised his trunk and
sniffed the air, searching out my scent.  Fortunately for me they have
rather poor vision.  I realized I had better not move. After a few long
moments he turned away and raced off in another direction, looking for
me.  Soon I quietly picked myself up and, trembling, made my way slowly
back to where my terrified friend had stood watching the whole episode,
convinced she would witness my death.

Rudimentary knowledge of elephants would have kept me safe: a herd with
small calves is particularly alert to danger; elephants don't like their
space invaded; flapping ears are a direct warning.  The encounter itself
was nothing but a projection of my own wish that a wild elephant would
want to meet me.

It was wrong to think that I could communicate with a strange elephant
under these circumstances.  Yet he communicated very clearly to me: he
was angry and I should leave.  I believe this is a realistic
description.

By contrast with animals, people's emotions are often distanced.  For
example, I experience heightened emotions in dreams -anger, love,
jealousy, relief, curiosity, compassion-to a degree of intensity that is
not paralleled in waking life.  To whom do those emotions belong?  Are
they mine?  Are they what I imagine a feeling to be like?  In the dream
there is nothing abstract about them: Ifeel extraordinary love, always
for people for whom, in fact, I do feel love, just not to that degree.
As a former psychoanalyst, I thought that these were feelings I had
somehow repressed in my day life, and only had access to the real
feelings in my night life.  I theorized that the feelings were real,
only access to them was barred.  The feelings were always there, but
could only become conscious at certain moments when some part of me was
off guard-asleep, as it were.  Somehow my ego had to be circumvented, an
end run needed to be made, and they were there waiting, pure, unsullied,
ready.  Might animals have the more ready access to this feeling world
that was largely denied my waking self?

Then there is the question of the feelings of others.  What could be
more interesting than what others feel?  Do they feel the same things I
do?  I have found it hard to find out by talking, or even by reading.
Songs, poems, literature, walking in the woods, evoke certain feelings.
Sometimes they are strange, complex, inexplicable, even bizarre, often
intense beyond comprehension. Where does,this come from?  I have long
wondered.  Why am I feeling this?  What am I feeling?  How could I name
this?

In my training as a psychoanalyst, I discovered that analysts were not
really all that interested in emotions.  Or rather, they confined their
interest to interpreting an emotion's meaning to the psyche or
discussing whether an emotion was appropriate or inappropriate.  I
thought appropriateness was a ridiculous category. Emotions simply were.
Moreover, they seemed to come unbidden. They were mysterious guests,
hard to capture.  Sometimes I thought I could feel something for only a
brief second, or fraction of a second, but then it was gone and could
not be recalled.  Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night
and remember a feeling I had once had and experience a kind of loss.

Psychoanalysis purports to be about feelings, especially deep feelings.
For psychoanalysts the essence of a person is not what is thought or
achieved, but what is felt.  The standard, almost humorous, therapist
question, "How do you feel about that?" turned out to be quintessential
and hard to answer.  We do not always know hence the notion, early in
Freud's work, of unconscious emotions, ones to which we are denied
access.  The early goal of psychoanalysis to make the unconscious
conscious was directed toward bringing feelings into awareness, raising
submerged emotions to the surface.  Yet the question of emotions in
dreams was and is barely touched in the psychological literature.

What fascinated me about animals was the ready access they seemed to
have to their emotions.  No animal, it seemed to me, needed to dream to
feel.  They demonstrated their feelings constantly.  Annoy them, they
have no hesitation in showing it.  Please a cat, it purrs and rubs
itself against you.  What could appear as contented as a cat?  A dog
wags its tail and looks more genuinely pleased to see you than any
human.  What could appear as happy as a dog?  Could anything seem as
peaceful as a cow?  Or are these merely human projections?

As a child, I had a duck that seemed to think I was its mother. It
followed me everywhere.  When we went on vacation, a neighbor offered to
care for it.  On our return, I eagerly asked how my duck was and he
replied, "Delicious." I became a vegetarian that day.  I still cannot
bear to eat anything with eyes.  The reproach is too deep.

I love dogs; it has always been clear to me that they lead extremely
intense emotional lives.  "No, Misha, no walk just now."

What?  The ears would cock.  Can I have heard right?  "Sorry, Misha, but
no." Unmistakable.  The ears flop.  Misha would throw himself onto the
floor.  There was no mistaking the pure disappointment he was feeling.
Just as unmistakable was his intense joy when I would say, "Okay, get
your leash, we're going for a walk," and the sheer pleasure Misha felt
on his walks, his delight at racing ahead, chasing leaves, doubling
back, tearing off into the forest and returning behind and ahead of me.
The contentment when we got home, built a fire, and I sat down to read,
he to rest next to me, his face on my knee, was equally apparent.  As he
grew old, and could no longer walk as well, I could almost see him visit
the scenes of his earlier life in his imagination. Nostalgia, in a dog?
Well, why not?

Darwin thought it possible.

In his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles
Darwin had dared to imagine a dog's conscious life: "But can we feel
sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of
imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past
pleasures in the chase?  and this would be a form of selfconsciousness."
Even more evocatively, he asked: "Who can say what cows feel, when they
surround and stare intently on a dying or dead companion?" He was
unafraid to speculate about areas that seemed to require further
investigation.

Another reason I began thinking in some depth about animal emotions was
the common experience of going to a zoo.  We have all seen the look of
forlorn sadness on the face of an orangutan, wolves pacing nervously up
and down, gorillas sitting motionless, seemingly in despair, or perhaps
having abandoned all hope of ever being free.

A pivotal book in my thinking about animal emotions was Donald Griffin's
The Question of Animal Awareness.  Attacked in many quarters upon its
publication in 1976, it discussed the possible intellectual lives of
animals and asked whether science was examining issues of their
cognition and consciousness fairly.  While Griffin did not explore
emotion, he pointed to it as an area that needed investigation.
Convincing and intellectually exciting, it made me want to read a
comparable work on animal emotions, but I learned that there was almost
no investigation of the emotional lives of animals in the modern
scientific literature.

Why should this be so?  One reason is that scientists, animal
behaviorists, zoologists, and ethologists are fearful of being accused
of anthropomorphism, a form of scientific blasphemy.  Not only are the
emotions of animals not a respectable field of study, the words
associated with emotions are not supposed to be applied to them. why is
it controversial to discuss the inner lives of animals, their emotional
capacities, their feelings of joy, disappointment, nostalgia, and
sadness?  Jane Goodall has recently written of her work with
chimpanzees: "When, in the early 1960s, I brazenly used such words as
'childhood,' 'adolescence,' 'motivation,' 'excitement,' and 'mood,' I
was much criticized.  Even worse was my crime of suggesting that
chimpanzees had 'personalities." I was ascribing human characteristics
to nonhuman animals and was thus guilty of that worst of ethological
sins-anthropomorphism."

Hungry to learn more systematically about animal emotions, I found that
the book I wanted to read was yet to be written.  So I started
researching accounts of specific animals.

Among the first people I asked about the emotional lives of animals were
researchers working with dolphins.  Dolphins show such delight in
performing, even in creating new performances of their own, that an
elaborate emotional component seems obvious.  I visited Marine World
Africa USA, near Berkeley, California, to meet Diana Reiss, a leading
dolphin researcher.  She showed me "her" four dolphins in their large,
clean tank, all clearly eyeing her, watching her movements, eager for
her to come into the water and play with them.  I wanted to think they
were happy, that they liked being there.  I asked her.  Oh, yes, she
said, they feed, they mate, they are physically healthy, they enjoy the
games she invents as part of her research.  I nodded in agreement.  But
is that enough to count as happiness?  I remembered what George Adamson,
the husband of Joy Adamson of Born Free fame, said in his autobiography:
"A lion is not a lion if it is only free to cat, to sleep and to
copulate.  It deserves to be free to hunt and to choose its own prey; to
look for and find its own mate; to fight for and hold its own territory;
and to die where it was born-in the wild.  It should have the same
rights as we have."

Thinking that experts who work with and study animals might offer
observations in person that they would be reluctant to put into a
scientific article, I asked other renowned scholars of dolphin behavior
about their experience with the emotions their dolphins expressed.  They
were unwilling to speculate or even to offer observations.  One said, "I
don't know what emotion means." Another referred the matter to his
female graduate students, implying that the subject was somehow beneath
his scientific (or male?) dignity.

What these scholars said was undermined by what they did. One hugged his
prize dolphin in a clearly emotional moment, at least for the
researcher.  The other could hardly leave at night, so attached had he
become to what he called his "subjects." The female graduate students
had many stories to tell about mutual affection between researchers and
dolphins, even some free-living dolphins.  It is hard to believe that
these scientists would express intense feelings toward creatures they
genuinely felt were emotionally insensate and could not return them or
respond to them in any way.

In any event, how can anyone know that an animal feels nothing if the
question has never been investigated?  To conclude without study that it
has no feelings or cannot feel is to proceed on a prejudice, an
unscientific bias, in the name of science.  This is not the only area in
which scientists cling to unscientific dogma.  Consider how long
psychoanalysts denied the reality of child sexual abuse.  Sexual abuse
of children occurred long before Freud became interested in it, but his
conclusion, without evidence, that it largely did not happen kept it
hidden until the women's movement exposed its true prevalence.

Looking for information about how trainers worked with the emotions of
the animals they used in their shows, I approached the public relations
director at Sea World in San Diego.  He told me bluntly that he
disapproved of the notion of animal emotions and would not permit Sea
World to be associated with my research because it "smacked of
anthropomorphism." I was therefore astonished to see the shows there in
which the killer whale and the dolphins were trained to wave, shake
hands, and splash water at the spectators.  They had been trained to
behave like people-more precisely, like people who had been bent and
formed into amusing slaves in the service of commercial exploitation.

Comparative psychology to this day discusses observable behavior and
physical states of animals, and evolutionary explanations for their
existence, but shies away from the mental states that are inextricably
involved in that behavior.  When such states are examined, the focus is
on cognition, not emotion.  The more recent discipline of ethology, the
science of animal behavior, with its insistence on distinctions between
species, also seeks functional and causal, rather than emotive,
explanations for behavior.  The causal explanations center on theories
of "ultimate causation"-the animal pairs because this increases
reproductive success-as distinguished from "proximate causation"-the
animal pairs because it has fallen in love.  Although the two
explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive-one of the
best-known figures of ethology, Konrad Lorenz, spoke confidently of
animals falling in love, becoming demoralized, or mourning-the field as
a whole has continued to treat emotions as unworthy of scientific
attention.

With the advent of laboratory studies of animals, especially in the
1960s, the distance maintained from the world of animal feelings became
even greater.  This distance supported scientists who do painful
experiments on animals in believing that animals feel no pain or
suffering, or at least that the pain animals feel is removed enough from
the pain humans feel that one need not take it into account in devising
experiments.  The professional and financial interests in continuing
animal experimentation help to explain at least some resistance to the
notion that animals have a complex emotional life and are capable of
experiencing not only pain but the higher emotions such as love,
compassion, altruism, disappointment, and nostalgia.  To acknowledge
such a possibility implies certain moral obligations.  If chimpanzees
can experience loneliness and mental anguish, it is obviously wrong to
use them for experiments in which they are isolated and anticipate daily
pain. At the very least, this poses a matter for serious debate-a debate
that has scarcely begun.

Some of the most innovative work being done with animals today is
directed at language use, self-awareness, and other cognitive abilities,
so that the willful blindness of science to the world of animal emotions
seems on the verge of crumbling.  The enticing subjects of cognition and
consciousness are both easier to test and more respectable than that of
emotion.  Intelligence is certainly fascinating, but an animal, like a
human, need not be intelligent to have feelings.  What data there is on
animal emotions comes not from laboratory work but from field studies.
Some of the most esteemed animal researchers of our day, from Jane
Goodall to Frans de Waal, from time to time defy orthodoxy and from
their position of eminence within their fields use words like love and
suffering to describe animals.  Yet these aspects of their work are
virtually ignored, and it remains professionally risky for less well
established scientists to use such terms.

But there are signs of significant change.  Recently Sue SavageRumbaugh,
a scientist at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia, wrote in
the preface to her book Ape Language:

It is possible, if one looks beyond the slightly differently shaped
face, to read the emotions of apes as easily and as accurately as one
reads the emotions and feelings of other human beings.  There are few
feelings that apes do not share with us, except perhaps self-hatred.
They certainly experience and express exuberance, joy, guilt, remorse,
disdain, disbelief, awe, sadness, wonder, tenderness, loyalty, anger,
distrust, and love.  Someday, perhaps, we will be able to demonstrate
the existence of such emotions at a neurological level.  Until then,
only those who live and interact with apes as closely as they do with
members of their own species will be able to understand the immense
depth of the behavioral similarities between ape and man.

Knowing what we feel is one way to judge whether an animal feels
something similar, but may not be the only, or even the best way.  Are
animals' similarities or differences from humans the only, or even the
most important, issue?  Surely we can train ourselves to an empathic
imaginative sympathy for another species.  Taught what to look for in
facial features, gestures, postures, behavior, we could learn to be more
open and more sensitive.  We need to exercise our imaginative faculties,
stretch them beyond where they have already taken us, and observe things
we have never been able to see before.  We need not be limited by
ourselves as the reference point, by what has already been written, by
the existing consensus among scientists.  What do we have to lose in
taking the imaginative leap to broaden our sympathies and our horizons?
I decided to explore what had been written about animals in scientific
studies to see whether they contained buried information about their
emotions, even if they did not contain explicit discussions of such
matters.  As yet no prominent scientist has undertaken a sustained
treatment of animal emotions.  It is to be hoped, for the sake of
animals as well as humans, that scientists will be persuaded to look
more seriously at the feelings of the animals who share the world with
us.

In this book I try to show that animals of all kinds lead complex
emotional lives.  Although many scientists have believed that the
animals they observed had emotions, few have written about it. This is
why my coauthor and I have sifted a large body of scientific literature,
looking for the unacknowledged evidence.  I have drawn on a long list of
expert witnesses, in particular scientists who have studied wild animals
in the field.  I have kept largely to work by recognized scientists, so
that even skeptics will see that evidence comes from a wide range of
careful studies of animals in different environments.

These field studies show what most laypeople have always beneved: that
animals love and suffer, cry and laugh; their hearts rise up in
anticipation and fall in despair.  They are lonely, in love,
disappointed, or curious; they look back with nostalgia and anticipate
future happiness.  They feel.

No one who has lived with an animal would deny this.  But many
scientists do just that, which is why I have tried to address their
worries in more detail than might be necessary for the ordinary person.
"It's obvious," says the pet owner; "It's an enormous claim," says the
scientist.  This book attempts to bridge the gap between the knowledge
of the person who has always observed animals without prejudice, and the
scientific mind that does not want to venture into such emotional
territory.

Many scientists have avoided thinking about the feelings of animals
because they have been frightened-and realistically being accused of
anthropomorphism.  That is why I have looked carefully at the issue of
anthropomorphism.  If it can be disposed of as a false criticism, then
the study of animal emotions can proceed on a scientific basis, freed
from a bogus fear.

I have also tried to look objectively at the arguments of evolunonamy
biology and ask, when do they help explain the real emotional lives that
animals display and when are they used to dismiss that reality?

As you read you may be surprised by the unexpected emotional behavior of
some animals: an elephant who keeps a pet mouse; a chimpanzee awaiting
the return of her dead baby; a bear lost in rapture as it watches the
sunset; ice-skating buffalo; a parrot who means what he says; a dolphin
inventing her own games-and through it all, scientists who refuse to
acknowledge what will probably seem obvious to you.

In the conclusion I will discuss some of the moral choices that flow
from an accurate understanding of animal emotions.  We will have seen
that animals feel anger, fear, love, joy, shame, compassion, and
loneliness to a degree that you will not find outside the pages of
fiction or fable.  Perhaps this will affect not only the way you think
about animals, but how you treat them.  The clearer it became to me that
animals have deep feelings, the more outraged I grew at the thought of
any kind of animal experimentation.  Can we justify these experiments
when we know what animals feel as they undergo these tortures?  Is it
possible to go on eating animals when we know how they suffer?  We are
horrified when we read, even in fiction, of people who kill other people
in order to sell parts of their bodies.  But every day elephants are
slaughtered for their tusks, rhinos for their horns, gorillas for their
hands.  My hope is that as it begins to dawn on people what feeling
creatures these animals are, it will be increasingly difficult to
justify these cruel acts.

 JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF AIASSON

April 1995

 In Defense of Emotions

Somewhere in India, a blind river dolphin seeks her companion. Under the
dark waters of the Ganges she will sleep next to him. She has never
needed to see.  These dolphins find everything they want and need by
listening to echoes.  Above them in the sky, two cranes from the east
are flying back from China to their western breeding territory in
Siberia.  The cranes are a mile up in the sky, looking down with their
golden eyes.  What is in their hearts, or in the hearts of the dolphins?
Wholly apart from us, their lives of turmoil and satisfaction are not
beyond our imagination.  When the dolphin rises out of the muddy waters,
or the cranes stretch their necks in flight, we are filled with a sudden
sense of familiarity, the recognition that we share an emotional
heritage.  They feel and we feel, no matter how difficult it is to know
just what their feelings are.

After a promising start over 120 years ago, when Darwin explored the
terrain in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
very few scientists have acknowledged, researched, or even speculated
about animal emotions.  So persistent are the forces that militate
against even admitting the possibility of emotions in the lives of
animals that the topic seems disreputable, almost taboo. The scholarly
literature on animals contains many observations, accounts, and
anecdotes that suggest emotions the animals may be experiencing or
expressing, or at least call for further research into this possibility.
Yet little to none is forthcoming.

G.  G.  Rushby, a game warden doing "elephant control work" in Tanzania
(then Tanganyika), saw three female elephants and a half-grown male in
tall grass.  Since his job was to keep the elephant population down, he
shot the females-and slightly wounded the half-grown animal.  To his
dismay, he suddenly saw two elephant calves, who had been with the
females but had been hidden in the grass.  He moved toward them,
shouting and waving his hat, hoping to drive them back to the larger
herd, where other elephants would adopt them.  The wounded elephant was
dazed and helpless and did not know which way to turn.  Instead of
fleeing, the orphaned calves pressed themselves against him and
supported him, and led him away from danger.

Terror, compassion, bravery-accounts like this, systematically
developed, could provide evidence for a world of deep emotional
experience on the art of animals, but there appears little place for
them in scientific literature.  Onetime incidents are dismissed as
"anecdotes," yet there is no reason to ignore rare events. And when it
is feasible to collect other instances or even to repeat rare events,
this is seldom done, so scathing do scientists find the charge of "using
anecdotal evidence." Discussing the ability of two symbol-using
chimpanzees, Sherman and Austin, to improvise unusual and impressive
combinations of symbols, primate researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh calls
such spontaneous occurrences "arguably the most important sort of data
we have," yet notes, "we have avoided describing these in our published
reports."

Without question, anecdotes do present hurdles for science, including
the inability to control the circumstances around the event, the
frequent lack of documentation, and the impossibility of generating
statistics from a single occurrence.  But even when an event is
meticulously recorded and takes place in a controlled situation, like
the symbol combinations used by Sherman and Austin, the onetime nature
of the event precludes its use in many scientists eyes.  Experimental
evidence is given almost exclusive credibility over personal experience
to a degree that seems almost religious rather than logical.

Jane Goodall finds the scientific reluctance to accept anecdotal
evidence a serious problem, one that colors all of science.  "I've
always collected anecdotes, because I think they're just terribly,
terribly important-whereas most scientists scorn the anecdotal. 'Oh,
that's merely anecdotal." What is anecdotal?  It's a careful description
of an unusual event." She tells of a research assistant in a laboratory
charged with logging the response of male rhesus monkeys to females,
some of whom were being treated with hormones or had had their ovaries
removed.  "She told me .  .  .  the most fascinating thing to her was
that there was one old female that she observed in all these different
states, ending with having her ovaries out, and whatever state she was
in, she was the most popular. But she was one monkey, and that was
ignored.  There must be literally millions of observations like that
that have never crept into the literature." Such observations would
provide a rich and suggestive ground for analysis and further
investigation, yet there are almost none.  YWile it is possible and
customary to describe such events without using words that connote
emotion, such a lean description is not necessarily more accurate.

This book defines emotions as subjective experiences, as what people
refer to when they say "I feel sad," or "I am happy," or "I am
disappointed," or "I miss my children." An emotion is not distinguished
from a feeling, a passion, a sentiment, or what scientists call
"affect." Mood refers to a feeling that lasts for some protracted time.
These words refer simply to inner feeling states, to something that is
felt.

The Practical Impossibility of Ignoring Emotion

Most people who work closely with animals, such as animal trainers, take
it as a matter of fact that animals have emotions. Accounts by those who
work with elephants, for example, make it clear that one ignores an
elephant's "mood" at one's peril.  The British philosopher Mary Midgley
puts it well:

Obviously the mahouts may have many beliefs about the elephants which
are false because they are "anthropomorphic" that is, they misinterpret
some outlying aspects of elephant behavior by relying on a human pattern
which is inappropri ate.  But if they were doing this about the basic
everyday feelings-about whether their elephant is pleased, annoyed,
frightened, excited, tired, sore, suspicious or angry-they would not
only be out of business, they would often simply be dead.

Training an animal will meet with little success if the trainer has no
insight into the animal's feelings.  Some trainers say they work with
certain animals better than others because they understand the feelings
of that species or individual better.  Circus trainer Gunther
Gebel-Williams noted individual differences in the emotions of the
tigers with whom he worked: "Not every tiger ... can be trained to jump
through a ring of fire.  When I incorporated that trick into the tiger
act I had to find several from among the twenty I was working with at
the time who were not afraid of fire. That was no easy task, because
most tigers will not go near flames."

The fear of committing anthropomorphism can handicap an animal trainer,
says Mike Del Ross, training supervisor at Guide Dogs for the Blind in
San Rafael, California: "The more you open yourself up to trying to read
the dog, the more you concentrate and read the dog better."

Asked whether they would still want to work with dogs if dogs had no
emotions, trainers were startled by the very idea.  Kathy Finger
replied, "Probably not, because I think reading emotions is part of
dealing with dogs-loving them, respecting them." Del Ross exclaimed, "No
way.  What would there be if they didn't have emotions?

Such empathy in the direct scientific observation of animals is
controversial.  But wonder-ig what one would feel in the place of an
animal can be fruitful.  Most scientists working with animals in the
wild make inferences based on empathy, to make sense of their behavior,
such as, "If I had just lost my closest companion, I, too, would not
feel like eating for some time." Thinking about feelings has proven to
be a valuable way of thinking about behavior.

The Emotions of Captivit"That Doesn't Count"

Evidence of emotion in captive animals and pets is often discounted as
irrelevant.  Captive animals, the argument goes, are in unnatural
situations, and what domesticated animals do is irrelevant to what
animals are really like, as if they are not really animals. While
genuinely domesticated animals are different from wild animals, domestic
and tame do not mean the same thing.  Domestic animals are animals that
have been bred to live with humans-they have been changed genetically.
Dogs, cats, and cows are domestic animals.  Captive animals like
elephants are not, since through the generations that people have
trained elephants, they have almost invariably caught and tamed wild
elephants, rather than hred elephants.  Since the nature of elephants
remains unchanged, observations on tame or captive elephants are in fact
highly relevant to free-living elephants.

While domesticated animals and wild animals may not be the same, they
still have much in common; information about one can be relevant to the
other.  As field biologist George Schaller has written, "A loving
dog-owner can tell you more about animal awareness than some laboratory
behaviorists." Biologist Lory Frame studied wild dogs in the Serengeti
and made the intriguing observation that the dominant animals (the only
ones in a pack who usually breed), seemed much less like domestic dogs.
"Intuitively I seemed to understand Maya and Apache.  And that, I
realized, was because their subordinate behavior reminded me of domestic
dogs.  Not that my family's dog was the cringing sort-on the contrary,
he bullied me when I was a child.  But Maya's tailwagging manner was
reminiscent of the behavior people expect, and usually get, from their
pet dogs.  Dominant wild dogs, however, are something else.  .  .  .  I
seldom saw one grin or wag his tail.  Serious they seemed, and
dangerous.  If I met Sioux on foot I'd

get up the nearest tree.  With Maya I'd be more likely to pat her on the
head and offer her a biscuit." What she knew from her experience with
domesticated dogs helped inform her observations of wild dogs.

That captive and domestic animals are in "an unnatural situation" is
simply not a valid reason to treat observations of them less seriously.
Humans are in just as unnatural a situation.  We did not evolve in the
world in which we now live either, with its deferred rewards and strange
demands (sitting in classrooms or punching time clocks).  All the same,
we do not dismiss our emotions as not existing or inauthentic simply
because they don't take place in small groups of hunter-gatherers on an
African savanna, where human life is thought to have begun.  We are
ourselves domesti cated animals.  We can be at a distance from our
"origins" and still claim that our emotions are real and characteristic
of our species.

Why can't the same be true of animals?  It is not natural for humans to
be in prison.  Yet if we are put in prison and feel emotions that we
don't usually feel, no one doubts that they are real emotions. An animal
in a zoo, or kept as a pet, may feel emotions that it would not
otherwise have felt, but these are no less real.

To find out if her observations of captive dwarf mongooses told her
anything accurate about mongooses in a natural state, Anne Rasa, author
of Mongoose Watch, went to Kenya to study them in the bush for several
years.  She discovered that the behavior of captive mongoose groups in
large enclosures closely followed that of wild ones with two exceptions.
The wild mongooses had to spend much more time gathering food, and hence
less time playing and socializing.  Their lives were also strongly
colored by the actions of other species.  Eagles and snakes preyed on
them, so they spent a significant time mobbing snakes to drive them
away.  They quarreled with the larger blacktip mongooses.  They usually
ignored lizards and ground squirrels, but occasionally tried to play
with them.  In other words, their emotional range was to some extent
determined by the opportunities that presented themselves,

but curiosity and play were common to both captive mongooses and those
in a natural state.

On the other hand, the conditions of captivity can certainly change the
way animals behave.  Female baboons kept together in a cage form a rigid
hierarchy unlike anything seen in the species in the wild.  The point is
not that captivity never changes emotions and behavior, only that both
captive and wild animals appear to have feelings, and that the emotions
of captive animals are as real as those of wild animals, and therefore
equally worthy of study.

Complexity of Emotion

Emotions seldom come pure, in isolation from other emotions.  In people,
anger and fear, fear and love, love and shame, shame and sorrow often
converge in particular situations.  Animals may also experience a mix of
emotions.  Perhaps a dolphin mother who carries her dead baby around
with her for several days feels both love and sorrow.  Hope Ryden
describes a half-grown elk calf guarding the body of another calf killed
by coyotes after the elk herd had moved on.  For at least two days the
calf straddled the body, aggressively chased coyotes away, and from time
to time sniffed and nuzzled the face of the dead calf.  Eventually
(after coyotes had succeeded in partly eating the body) the calf moved
on.  The calf may have felt grief; it may have felt lonely for the rest
of the herd; it may have felt anger at the coyotes; it may have feared
the coyotes.  Perhaps it felt love for the dead calf.  That feelings may
be complex and multifaceted or difficult to interpret does not mean they
do not exist.

Animals do not all have the same emotions, any more than humans do. just
as the behavior of animal species differs, their feeling lives may
differ as well.  This is often overlooked when people argue from animal
examples.  "Geese mate for life," people declare.  Or, "Robins kick
their young out of the nest when they're old enough to be on their own."

"The dog doesn't stay and help the bitch raise the puppies-that's just
the way it is." This wrongly assumes that all animals are the same and
therefore we can draw the same conclusions about people.  But while
geese mate for life, grouse do not.  The male grouse mates with as many
females as he can and leaves them to raise the young on their own.  The
female Tasmanian native hen often mates with two males and the trio
raises the young together.  While robins fledge at an early age, condors
stay with their parents for years.  Male and female wolves raise their
puppies together. These differences often produce a kind of sociobiology
parlor game in which people try to prove points about human behavior by
pointing to an animal species that exhibits the behavior they want to
define as "natural" for humans. But animal species may also differ in
the content of their emotions. Evidence that elephants feel compassion
or sorrow does not mean that hippos feel compassion or that penguins
feel sorrow. Perhaps they do, perhaps not.

Animals also differ from one another as individuals.  Among elephants,
for example, one may be timid and another bold.  One may be prone to
attacks of rage, another peaceable.  One Victorian commented on working
elephants in Rangoon, "There are willing workers and there are skulkers;
there are gentle tempers, and there are others as dour as a door-nail.
Some of them will drag a log two tons in weight without a groan; while
others, who are equally powerful but less willing, will make a dreadful
fuss over a stick that is, comparatively speaking, nothing." Of a
species he hunted, Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "[B]ears differ
individually in courage and ferocity precisely as men do.  .  .  .  One
grizzly can scarcely be bullied into resistance; the next may fight to
the end, against any odds, without flinching, or even attack unprovoked.
.  .  .  Even old hunters-who indeed, as a class, are very narrow-minded
and opinIonated-often generalize just as rashly as beginners."

Views of Animal Emotion; Lay and Scientific Most ordinary people who
have direct contact with animals freely concede the reality of animal
emotions.  Their belief arises from the evidence of their senses and
logical deduction.  A person who hears birds attacking a cat near their
nest usually experiences them as angry.  When we see a squirrel flee
from us, we think that it is afraid.  We see a cat licking its kittens
and feel it loves them. We see a bird throbbing with song and suppose it
to be happy. Even those with only indirect experience of animals often
recognize what they see to be an emotional state, a feeling, which they
correlate to a similar human feeling.  In this respect the layperson's
description of animal life may be more accurate and is certainly richer
than the standard behaviorist's description, which shows no effort to
investigate animal emotions systematically or in depth.

Despite the lack of sustained scholarly work on animal emotions, there
is today a greater interest in the realities of the lives of animals
than ever before.  Practitioners in a wide range of disciplines share an
increasing awareness of the complexity of animal actions-cognitive,
perceptual, and behavioral, individual and social-and correspondingly
greater humility in the face of questions of animal capacities.  Humans
are no longer as prepared to pronounce upon what an animal can and
cannot be and do.  We are starting to be clear that we do not know and
are only beginning to learn.

While the study of emotion is a respectable field, those who work in it
are usually academic psychologists who confine their studies to human
emotions.  The standard reference work, The Oxford Companion to Animal
Behavior, advises animal behaviorists that "[O]the is well advised to
study the behavior, rather than attempting to get at any underlying
emotion." Why?  They may be elusive or difficult to measure, but this
does not mean animal feelings do not exist and are not important.

Human beings are not always aware of what they are feeling. Like
animals, they may not be able to put their feelings into words. This
does not mean they have no feelings.  Sigmund Freud once speculated that
a man could be in love with a woman for six years and not know it until
many years later.  Such a man, with all the goodwill in the world, could
not have verbalized what he did not know.  He had the feelings, but he
did not know about them.  It may sound like a paradox-paradoxical
because when we think of a feeling, we think of something that we are
consciously aware of feeling.  As Freud put it in his 1915 article "The
Unconscious": "It is

surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it."

Yet it is beyond question that we can "have" feelings that we do not
know about.

Psychiatric lexicons contain the term alexithymia for the condition of
certain people who cannot describe or recognize emotions, who are able
to define them "only in terms of somatic sensations or of behavioral
reaction rather than relating them to accompanying thoughts." Such
people are handicapped by their inability to understand what feelings
are.  It is curious that the study of animal behavior should demand that
its practitioners turn themselves into alexithymics.

Defining the Emotions

Psychological theorists speak of a set of fundamental human emotions
that are universal, discrete, and which they consider innate.  These
fundamental emotions are like the primary colors and can give rise to
many variations.  One psychologist compiled a list of 154 emotion names,
from abhorrence to worry.  Theorists do not agree on which emotions are
the basic ones.  Ren6 Descartes said there were six basic emotions:
love, hate, astonishment, desire, joy, and sorrow.  Immanuel Kant found
five: love, hope, modesty, joy, and sorrow.  William James defined four:
love, fear, grief, and rage.  Behavioristj.  B.  Watson postulated three
basic emotions, X, Y, and Z, roughly equivalent to fear, anger, and
love.  Modern theorists like Robert Plutchik, Carroll Izard, and Silvan
Tomkins found either six or eight basic emotions-but not the same ones.
On most modern lists love is not included as an emotion.  Many
scientists prefer to call it a drive or a motivation, if they refer to
it at all.  All the emotions in these commonly used and accepted lists
have been thought by some researchers to be observed among animals.

In addition to these, there are probably other emotions and variations
within them that from time to time everybody, from whatever culture,
feels.  Compiling a full list can be hazardous,

however, as the Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka points out when she
observes that in some non-Western cultures, for example in Aboriginal
Australia, a concept related but not identical to shame plays a social
role evidently missing in our culture.  The word describing this emotion
can include the English concept of "shame,"

"embarrassment......  shyness" and "respect." Yet it seems likely that
the feeling itself would be recognizable at least approximately to
somebody from another culture.

We should be wary of confining any emotion to only one part of the
world.  After all, it was not so long ago that ethnologists thought that
there were some cultures (obviously inferior) where the full range of
Western emotions could not be expressed, and thus were probably not
experienced.  It seemed then as poindess to inquire into compassion or
aesthetic awe among certain hill tribes as it now appears to catalog
aesthetic rapture among bears.  One of the "great" anthropological texts
of the beginning of this century was tided Mental Funaion in Inferior
Societies, written by L.  LevyBruhl, who was professor at the Sorbonne.
Such prejudice is slowly receding.  The capacity to feel all emotions
may be universal.  Great literature suggests that certain feeling states
are universal, or at least that the capacity to experience them crosses
cultures, although different cultures and different individuals may
describe them differently, or attach differing importance to subtleties
of feeling.  If feelings can cross cultures, it seems likely they can
cross species.

This book discusses animal emotions following the order in which people
find them plausible.  Humans are most ready to consider the possibility
of other animals having the emotion of fear. Love, sorrow, and joy are
considered "nobler," hence less likely to be granted to others,
especially animals.  Although many people are very ready to speak of
anger in animals, some experienced animal trainers argue that animals do
not feel this emotion.  The sociobiological debate over altruism has
resulted in a widespread denial of the possibility of compassion in
animals.  As for shame, a feeling for beauty, creativity, a sense of
justice, and other even more elusive capacities: these are the least
likely to be ascribed to animals.

The Functions and BenefitS of Emotion

What are feelings for?  Most non-scientists will find this a strange
question.  Feelings just are.  They justify themselves.  Emotions give
meaning and depth to life.  They need serve no other purpose in order to
exist.  On the other hand, many evolutionary biologists, in contrast to
animal behaviorists, acknowledge some emotions primarily for their
survival function.  For both animals and humans, fear motivates the
avoidance of danger, love is necessary to care for young, anger prepares
one to hold ground.  But the fact that a behavior functions to serve
survival need not mean that that is why it is done.  Other scientists
have attributed the same behavior to conditioning, to learned responses.
Certainly reflexes and fixed action patterns can occur without feeling
or conscious thought.  A gull chick pecks at a red spot above it.  The
parent has a red spot on its bill; the chick pecks the parent's bill.
The gull parent feeds its chick when pecked on the bill.  The baby gets
fed. The interaction need have no emotional content.

At the same time, there is no reason why such actions cannot have
emotional content.  In mammals-including humans-that have given birth,
milk is often released automatically when a new baby cries.  This is not
under voluntary control; it is reflex.  Yet this does not mean that
feeding a new baby is exclusively reflex and expresses no feelings like
love.  Humans have feelings about their behavior even if it is
conditioned or reflexive.  Yet since reflexes exist, and conditioned
behavior is widespread, measurable, and observable, most scientists try
to explain animal behavior using only these concepts.  It is simpler.

Those who argue against speaking of emotion and consciousness in animals
often appeal to the principle of parsimony, or Ockham's razor.  This
principle holds that one should choose the simplest explanation for a
phenomenon.  Animal behaviorist Lloyd Morgan's version reads: "In no
case may we interpret an action as the outcome of an exercise of a
higher physical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the
exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale." This
rule of giving credence to only the lowest or simplest explanation for
behavior is not unassailable.  Many questionable assumptions lie buried
in the assessment of faculties as higher and lower.  Emotions are
typically considered higher faculties for no very clear reason.
Moreover, the world is not necessarily a parsimonious place.  As Gordon
Burghardt has pointed out, "The origin of life by creation is simpler
than the indirect methods of evolution."

Preferring to explain behavior in ways that fit science's methods most
easily, many scientists have refused to consider any causes for animal
behavior other than reflexive and conditioned ones.  Scientific
orthodoxy holds that what cannot be readily measured or tested cannot
exist, or is unworthy of serious attention.  But emotional explanations
for animal behavior need not be impossibly complex or untestable.  They
are just more difficult for the scientific method to verify in the usual
ways.  Cleverer and more sophisticated approaches are called for.  Most
branches of science are more willing to make successive approximations
to what may prove ultimately unknowable, rather than ignoring it
altogether.

Functionalist

Evolutionary biology offers further support for the view that animals
feel.  In this model, anything that enhances survival has selective
value.  Emotions can motivate survival behavior.  An animal who is
afraid of danger and runs away may survive over the one who does not,
while another animal that angrily defends its territory may live longer
and better.  An animal that loves and protects its offspring may leave
more descendants.  An animal may take pleasure in the ability to run
swiftly, fly strongly, or burrow deeply. The old German
termfunktionslust refers to pleasure taken in what one can do best-the
pleasure a cat takes in climbing trees, or monkeys take in swinging from
branch to branch.  This pleasure, this happiness, may increase an
animal's tendency to do these things, and will also increase the
likelihood of its survival.

But not all actions driven by emotion have survival value.  A loving
animal may leave more offspring, thus making love an aid to survival;
but a loving animal may also care for disabled offspring or companions
that have no chance of surviving, or expose itself to hazards mourning
dead ones.  It may adopt the babies of others, not passing on its own
genes.  These actions would not enhance, and would probably decrease,
its own fitness.  Perhaps animals take certain actions because of what
they feel, not simply because of any survival advantage conferred.  Yet
lovingness could still have survival value, because the net effect would
be to leave more offspring. If a behavior that is usually adaptive also
occurs when it has no survival advantage, this may mean that an
overarching emotion, not a narrow adaptation, drives the behavior.
Systematic observations of this sort could promote theorizing on
emotions, even test their existence.  If a usually adaptive behavior
occurs in an unadaptive situation, an overarching emotion, not a narrow
adaptation, may drive the behavior.

Biologists often point to a behavior's evolutionary advantage as a way
to sidestep the question of emotions.  Scientists sometimes argue that
the songbird is not singing with joy, nor singing because he finds his
song beautiful, but because he is establishing territory and advertising
his fitness to possible mates.  Thus to view birdsong as an aggressive
and sexual act provides a genetic explanation for the behavior.  The
bird's song may announce his territorial claims, and may indeed attract
a mate, but that does not preclude the bird singing because he is happy
and finds his song beautiful.  As primatologist Frans de Waal points
out, "When I see a pair of parrots tenderly and patiently preening each
other, my first thought is not that they are doing this to help the
survival of their genes.  This is a misleading manner of speaking, as it
employs the present tense, whereas evolutionary explanations can deal
only with the past."

Instead de Waal views the birds as expressing love and expectation, or,
retreating a little, "an exclusive bond."

Similarly, human behavior that can be viewed as increasing survival
fitness often cannot be explained from that standpoint only, as
sociobiologists sometimes attempt to do.  When monogamous humans have
affairs, they are not generally thinking about maximizing reproductive
chances by impregnating females other than the one with whom a
substantial parental investment is being made, or about mating with
genetically superior males for the ben

efit of their progeny.  Indeed, adulterers usually try to avoid
reproduction.  Sexual abuse of children has no survival value either,
yet is common.  If humans are subject to evolution but have feelings
that are inexplicable in survival terms, if they are prone to emotions
that do not seem to confer any advantage, why should we suppose that
animals act on genetic invesnnent alone?

A Double Standard

As human beings, we clearly apply different standards to ourselves than
to other animals.  Humans are conceded to have emotions.  The usual
reason given is that feelin s are expressed in language, using words
like "I love you," or "I don't care," or "I am sad." People live much of
their lives according to expressions of feelings in themselves or in
others.  Although it is widely agreed that some people lie about their
feelings to gain an advantage, and some people make mistakes about their
feelings, or do not know what they really feel, or express them without
credibility, few doubt that feelings exist-one's own, and those of
others.  The primary method of reasoning seems to be analogy and
empathy: we know we have feelings because we feel moved by them, and
others do and express similar things, so we believe that they have
feelings too.

Such reasoning has its limitations.  We learn from personal experience
that other humans can feel gratitude because they say so and act as
though they do.  By itself, this sheds no light on whether a lion can
feel gratitude.  On the other hand, humans, even when embedded in
sophisticated cultural environments, remain very much a species of
animal; the relation of the physical to the psychic ingredients of
emotions may well be shared.  While emotions cannot be reduced simply to
a blend of hormones, to whatever extent hormones contribute to emotional
states in humans, they probably also do so in animals.  Substances like
oxytocin, epinephrine, serotonin, and testosterone-all of which are
thought to affect human actions and feelings-are found in animals as
well.  Grossly oversimplified explanations of human behavior in terms of
hormones

have proved not only faulty but pernicious; care should be taken to
avoid the same mistake in explaining animal behavior.

Belying the closely held belief that emotions are the exclusively human
products of our unparalleled mental powers, the physical pathways of
human emotion are among the most primitive.  The part of the brain
called the limbic system, which is thought to mediate emotion, is one of
the most phylogenetically ancient parts of the human brain, so much so
that it is sometimes called "the reptile brain." From a purely physical
standpoint, it would be a biological miracle if humans were the only
animals to feel.  Can it then be shown, say, that a cat loves her
kittens or that kittens love their mother?  If measurements showed
hormone levels surging in the cat's bloodstream when she sees her
kittens, and electrical activity spiking in certain parts of the cat's
brain, would that be accepted as proof?  Many scientists would still say
no; we can never know if a cat loves.  Yet most observers already
believe that the cat loves the kittens, simply on the basis of her
behavior. Scientists prefer not to say so.

Could it be that the statement "The ape is clearly sad" is not so
different from 'John is clearly sad"?  The clearly signals an
interpretation; it refers to clues that are socially agreed upon to
indicate sadness.  John is staring at the ground for hours and sighing.
So is the ape.  John may refuse to eat.  So might the ape.  John refuses
to speak; when asked how he feels, he stares past the speaker.  We do
not, for that reason, say that he cannot feel sorrow or he would say so.
We can be wrong about the ape.  We can also be wrong about John.  John
might, in fact, be feeling something entirely differentapathy, perhaps,
or existential despair.  We may have misunderstood his actions, his
facial expressions, and his vocalizations. Clearly is a statement about
the kind of evidence we think we have, but our evidence may not be as
good for people, nor as poor for other animals, as we have assumed.

The Slippery Clues of Language

Humans do have the advantage of language, one of the biggest differences
between humans and other animals.  Animals cannot speak of their
feelings in a way humans can reliably understand, although the language
barrier between humans and animals is not absolute.  But language is not
entirely trustworthy as a yardstick of feeling between humans.  Verbal
assertion of a feeling does not prove the emotion exists, nor does the
inability to verbalize an emotion prove it does not.  Some profoundly
retarded humans cannot speak their feelings; this does not mean they do
not have them. Mute humans feel.  Intellectually sophisticated people
can lie about their feelings or conceal them.  Intellectual capacity may
distinguish people from other animals, even if only in degree, but even
among humans, intelligence and emotion are not closely correlated.

Language is a part of culture, and cultures around the world seem to
make many of the same distinctions between emotions and to refer to
similar experiences.  But can we feel an emotion for which our culture
provides no word or no examples?  No doubt there are emotions promoted
in one culture and not another, but this does not mean they are not
experienced in all of them.  It may be difficult to define or express
them, given the language to which one is born; it may even be difficult
to think about them, and especially to convey them to another person.
Yet the feelings themselves may have a certain autonomy such that they
may nonetheless be felt.  Similarly, animals may have emotional
experiences it would be hard to express or put into words, even if they
had the capacity to use words, but they would not for that reason cease
to be real feelings.  The language barrier notwithstanding, humans may
well share with animals the vast majority of feelings of which they are
capable.

The prejudice has long existed that only humans think and feel because
only humans can communicate thoughts and feelings in words, whether
written or spoken.  Descartes, the seventeenthcentury French
philosopher, believed animals to be "thoughtless brutes," automata,
machines:

There are [no men] so depraved and stupid, without even

excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together,
forming of them a statement by which they make

known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no

other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced

it may be, which can do the same .  .  .  the reason why animals do not
speak as we do is not that they lack the organs but

that they have no thoughts.

An unknown contemporary of Descartes put this position starkly:

The [Cartesian] scientists administered beatings to dogs with

perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the

creatures as if they felt pain.  They said the animals were

clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the

noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the

whole body was without feeling.  They nailed the poor animals

up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the

circulation of the blood, which was a great subject of contro versy.

Voltaire responded that, on the contrary, vivisection showed that the
dog has the same organes de sentiment that a human has. "Answer me, you
who believe that animals are only machines," he wrote.  "Has nature
arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in
order for it not to have any at all?" Elsewhere, in Le philosophe
ignorant, he criticizes Descartes by saying that he "dared to say that
animals are pure machines who looked for food when they had no appetite,
who had the organs for feeling only to never have the slightest feeling,
who screamed without pain, who showed their pleasure without joy, who
possessed a brain only to have in it not even the slightest idea, and
who were in this way a perpetual contradiction of nature." As early as
1738, Voltaire talked about the humane feelings of the great English
physicist Isaac Newton and how, like the philosopher John Locke, he was
convinced that animals had the same sentiments man did.  Voltaire
writes: "He [Newton] believed that it was a very terrible contradic

non to believe that animals could feel, and yet cause them to suffer."

It is true that most animals have no speech that humans yet understand.
But is the absence of speech, after all, as important an indication of
feelings as some philosophers have imagined it to be?

Several chimpanzees and other great apes have American Sign Language
(ASL) vocabularies of more than a hundred words.  They communicate not
only with humans but with members of their oy,rn species.  Would it not
be parsimonious to suppose that they had previously communicated some of
these same thoughts to other apes via means other than human sign
language?  Why would they wait for scientists before doing something
they were already capable of doing?  The fact that apes do not have
human vocal cords does not mean that they must remain uncommunicative.
Following a first flush of excitement, the overwhelming response of the
scientific community to signing apes has been to ignore or disbelieve
them, both as individuals and as a species.  Given that statements made
by apes about food and toys are attacked, one can only imagine the
reaction to statements about their feelings. Rooted prejudice claims
that animal feelings cannot be known because animals cannot speak; when
they do speak in a human tongue, the claim is that what they are saying
cannot possibly mean what humans mean.

Even when animals speak our language, humans do not always take them at
their word.  For sixteen years Alex, an African grey parrot, has been
trained by psychologist Irene Pepperberg, who researches the bird's
cognitive abilities.  Alex is one of the few parrots in the world who
has been demonstrated to understand the meaning of the words he speaks.
He knows the names of fifty objects, seven colors, and five shapes.  He
can enumerate up to six objects and say which of two objects is smaller.
Alex has also picked up many "functional" phrases.  He has learned "I'm
gonna go now," something he hears people say in Pepperberg's laboratory.
Pepperberg describes how, when Alex is scolded, "We say, 'No!

Bad boy!" We walk out.  And he knows what to say contextually,
applicably.  He brings us back in by saying, 'Come here!  I'm sorry!"'
Alex learned to say he was sorry by hearing humans say it.

He knows when to say it.  Does he feel regret?  "He bites, he says, 'I'm
sorry' and he bites again," says Pepperberg, somewhat irritably.
"There's no contrition!" just like many people.

Here is an animal who appears to be verbally reporting an emotional
state-regret-but we don't believe him.  If he were really sorry (as we
understand the term) for biting, would he imme.  'de diately bite again?
Perhaps he would.  Whatever is going on insi Alex, he is motivated
enough to learn human words for human feelings-possibly to make humans
into more satisfactory parrot companions.  Alex may not feel contrition
about hurting someone. Pepperberg may have no word for what Alex wants
from her eitheir; she may never have felt what Alex feels.  Humans are
surprisingly deficient in vocabulary for positive social emotions, and
unduly successful at naming negative individualistic ones.  Could there
not be gradations of social proximity and affection at the top of the
forest canopy for which humans are functionally emotional illiterates?
Maybe we have something to learn.

Communication 'Without Language

Nonverbal communication among humans has sparked increasing interest
among academics and therapists in the last few years.  Many complex
mental states are conveyed more conveniently by gestures than by
sentences, while others appear to escape verbal language entirely.
Attempts to convey subtle or elusive feelings leave everybody with a
sense of the inadequacy of speech. Poetry, after all, is an attempt to
convey feelings, moods, states, and even thoughts that are hard to grasp
and that seem to defy language in prose.  And some feelings do in fact
elude language, even poetry, altogether.  The fine arts and silence pick
up where words leave off.

There is little doubt that humans communicate thoughts and feelings
without words; indeed, there is growing evidence that a great part of
communication with others takes place outside verbal speech.  Just as
humans communicate through body language, gestures, and expressive acts,
formalized through mime and dance,

consideration should be given to the nonverbal statements about feelings
that animals make.

Animals communicate information through posture, vocalizations,
gestures, and actions, both to other animals and to humans who are
attentive.  Although study of these patterns is improving, even
specialists can be rather poor at interpreting this information; this is
especially true for those unfamiliar with the species.  The animals
themselves are much better at understanding these signals, even across
species.  Indeed, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas speculates that animals are
much better at reading human body signals than humans are at reading
animal signals of any kind.  "Our kind may be able to bully other
species not because we are good at communication but because we aren't."
De Waal complains that apes are so good at reading human body language
as to leave people who work with them feeling transparent.

After fifteen years of studying red foxes, raising them and living with
them, David Macdonald understands their body language. He can tell at a
glance a happy fox, an excited fox, a nervous fox. He freely writes of
them as playful, furious, besotted, fearful, confident, contented,
flirtatious, or humiliated.  His Running with the Fox illustrates fox
body language so that those less familiar with foxes can figure it out.
Yet because the emotions of animals are not scientifically respectable,
when Macdonald discusses whether foxes enjoy killing, he retreats, with
the caveat, "assuming they are subject to emotions recognizable to
humans He calls this question philosophically unanswerable." But to most
lay people it is no more philosophically unanswerable than the question
of whether other humans have emotions, including sadism.

In Konrad Lorenz's The Year of the Greylag Goose, the caption to one
photograph of a gander reads: "After Ado [another gander] had
appropriated Selma this former mate], Gurnemanz went to pieces, as can
be seen in this picture." To a person only casually familiar with geese,
this cannot be seen at all.  It might as easily be a happy goose or a
furious goose.  A goose does not have a mobile face, so there is little
by way of facial expression.  Lorenz, from long experience, knows a
goose's body language and can read it. Gurnemanz's posture and neck
position tell of his submission and

demoralization.  Elsewhere Lorenz describes goose postures, gestures,
and sounds as victorious, uncertain, tense, glad, sad, alert,

relaxed, or threatening.

The point is that a goose or other animal may be a quivering mass of
emotion.  Its feelings may be "written all over its face," and it may
only take practice to read that writing.  We are restricted only by
ignorance, lack of interest, desire for exploitation (like wanting to
eat them), or by anthropocentric prejudices that preclude us, as if by
divine fate, from recognizing commonality where it might exist.  How can
we be gods if animals are like us?

E,ploring the Forbidden Subject

The standards for defining the existence of emotions in animals begin
with those in common use for humans.  One should demand no more proof
that an animal feels an emotion than would be demanded of a human-and,
like humans, the animal should be permitted to speak its own emotional
language, which it is up to the beholder to understand.

Human emotions, too, escape exact scientific scrutiny.  There is, in
fact, no universally accepted scientific proof of human feelings.  What
one person feels is never entirely available to another. Not only is it
uncertain our feelings are communicable; whether or not anyone
understands the landscape of anyone else's inner life is ultimately
unknowable.  We think we know that people are sad, or lonely, or joyous,
but it is hard to know the particularity of the accompanying mood.  We
may not be locked away in private universes of feeling, but another
person's inner life, to the extent that it is individual, remains
ultimately mysterious.

A history of human affairs in which fear, anger, love, pride, and guilt
played no part would be strangely inadequate.  Biographies without
grief, sadness, and nostalgia would appear unreal.  An ordinary person's
life in which no one loves, is loved, or wants to be loved; in which no
one fears anything; in which no one becomes angry or makes anyone else
angry; in which the depths of despair remain unfathomed; in which no one
feels pride in anything they

do; in which no one is ever ashamed to do anything or feels guilty if
they do-this would be an unnatural, unrealistic, paltry description.  It
would be neither believable nor accurate.  It would be called inhuman.
To describe the lives of animals without including their emotions may be
just as inaccurate, just as superficial and distorted, and may strip
them of their wholeness just as profoundly.  To understand animals, it
is essential to understand what they feel.

Humans have historically been much concerned with distinguishing
ourselves from beasts.  We speak; we reason; we imagine; we anticipate;
we worship, we laugh.  They do not.  The historical insistence on an
unbridgeable gap between humans and other animals suggests that it
serves some need or function.  Why do we humans so frequently define
ourselves by distinction from animals?

Why should the distinction between man and beast matter?

Attempts to make this distinction fall largely into two categories.
First, many cite human failings as unique, chief among which is fighting
among ourselves.  In these cases, the writer is usually trying to
inspire his readers with moral resolutions.  In the first century A.D.,
Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, admonishes: "Lions do not fight
with one another; serpents do not attack serpents, nor do the wild
monsters of the deep rage against their like. But most of the calamities
of man are caused by his fellow men."

When, in 1532, Ludovico Ariosto in Orlando Furi'oso says, "Man is the
only animal who injures his mate," this, too, is meant as an admonition.
James Froude in his Oceana of 1886 claimed, "Wild animals never kill for
sport.  Man is the only one for whom the

torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself." And
even William James, in this century, wrote that "Man .  .  .  is simply
the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one
that preys systematically on his own species." In these examples,
animals are not so much being observed as men are being exhorted to
cease killing (usually) other men.  They are intended to shame men into
recognizing that they behave worse than animals.

The other-by far larger-category of man-beast contrasts cites human
advantages: our intelligence, our culture, our sense of humor, our
knowledge of death.  In the nineteenth century William Hazlitt
maintained, "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the
only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are
and what they ought to be." And in our century, the philosopher William
Ernest Hocking claimed, "Man is the only animal that contemplates death,
and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality."
Uniqueness is claimed for the human sense of humor, the ability to
understand virtue, the ability to make and use tools.  Again the authors
seem more interested in making a didactic point for humans than in
observing or understanding animals.

Human-animal comparisons have historically served as a rich source of
moral instruction for humanistic philosophers, particularly during
periods when the natural world was sentimentalized and viewed as a
model.  The most poetic was Button, the great nineteenth century French
naturalist, who began his essay "On the Nature of Animals" by saying
that animals cannot think or remember, but have feelings "to an even
greater degree than humans do."

Button believed there to be an advantage to an animal's purely feeling
life.  Humans, he wrote, lead lives of quiet desperation, and ((most men
die of sorrow." In contrast, "Animals do not search for pleasures where
none can be found; guided by their feelings alone, they never make a
mistake in their choice; their desires are always proportional to their
capacity to enjoy; they feel as much as they enjoy and enjoy only as
much as they feel.  Man, on the other hand, wanting to invent pleasures,
does nothing but spoil nature; wanting to force feelings, he only abuses
his being, and digs a hole in his

heart which nothing is capable of later filling." He ends by speaking of
"the infinite distance that the Supreme Being has put between animals
and [Man]."

Contemporary renditions of this contrast have been scarcely more
grounded in animal reality and have not shed much more light on
animals-or humans.  Recently N.  K.  Humphrey wrote that "human beings
have evolved to be the most highly social creatures the world has ever
seen.  Their social relationships have a depth, a complexity, and a
biological importance to them, which no other animals' relationships
come near." Considering how little is known about "other animals'
relationships," this seems unwarranted.

How little we know, and how much we pretend to know, is illustrated by
the fact that, until very recently, it was a canon of animal behavior
that, of females, only the human experienced orgasm.  As recently as
1979, anthropologist Donald Symons pronounced that the "female orgasm is
a characteristic essentially restricted to our own species." When the
question was actually investigated in the stump-tailed macaque, using
the same physiological criteria used for humans, it was found that the
female macaques did appear to experience orgasm.  Primatologist Frans de
Waal observes the same of the female bonobo (pygmy chimpanzee), from
behavioral evidence.  Like many questions specifically involving the
human female, the truth is that not many scientists had ever considered
the question systematically, let alone done the necessary field
observation studies to find an answer.  Perhaps it pleased most male
scientists to imagine that while animal females sought sex only during
an estrus cycle, and hence had sex only for reproduction, human females,
due to their unique orgasmic capacity, wanted sex all the time.

Our Noble Feelings

People have always exalted certain "hiGher" feelings that are claimed to
single us out among animals.  Only humans, it is said, feel noble
emotions such as compassion, true love, altruism, pity,

mercy, reverence, honor, and modesty.  On the other hand, people have
often attributed so-called negative or "low" emotions to animals:
cruelty, pride, greed, rage, vanity, and hatred.  At play here appears
to be a seemingly unbearable injury to our sense of uniqueness, to our
entitlement to the special nobility of our emotional life.  Thus not
only whether animals can feel, but what they feel, is used to strengthen
the species barrier.  What lies behind this "us/ them" mentality-the
urge to define ourselves by proving we are not only different, but
utterly different, including emotionally?

Why should this distinction between man and beast be so important to
humans?

A look at the distinctions humans draw among ourselves may provide a
partial answer.  Dominant human groups have long defined themselves as
superior by distinguishing themselves from groups they are
subordinating.  Thus whites define blacks in part by differing melanin
content of the skin; men are distinguished from women by primary and
secondary sex characteristics.  These empirical distinctions are then
used to make it appear that it is the distinctions themselves, not their
social consequences, that are responsible for the social dominance of
one group over the other. Thus the distinction between man and beast has
served to keep man on top.  People define themselves as distinct from
animals, or similar when convenient or entertaining, in order to keep
themselves dominant over them.  Human beings presumably benefit from
treating animals the way they do-hurting them, jailing them, exploiting
their labor, eating their bodies, gaping at them, and even owning them
as signs of social status.  Any human being who has a choice does not
want to be treated like this.

A blatant example of many of these prejudices, with a suggesnon of some
of their social consequences, can be found in the article on "Animals"
in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, written in 1908:

Civilization, or perhaps rather education, has brought with it a

sense of the Lreat Lulf that exists between man and the lower

animals.  .  .  .  In the lower stages of culture, whether they be

found in races which are, as a whole, below the European

level, or in the uncultured portion of civilized communities,

the distinction between men and animals is not adequately, if

at all, recognized.  .  .  .  The savage .  .  .  attributes to the an
imal a vastly more complex set of thoughts and feelings, and a

much greater range of knowledge and power, than it actually

possesses.  .  .  .  It is therefore small wonder that his attitude

towards the animal creation is one of reverence rather than

superiority.

Only a lower man, one close to animals, would value them. Human
rationalizations of this gap are analyzed in A View to a Death in the
Morning, an elegant book on hunting by Matt Cartmill:

In policing the animal-human boundary, scientists have shown

considerable ingenuity in redefining supposedly unique human traits to
keep them from being claimed for other animals.

Consider our supposedly big brains.  Human beings are supposed to be
smarter than other animals, and therefore we

ought to have larger brains.  But in fact, elephants, whales, and

dolphins have bigger brains than ours; and small rodents and monkeys
have relatively bigger brains (their brains make up a

larger percentage of body weight than ours do).  Scientists who

study these things have accordingly labored to redefine brain

size, dividing brain weight by basal metabolic rate or some

other exponential function of body weight to furnish a standard by which
these animals' brains can thus be deemed

smaller than ours.  The unique bigness of the human brain

thus turns out to be a matter of definition.

This is not the only example of the manipulation of science toward the
goal of dominance.  In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould cogently
described the conscious or unconscious manipulation of data on brain
size to prove that the scientist's racial group was inherently smarter
than other groups.  (A similar example of an attempt to force science
into the service of racial discrimination may be found in Murray and
Hermstein's recent The Bell

Curve.  This ugly piece of advocacy is depressing evidence that
measurable intelligence is no guarantee of intelligent ideas.)

The insensate Other

Animals' presumed lack of feeling has provided a major excuse for
treating them badly.  This has been so extreme that animals were long
regarded as unable to feel pain, physical or emotional. But when an
animal is hurt in a way that would hurt a person, it generally reacts
much as a person would.  It cries out, it gets away, then examines or
favors the affected part, and withdraws and rests. Veterinarians do not
doubt that wounded animals feel pain, and use analgesics and anesthetics
in their practice.  The only criterion that an animal fails to meet for
feeling physical pain as humans understand it is the ability to express
it in words.  Yet the fish on the hook is said not to be thrashing in
pain (or fear) but in a reflex action.  A lobster in boiling water or
puppies whose tails are being docked are said to feel nothing.  A recent
German book on animal consciousness argues to the contrary: "The fact
that we so immediately understand these signals is just a further sign
that we share with other animals the grand construction of our pain
apparatus." When the subject is actually researched, the findings are in
line with common sense: the apparent pain of the fish twisting on the
hook is real.

It has always been comforting to the dominant group to assume that those
in subservient positions do not suffer or feel pain as keenly, or at
all, so they can be abused or exploited without guilt and with impunity.
The history of prejudice is notable for assertions that lower classes
and other races are relatively insensitive. Similarly, until the 1980s,
it was routine for surgery on human infants to be performed with
paralytic agents but without anesthesia, in the long-held belief that
babies are incapable of feeling pain. It was believed, without evidence,
that their nervous systems were immature.  The notion that babies do not
feel pain is directly counter to their screams and can only be
classified as scientific myth.  Yet it has been a tenet of human
medicine, only recently acknowledged to be false in the wake of studies
showing that in

fants who do not get pain medication take longer to recover from
surgery.

A similar bigotry has extended to the presence of emotions in the poor,
the foreign, those raised in impoverished or unenlightened cultures, and
in children, who supposedly have not yet learned to feel in fully human
ways.  It is often asserted that when an infant smiles, for example, it
is a physical response to gas in the intestines.  The baby is said not
to be smiling in response to other people, or out of happiness, but in
response to digestive events. Despite the fact that adults do not smile
as a result of discomfort in the stomach, this notion is widely
repeated-though often not believed by the infant's parents.  Studies
showing that infant smiles are not correlated with burps, regurgitation,
and flatulence have made little impact on this idea.  Many people are
gratified to think of infants as having diminished or no feelings.

If it is so easy to deny the emotional lives of other people, how much
easier it is to deny the emotional lives of animals.

A-lithropomorphism

The greatest obstacle in science to investigating the emotions of other
animals has been an inordinate desire to avoid anthropomorphism.
Anthropomorphism means the ascription of human characteristics-thought,
feeling, consciousness, and motivationto the nonhuman.  When people
claim that the elements are conspiring to ruin their picnic or that a
tree is their friend, they are anthropomorphizing.  Few believe that the
weather is plotting against them, but anthropomorphic ideas about
animals are held more widely.  Outside scientific circles, it is common
to speak of the thoughts and feelings of pets and of wild and captive
animals. Yet many scientists regard even the notion that animals feel
pain as the grossest sort of anthropomorphic error.

Cats and dogs are prime targets of anthropomorphism, both wrongly and
rightly.  Ascribing unlikely thoughts and feelings to pets is common:
"She understands every word you say."

"He sings his little heart out to show how,grateful he is." Some people
deck

reluctant pets in clothing, give them presents in which they have no
interest, or assign their own opinions to the animals.  Some dogs are
even taught to attack people of races different from their owners'. Many
dog lovers seem to enjoy believing that cats are selfish, unfeeling
creatures who heartlessly use their deluded owners, compared with
loving, loyal, and naive dogs.  More often, however, people have quite
realistic views about their pets' abilities and attributes.  The
experience of living with an animal often provides a strong sense of its
abilities and limitations-although even here, as for people living
intimately with people, preconceptions can be more persuasive than lived
evidence, and can create their own reality.

Consider three statements about a dog's behavior: "Brandy's upset
because we forgot her birthday......  Brandy feels left out and wants
your attention," and "Brandy is performing the submissive display of a
low-ranking canid." The first two statements can both be called
anthropomorphic and the last is the jargon of ethology, the scientific
study of animal behavior.  The first statement is probably
anthropomorphic error or projection; the speaker would feel bad if his
or her birthday were forgotten and assumes the dog feels the same, but
of course the idea that the dog knows what birthdays and birthday
parties are is far-fetched.  The third statement describes an "ethogram"
of the dog's actions and avoids any mention of thought or feeling.  It
is an incomplete description, one that deliberately describes events and
avoids explaining them, restricting its own predictive ability.  The
second statement interprets the dog's feelings.  While it could be
mistaken, it is only anthropomorphic if dogs cannot feel left out and
cannot want attention-which most dog owners know to be untrue.  In the
end, it may be the most useful of the three statements.

Perhaps the richest source of anthropomorphic error occurs in human
thinking about wild animals.  Since people live with domestic animals,
erroneous theories about their behavior are likely to be disproved in
the course of events.  But since most people's contact with wild animals
is so limited, theories about them may never run up against facts, and
we remain free to imagine ravening wolves, saintly dolphins, or crows
who follow parliamentary procedure.

Science considers anthropomorphism toward animals a grave mistake, even
a sin.  It is common in science to speak of "committing"
anthropomorphism.  The term originally was religious, refering to the
assigning of human form or characteristics to God-the hierarchical error
of acting as though the merely human could be divine-hence the
connotation of sin.  In the long article on anthropomorphism in the 1908
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, the author (Frank B.  Jevons)
writes: "The tendency to personify objects-whether objects of sense or
objects of thought-which is found in animals and children as well as in
savages, is the origin of anthropomorphism." Men, the idea goes, create
gods in their own image.  The best-known example of this tendency comes
from the Greek author Xenophanes (fifth century B.C.).  He notes that
Ethiopians represent the gods as black, Thracians depict them as
blueeyed and red-haired, and "if oxen and horses .  .  .  had hands and
could paint," their images of gods would depict oxen and horses. The
philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach concluded that God is nothing but our
projection, on a celestial screen, of the essence of man. In science,
the sin against hierarchy is to assign human characteristics to animals.
just as humans could not be like God, now animals cannot be like humans
(note who has taken God's place).

Anthropomorphism as Contagion

Young scientists are indoctrinated with the gravity of this error.  As
animal behaviorist David McFarland explains, "They often have to be
specially trained to resist the temptation to interpret the behavior of
other species in terms of their normal behavior-recognition mechanisms."
In his recent book The New Anthropomorphism, behaviorist John S. Kennedy
laments, "The scientific study of animal behavior was inevitably marked
from birth by its anthropomorphic parentage and to a significant extent
it still is.  It has had to struggle to free itself from this incubus
and the struggle is not over.  Anthropomorphism remains much more of a
problem than most of today's neobehaviorists believed.  .  . . If the
study of animal behavior is to mature as a science, the process of
liberation

from the delusions of anthropomorphism must go on." His hope is that
"anthropomorphism will be brought under control, even if it cannot be
cured completely.  Although it is probably programmed into us
genetically as well as being inoculated culturally that does not mean
the disease is untreatable."

The philosopher John Andrew Fisher has noted, "The use of the term
'anthropomorphism' by scientists and philosophers is often so casual as
to almost suggest that it is a term of ideological abuse, rather like
political or religious terms ('communist' or 'counterrevolutionary')
that need no explication or defence when used in criticism."

In a science dominated by men, women have been deemed especially prone
to empathy, hence anthropomorphic error and contamination.  Long
considered inferior to men precisely on the ground that they feel too
much, women were thought to overidentify with the animals they studied.
This is one reason why male scientists for so long did not encourage
female field biologists. They were too emotional; they allowed emotions
to sway judgments and observations.  Women, it was felt, were more
likely than men to attribute emotional attitudes to animals by
projecting their own feelings onto them, thereby polluting data.  Thus
did gender bias and species bias converge in a supposedly objective
environment.

To accuse a scientist of anthropomorphism is to make a severe enticism
of unreliability.  It is regarded as a species-confusion, a forgetting
of the line between subject and object.  To assign thoughts or feelings
to a creature known incapable of them would, indeed, be a problem.  But
to ascribe to an animal emotions such as )oy or sorrow is only
anthropomorphic error if one knows that animals cannot feel such
emotions.  Many scientists have made this decision, but not on the basis
of evidence.  The situation is not so much that emotion is denied but
that it is regarded as too dangerous to be part of the scientific
colloqusuch a minefield of subjectivity that no investigation of it
should take place.  As a result, any but the very most prominent
scientists risk their reputations and credibility in venturing into this
area.  Thus many scientists may actually believe that animals have
emotions, but be unwilling

not only to say that they believe it, but unwilling to study it or
encourage their students to investigate it.  They may also attack other
scientists who try to use the language of the emotions.  Nonscientists
who seek to retain scientific credibility must tread carefully.  An
administrator at one internationally known animal training institute
remarked, "We don't take a position on whether animals have emotions,
but I'm sure if you talked to any one of us we'd say, 'Sure they have
emotions." But as an organization we would not want to be depicted as
saying they have emotions."

Linguistic Taboos

From the belief that anthropomorphism is a desperate error, a sin or a
disease, flow further research taboos, including rules that dictate use
of language.  A monkey cannot be angry; it exhibits aggression.  A crane
does not feel affection; it displays courtship or parental behavior.  A
cheetah is not frightened by a lion; it shows flight behavior.  In
keeping with this, de Waals use of the word reconciliation in reference
to chimpanzees who come together after a fight has been criticized:
Wouldn't it be more objective to say "first postconflict contact"?  In
the struggle to be objective, this kind of language employs distance and
the refusal to identify with another creature's pain.

Against this scientific orthodoxy, the biologist Julian Huxley has
argued that to imagine oneself into the life of another animal is both
scientifically justifiable and productive of knowledge.  Huxley
introduced one of the most extraordinary accounts of a deep and
emotional tie between a human being and a free-living lioness, Joy
Adamson's Living Free, as follows:

When people like Mrs.  Adamson (or Darwin for that matter)

interpret an animal's gestures or postures with the aid of psychological
terms-anger or curiosity, affection or jealousy the strict Behaviourist
accuses them of anthropomorphism, of

seeing a human mind at work within the animal's skin.  This is

not necessarily so.  The true ethologist must be evolution minded. After
all, he is a mammal.  To give the fullest possible

interpretation of behavior he must have recourse to a language that will
apply to his fellow-mammals as well as to his

fellow-man.  And such a language must employ subjective as

well as objective terminology-fear as well as impulse to flee,

curi .  osi .  ty as well as exploratory urge, maternal solicitude in
all its

modulations in welcome addition to goodness knows what

complication of behaviourist terminology.

Huxley's argument ran counter to mainstream scientific thinking when he
wrote that in 196 I, and it remains so today.  A contemporary example is
provided by Alex, the African grey parrot, who was being trained or
tested by experimenters who varied the requests they made of him to
avoid cueing and to prevent Alex from becoming bored.  When reviewers of
a paper that researcher Irene Pepperberg submitted to a scientific
journal vetoed her use of the term horedom, she remarked:

I had a referee go ballistic on me.  And yet, you've watched the

bird, he looks at you, he says "I'm gonna go away." And he

walks!  The referee said that was an anthropomorphic term

that had no business being in a scientific journal.  .  .  .  I can

talk in as many stimulus-response type terms as you want.  It

turns out, though, that a lot of his behaviors are very difficult

to describe in ways that are not anthropomorphic.

What is wrong with exploring the idea, based on many such observations
in a research setting, that parrots and humans may have a shared
capacity for boredom?

Naming

In the study of animal behavior it has long been taboo for scientists to
name the animals.  To separate individuals, they might be called Adult
Male 36, or Juvenile Green.  Most field workers over the generations
have resisted this precept, naming the animals

they spent their days watching, at least for their own use, SpotNose and
Splotch-Tail, Flo and Figan, or Cleo, Freddy, and Mia. In their
published work, some reverted to more remote forms of identification;
others continued to use names.  Sy Montgomery reports that, in 1981,
anthropologist Colin Turnbull declined to provide a supporting statement
for Dian Fossey's book of observations on mountain gorillas because she
assigned names to the gorillas.  It is even more common not to name
animals in laboratories, perhaps for the same reason that farmers often
avoid naming animals they expect to slaughter: proper names have a
humanizing effect, and it is harder to kill a friend.

Rebutting the view that naming animals only causes one to assign them
human traits, elephant researcher Cynthia Moss notes that the opposite
happens to her: people remind her of elephants. "When I am introduced to
a person named Amy or Amelia or Alison, across my mind's eye flashes the
head and ears of that elephant." The no-name norm has gradually changed,
particularly among primatologists, perhaps because of the outstanding
work of researchers who named-and admitted that they named-the subjects
they studied.  Bekoff and jamieson, a field biologist and a philosopher,
have argued that it is not only permissible but advisable to name
animals under study, since empathy increases understanding.  Yet as
recently as 1987, researchers studying elephants in Namibia (then
South-West Africa) were instructed by park authorities to assign the
animals numbers because names were too sentimental.  Granted that a
number is more dehumanized than a name, does that make it more
scientific?  Assigning names to them-referring to a chimpanzee as Flo or
Figan-can be called anthropomorphic, but so is assigning numbers.
Chimpanzees are no more likely to think of themselves as F2 or JF3 than
as Flo or Figan.

We do not know if animals name themselves or each other. We do know that
animals recognize other animals as individuals and distinguish between
them.  Names are the way humans label such distinctions.  Botde-nosed
dolphins may identify and imitate one another's signature whistles,
something very close to a name.  A similar phenomenon has been observed
in captive birds.  When their mate was removed, caged ravens and Shama
thrushes "frequently uttered sounds or song elements which were
otherwise principally or exclusively produced by the partner.  On
hearing these sounds, the bird so 'named' returned at once, whenever
this was possible." The ability to call a mate by name could be even
more useful to wild birds. Some animals clearly respond emotionally to
being given a name.  Alike Tomities in Last Wild Years writes that "only
the ignorant pour scorn on this habit of mine of giving names to the
creatures that, over the years, have shared my home. And also others
that have not.  So long as it is not a harsh sound, it matters little
what the name is, but there can be no doubt whatever that an animal or
bird will respond differently, become more trusting, once it is given a
name."

If naming the animals one studies promotes empathy toward them, this may
help rather than occlude insight into their natures. The essential fact
glossed over in the attack on anthropomorphism is that humans are
animals.  Our relation to animals is not a literary exercise in creating
charming metaphors.  As the philosopher Mary Midgley puts it: "The fact
that some people are silly about animals cannot stop the topic being a
serious one.  Animals are not just one of the things with which people
amuse themselves, like chewinggum and water-skis, they are the group to
which peopk belong.  We are not just rather like animals; we are
animals." To act as if humans are a completely different order of beings
from other animals ignores the fundamental reality.

Anthropomorphism'Wlthout Really Meaning It

Even fierce opponents of anthropomorphism concede that it often works in
trying to predict animal behavior.  By considering what an animal feels
or thinks, we may improve our ability to project how it will act.  Such
guesses have a high success rate. While successful prediction does not
prove that the animal actually felt or thought what was imagined, it is
a standard test of scientific theories.  John S.  Kennedy, the animal
behaviorist who views anthropomorphism as a disease, concedes
nevertheless that it is a useful way to predict behavior.  Kennedy
argues that anthropomor

phism works because animals have evolved to act as if they thought and
felt: "it is natural selection and not the animal that ensures that what
it does mostly 'makes sense,' as we are wont to say."

Even though Kennedy disavows the "assumptions that they have feelings
and intentions," he acknowledges that empathy can be useful for
generating questions and making predictions.  Thus one might predict
that a cheetah, fearful for her cubs, may run close to a lion to lure it
away.  Under Kennedy's formulation, if the cheetah does so, it does not
mean she fears for the lives of her cubs. It only means that she has
evolved to act as if she fears for their lives.  To speculate that
leaving more offspring is the ultimate cause of her behavior is
permitted.  Not permitted is to speculate that fear for their lives is
its proximate cause, far less about how she may feel seeing the lion
grabbing them.  Why is it so impossible to know what animals feel, no
matter how much or what kind of evidence there is?  How is knowing about
their feelings different, in truth, from the assumptions made routinely
about the feelings of other people?

The Solipsistic Defense

Short of being another person, there is no way to know with certainty
what another person feels, although few people, even philosopher-,;,
carry their solipsism (the belief that the self can know nothing but the
selo this far.  In learning others' feelings, people are not always led
by words alone, but watch behavior-gestures, the face, the eyes-patterns
and consistency over time.  Conclusions are based on this, and ground
everyday life decisions.  We love certain people, hate others, trust
some, fear others, and act on this basis.  Belief in the emotions of
others is indispensable to life in human society.  N.  K.  Humphrey
writes, "For all I know no man other than myself has ever experienced a
feeling corresponding to my feeling of hunger; the fact remains that the
concept of hunger, derived from my own experience, helps me to
understand other men's eating behavior." On human claims not to know
animals' pain, Midgley has said of the extreme solipsistic position: "If
a

torturer excused her activities by claiming ignorance of pain on the
grounds that nobody knows anything about the subjective sensation of
others, she would not convince any human audience.  An audience of
scientists need not aim at providing an exception to this rule." She
locates the basis of human assumptions of natural superiority underlying
the position of the solipsist when she quotes an astonishing passage
from Ethics, by the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Benedict de
Spinoza:

It is plain that the law against the slaughtering of animals is

founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than

on sound reason.  The rational quest of what is useful to us

further teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with

our fellow-men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is

different from our own; we have the same rights in respect to

them as they have in respect to us.  Nay, as everyone's right is

defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights

over beasts than beasts have over men.  Still I do not deny that

beasts feel; what I deny is that we may not consult our own

advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way

which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours, and their

emotions are naturally different from human emotions.

Spinoza refrains from discussing how he knows that animal emotions are
different from human ones, or from explaining how this justifies the
human exploitation, plunder, and murder of them. He simply says we have
more power than they do.  Might makes right.  Josd Ortega y Gasset's
defense of hunting comes to the same conclusion, insisting that the
victim is always asking for it:

[Hunting] is a relationshi that certain animals impose on

man, to the point where not trying to hunt them demands the

intervennon of our deliberate will.  .  .  .  Before any particular

hunter pursues them they feel themselves to be possible prey,

and they model their whole existence in terms of this condition.  Thus
they automatically convert any normal man who

comes upon them into a hunter.  The only adequate response to a

being that lives obsessed with avoiding capture is to t?Y to catch it.

[Ortega y Gasset's italics]

Such delusional anthropomorphism, based in turn on a human model that
itself is delusional, reveals deep and hidden assumptions and interests.
Ortega y Gasset's buried premise-that hunted beings seek their own
demise-closely resembles rationales about rape.  A common excuse of
rapists is that women ask for rape, thus seeking and causing their own
violation, most especially when actively trying to avoid it.  A similar
exoneration of hunters is sought here by justifying the capture of
animals by calling animal flight from capture an "obsession"-meaning
they most desire what they most strenuously flee.

Simpler forms of anthropomorphism can also interfere with observation
and distort understanding.  Carolus Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century
Swedish naturalist who developed the classification system of living
things, wrote of the frog: "These foul and loathsome animals are .  .  .
abhorrent because of their cold bodies, pale color, cartilaginous
skeletons, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell,
harsh voice, squalid habitation and terrible venom." The words are all
emotive, referring to emotions Linnaeus felt when he saw a frog.  They
are pure projection.  Calculating is not a scientific term to describe a
frog's eye.  This passage is artit describes little in the physical
world, but powerfully conveys the scientist's subjective state.

Assigning Human Gender Roles to Animals

Another problem with anthropomorphism has been that human views of
gender-often as wrong as human views of animalshave been attributed to
animals.  People sometimes expect a male animal to lead the herd or be
dominant or more aggressive even in species where the reality is
different.  A recent nature program on television featured a family of
cheetahs in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park.  The male cub was called
Tabu and the female TamuSwahili for Trouble and Sweetness.  One expects
different things

from a Sweetness than a Trouble.  Surely the sentence "Trouble is
prowling around my tent" is more threatening than "Sweetness is prowling
around my tent." Sociobiology has tended to encourage prejudices men
have about women by insisting that they are "natural," by which is meant
they can be found among members of the animal Idngdom.  As already
noted, one can prove almost anything by careful choice of species.  It
does not seem accidental that human society has for so long been
compared to baboon society, despite the facts that baboons are far more
sexually dimorphic than humans and that baboons do not form mated pairs.
The idea seems to be to impose greater gender inequality on human
females by enforcing a supposedly natural template.

A serious problem with careless human-animal comparisons is the
inadequacy of our present knowledge of animals' lives, especially of
crucial matters like the role of culture in animal learning

in the wild.  Elephants, for example, learn from their elders which
humans to fear based on the history of the herd with humans.  Mike
Tomities describes watching an eaglet in the wild being taught to fly so
as to hunt and kill by repeated demonstrations on the part of its
parent, who was clearly showing the youngster what to do rather than
engaging itself in search of prey.  Evidently the eaglet is not born
knowing this.  It is transmitted by learning, that is, by culture.  It
is natural, but it is also learned; that it has to be learned does not
make it unnatural.  To use the word natural to describe how the eaglet
kills simply means that an animal was observed doing it.  The
distinction between innate and natural, on the one hand, and cultural
and learned, on the other, loses much of its force in light of more
recent observations on what animals teach each other.

Anthropocentrism

The real problem underlying many of the criticisms of anthropomorphism
is actually anthropocentrism.  Placing humans at the center of all
interpretation, observation, and concern, and dominant men at the center
of that, has led to some of the worst

errors in science, whether in astronomy, psychology, or animal behavior.
Anthropocentrism treats animals as inferior forms of people and denies
what they really are.  It reflects a passionate wish to differentiate
ourselves from animals, to make animals other, presumably in order to
maintain humans at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy and the food
chain.  The notion that animals are wholly other from humans, despite
our common ancestry, is more irrational than the notion that they are
like us.

But even if they were not like us at all, that is no reason to avoid
studying them for their own sakes.  The point has been made by J.  E. R.
Staddon that "psychology as a basic science should be about intelligent
and adaptive behavior, wherever it is to be found, so that animals can
be studied in their own right, for what they can teach us about the
nature and evolution of intelligence, and not as surrogate people or
tools for the solution of human problems."

The knowledge obtained from such study, whether or not it contributes to
the solution of human problems, is still knowledge.

Amimals as Saints and Heroes

Idealizing animals is another kind of anthropocentrism, although not
nearly as frequent as their denigration and demonization.  The belief
that animals have all the virtues to which humans aspire and none of our
faults is anthropocentric, because at its core is an obsession with the
repulsive and wicked ways of humans, which animals are used to
highlight.  In this sentimental formulation the natural world is a place
without war, murder, rape, and addiction, and animals never lie, cheat,
or steal.  This view is embarrassed by reality.  Deception has been
observed in animals from elephants to arctic foxes.  Ants take slaves.
Chimpanzees may attack other bands of chimpanzees, unprovoked and with
deadly intent. Groups of dwarf mongooses battle other groups for
territory.  The case of the chimpanzee murderers Pom and Passion, who
killed and ate the infants of other chimpanzees in their group, has been
well documented by Jane Goodall's research team.  Orangutans have been
seen to rape other orangutans.  Male lions, when they

join a pride, often kill young cubs who were fathered by other lions.
Young hyenas, foxes, and owls have been seen to kill and eat their
siblings.

All is not as humans wish it to be among our evolutionary cousins.  One
has to sympathize with Jane Goodall's reaction to some chimpanzees'
treatment of one old animal, his legs wholly paralyzed by polio, who was
lonely, shunned, and sometimes attacked by those who were still healthy.
In the hope of inducing companions who were grooming each other to groom
him as well, he dragged himself up into a tree:

With a loud grunt of pleasure he reached a hand towards them

in greeting-but even before he made contact they both

SvIrung quickly away and, without a backward glance, started

grooming on the far side of the tree.  For a full two minutes,

old Gregor sat motionless, staring after them.  And then he

laboriously lowered himself to the ground.  As I watched him

sitting there alone, my vision blurred, and when I looked up at

the groomers in the tree I came nearer to hating a chimpanzee

than I have ever done before or since.

It is hard to romanticize anything this ugly.

It has been a long time since anyone called the lion the king of beasts
(except in a Walt Disney film), but dolphins have recently been
romanticized as smarter, kinder, nobler, more pacific, and better at
living in groups than people.  This ignores the well-documented fact
that dolphins can be quite aggressive.  Recently it has been discovered
that some dolphins occasionally rape.  At the same time animal cruelty
does not approximate the human standard.  It is unlikely that dolphin
rape rivals the human figures.  One respected random sample study in
1977 found that almost half of all the women in one U.S.  city had been
victims of rape or attempted rape at least once in their lives.  Child
abuse may occur rarely in the wild, but nothing compares with over one
in every three girls being sexually abused as children, as shown in a
major American study conducted in 1983 by the same researcher.

zoomorphism

If humans can misunderstand animals by assuming they are more like us
than they are, can animals also wrongly project their feelings onto us?
Do animals commit what might be called zoomorphism, ascribing their
attributes to humans?  A cat who brings a human offerings of dead
rodents, lizards, and birds day after day, no matter how often these
objects are greeted with loathing, commits zoomorphism.  This is the
equivalent of offering candy to a cat, as children sometimes do.  In The
Hidden Life of Dogs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes: "When a dog with
a bone menaces a human observer, the dog actually assumes that the
person wants the slimy, dirt-laden object, and is applying dog values,
or cynomorphizing." Were a dog to give a history of the human race, some
valuable attributes may be denied us, just as our history of any animal
civilization would doubtless miss many of its signal achievements.

   Fear Hope and the Terrors of Dreams

Animal behaviorists are unlikely to acknowledge that terror can return
in the dreams of animals.  And yet from a Kenyan "elephant orphanage"
comes a report of baby African elephants who have seen their families
killed by poachers, and witnessed the tusks being cut off the bodies.
These young animals wake up screaming in the night.  What else but the
nightmare memories of a deep trauma could occasion these night terrors?

Wildlife biologist Lynn Rogers has spent decades studying black bears,
following them through forests and swamps.  As a graduate student he
learned about black bears from his professor, Albert Erikson.  One day
they were trying to take a blood sample from an anesthetized wild bear,
when it suddenly woke.  The bear lunged at Erikson.  To Rogers's
surprise, Erikson lunged back.  The bear turned to Rogers.  Erikson
said, "Lunge!" Rogers obediently lunged at the bear, who turned and ran
away.  Rogers says, "I was learning things that would help me interpret
bears' actions in terms of their own fear rather than mine."

An error to which anthropomorphism can lead is to see bears through our
own emotions: we fear them, so we perceive them as

angry and hostile.  The equal and opposite error into which the fear of
anthropomorphism can lead is to refuse to recognize that bears can feel
their own emotions.  Rogers learned to observe bears in terms of those
emotions, discovering that the bears themselves were often fearful.  He
learned what frightened them and how not to frighten them.  "Once I
started looking at bears in terms of their fear, and interpreted all the
things that used to scare me and interpreted those in terms of the
bear's fear, it was easy to gain their trust and begin walking with them
very closely, sleeping with them -doing all the things that you have to
do to see how an animal really lives in its world." So well did Rogers
learn to understand the wild bears that he could curl up for the night a
few feet from their den or even handle their cubs.  Asked whether
scientists don't usually avoid using words like fear and trust to
describe animal behavior, he replied, "Yes.  But I think that we miss
the mark more by ignoring those emotions than by taking them into
account. Those are basic emotions that animals and people share."

His description of a suddenly alarmed bear shows how humans can learn to
"read" bears: "You can be very close to a bear and have things be calm,
until some little unidentified noise happens far off in the forest. Then
the bear is suddenly keyed up, wary.

.  .  .  Whenever there's anything that makes the bear take a deep
breath, which is the first sign of their fear, and then you see its ears
prick up, you think, 'Better give the bear a little bit more room, don't
be standing right on top of it, because there's a good chance it'll
whack you,' " says Rogers cheerfully.  "It feels threatened by some
other thing and it wants room and the peace of mind from you to deal
with that.  After being told in no uncertain terms by bears to get away
in that situation, after a while I learned."

A Cornerston, Emotion

Of all emotions animals might feel, fear is the one that skeptics most
often accept and one of the few that comparative psychology
investigates.  One reason is that fearfulness has an obvious
evolutionary advantage.  Fear can serve as a mechanism to trigger
defensive behavior, so its survival value is clear for any organism
capable of defense.  Fear can set animals running, diving, hiding,
screaming for help, slamming their shells shut, bristling their quills,
or baring their teeth.  If an animal had no mode of defense, fear would
confer no benefit.  Yet fear has also been known to interfere with
survival: the actions of a panicking person or animal are not always the
wisest, as when a terrified soldier on a battlefield runs into the line
of fire.

People also find it easy to believe that animals feel fear because this
emotion is one that humans often elicit from animals, and may even enjoy
eliciting.  An urban dweller who has never so much as visited a zoo has
probably scattered birds into flight, shooed insects away, seen cats
flee from dogs or dogs flee from bigger dogs, and has no reason to doubt
that animals feel fear.

Nor does a powerful intellect seem necessary to experience fright.
Intellect may help one detect subtler reasons to fear, but the less
intelligent still find plenty to fear.  Those who wish to believe that a
great gulf separates people from other animals seldom seem threatened by
the notion of animal fear.  In animals it may not be called an emotion,
however.  Thus, while dictionaries call fear an emotion, animal
behaviorists may prefer the definition of fear that appears in The
Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior.  "a state of motivation which is
aroused by certain specific stimuli and normally gives rise to defensive
behavior or escape."

The Picture of Terror

The biological traces of fear are easy to find in a laboratory.

(Indeed, what animal would not have reason to fear a laboratory?) A
small electrical impulse to a cat's amygdala (part of the brain's limbic
system) produces alertness, a larger one produces the expressions and
actions of terror.  A rat whose amygdala has been removed loses the fear
of cats and will walk right up to one.  Researchers at New York
University trained rats to expect an electric shock when they heard a
tone, and discovered to their surprise that the nerve impulses in the
rats taught to fear the tone went straight

from the ear to the amygdala, instead of via the usual route through the
auditory cortex.  The theory is that the amygdala attaches emotional
import to some forms of learning.  Endocrine studies show that hormones
such as epinephrine and norepinephTine help pass along fear messages.
Geneticists say that in just ten generations of breeding, two strains of
rats can be produced from a parental stock, one fearful, one calm.

But even biologists concede that physiological symptoms alone do not
form a complete description of fear.  Philosopher Antheny Kenny has
given the example of a person who fear heights and avoids them
scrupulously, as compared to a relatively fearless mountain climber. The
person who avoids heights may succeed in doing so and, as a result,
seldom exhibit physiological signs of fear. The climber, more often at
risk, may show such signs more often, yet cannot be said to be more
afraid of heights.  Perhaps, though, the notion of a "counterphobia,"
developed by the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel, is not entirely
inappropriate here.  He spoke of people seeking out the very thing they
most fear because the fear is unconscious.  Thus at least some climbers
are terrified of heights but cannot acknowledge this fear to themselves.
Their behavior is a kind of deep overcompensation, an internal
self-deception meant to keep the feared but fascinating object in
constant view.  Is this, like the well-known compulsion to repeat
traumas, a search for mastery?

Perhaps counterphobia is not confined to humans.  Many animals of
species that are frequently preyed upon show a macabre interest in the
deaths of others like them.  Studying hyenas in the Serengeti, Hans
Kruuk was struck by the frequency with which hyenas or other predators
at a kill were closely observed by wildebeest or gazelle who had drifted
over to watch.  This has been called "behavior of fascination" or "the
bystander phenomenon."

Such onlookers are attracted even when the victim is not of their own
species.  Animals of prey species also show interest in predators who
are not at kills, watching and even following them. A cheetah being
observed by a crowd of gazelle made a sudden dart and caught one of
them, so the behavior has risks.  Kruuk speculates that this dangerous
behavior conveys a selective advantage either because it is worthwhile
for prey species to keep an eye on the predator, preventing ambushes, or
because they learn valuable information about predators.  In his classic
study of red deer, F. Fraser Darling noted that "deer have a marked
objection to allowing any person or object out of their sight which they
may think to be a source of danger." It may also be an example of
counterphobia.

In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin made a
systematic study of how animals look when they are afraid. In both
humans and animals, he found, some or all of the following may occur:
the eyes and mouth open, the eyes roll, the heart beats rapidly, hairs
stand on end, muscles tremble, teeth chatter, and the sphincter loosens.
The frightened creature may freeze in its place or cower.  These rules
hold true across a remarkable array of species.  Somehow it is
surprising to learn that when dolphins are terrified, their teeth
chatter and the whites of their eyes show, or that a frightened
gorilla's legs shake.  Such familiar behavior in a wild animal is a
reminder of our ultimate kinship.  Melvin Konner has written, "We
are-not metaphorically, but precisely, biologicalllike the doe nibbling
moist grass in the predawn misty light; chewing, nuzzling a dewy fawn,
breathing the foggy air, feeling so much at peace; and suddenly, for no
reason, looking about wildly."

Other symptoms of fear may be more specific to a species.  A frightened
mountain goat, biologist Douglas Chadwick reports, flattens its ears,
flicks its tongue past its lips, crouches and raises its tail. According
to Chadwick, a kid raises its tail when it wants attention or to nurse.
The adult continues to raise its tail when fearful.  If the tail is
partially raised, Chadwick says, it means "I'm worried," and a
completely erect tail means "I'm scared," or maybe "Help, Momma!"

Aviculturalist Wolfgang de Grahl notes that frightened young grey
parrots in new surroundings may not only flutter wildly at the approach
of humans but may hide their heads in a far corner.  In de Grahl's view,
these birds probably believe, like the ostriches who were once said to
hide their heads in the sand, that they cannot be seen when they do so.
But this is likely based upon an overestimation of the stupidity of
birds.  Humans who cover their eyes or turn

their faces away from scary sights do not believe they cannot be seen.
Perhaps, like humans, the parrots cannot bear the sight of what
frightens them, or are trying to keep their feelings from overwhelming
them.

What,Animals Fear

Because people have lived and worked with horses for so long, some of
the things that frighten them are fairly well understood.  In addition
to such obvious dangers as predators, they may be alarmed by unfamiliar
motions, noises, and smells.  Changes in their environment often
frighten horses.  Skittish horses even appear to be alarmed by imagined
changes: an object that a horse has passed countless times may suddenly
cause a horse to shy although there has been no alteration.  What
frightens one horse will leave another horse unmoved, and some horses
seldom display fear.  Horses may also be afraid to go to places that do
not smell as if horses have been there.  A horse that goes happily into
horse trailers will sometimes refuse to go into a brand-new horse
trailer.

Personal history also plays a part in the genesis of fear for a
particular animal, who can learn to fear something that it did not fear
before.  This is expressed in commonsense beliefs.  For example, if you
pick up a stick to toss for a dog to retrieve and instead it cringes in
fear, your first thought is likely to be that the dog has been beaten.
Animals form associations of fear with objects that have frightened them
in the past.  Memories can be triggered by resemblances or perhaps even
by wandering thoughts.

Animals also learn fear to avoid pain.  Laboratory rats fear pain and
learn to fear receiving an electric shock.  Coyotes learn to fear
getting a faceful of porcupine quills.  Monkeys learn that a long fall
is painful.

Fear and Self-Defense

Most animals fear their predators, logically enough.  How they recognize
them as predators if they have never seen them in action is not ;always
clear, but the reaction is.  In the Rockies, Chadwick one day saw a lynx
stalking a large mountain goat billy.  It sneaked to a ledge above the
billy, to a position that seemed perfect for pouncing, but hesitated.
Then the goat spotted the lynx, and backed off into a corner.  After a
while the goat came forward, stamped his feet, and began leaping up in
the direction of the cat, hooking toward it with his horns.  The lynx
watched for a while, now and then dangling a paw toward the goat before
finally walking off.  It appeared that the goat was frightened of the
predatory lynx at first, but then lost its fear and became aggressive.
The lynx was mildly frightened of the goat-enough not to attack
immediately and eventually to give up.

One factor in the recognition of predators may be an innate response to
staring eyes.  Birds have been found to be more likely to mob a stuffed
owl if it has eyes.  Young chicks who have never seen a predator avoid
objects with eyes or eye-spots on them, particularly if the eyes are
large.  Wild birds at a feeder table are much more apt to flee if a
design that is highlighted on the feeder resembles eyes, and the more
realistic the eyes, the greater their panic.

Fear of falling from heights also appears to be innate in many animals.
Infants of many species (including humans) show terror when confronted
with a steep drop, or the convincing image of a steep drop, even if they
have never been dropped or seen a drop. The fear of heights is probably
triggered in some species more easily than in others.  A creature that
lives in high places cannot survive if it spends too much time quaking
with alarm.  Yet the mountain goats observed by Chadwick also showed
signs of fear when searching for a foothold on cliffs too precipitous
even for them, or when loose rock underfoot started to slide toward a
drop.

A brown bear cub who fell into the McNeil River in Alaska and was
carried out into the rapids showed signs of fear-flattened ears and
wide, rolling eyes.  His mother saw him fall in but did not seem
alarmed, only going after him once he had been carried a

considerable distance away.  Perhaps she did not realize that what was
safe for her was not safe for him.  Or perhaps she realized, or felt,
that he was in no real danger.  The cub succeeded in getting out on his
own.

Alone and Lost

For social animals, or for the young of most species, loneliness holds
fears.  The fear of being alone is sometimes hard to separate from the
fear of being lost.  Wingnut, a particularly timid brown bear cub
observed on the McNeil River, was said by Thomas Bledsoe to be literally
afraid of his own shadow.  He was afraid of being left alone, and would
call "hysterically" every time his mother left to fish, continuing until
she returned.  Again, it may well be that an earlier experience lies
behind this reaction.  A Pacific bottle-nosed porpoise, Keiki, who lived
in a marine park, was released into a bay nearby.  Separated from his
companions into a location he did not know, Keiki was stricken with
terror, teeth chattering and eyes rolling.

Zoo keepers report that captive elephants are subject to "sudden-death
syndrome" or "broken-heart syndrome," which happens (most often with
young elephants) when they are separated from their social group or put
in a new enclosure by themselves. Jack Adams of the Center for the Study
of Elephants ascribes this to "gripping fear."

Like the horses afraid of unusual things, captive but untamed grey
parrots are suspicious of changes in their surroundings. Rather than eat
from a new bowl, they will go hungry for days. Even once they have
learned to trust and accept food from a particular individual, a change
of clothing can create alarm.  One aviculruralist reported that a group
of mistrustful parrots would accept peanuts only from the
aviculturalist's mother-and only when she wore her usual apron.  The
term neophohia has been coined for this fear of the unfamiliar.
Neophobia can produce odd reactions in an animal raised in unusual
circumstances.  Indian conservationist Billy Arjan Singh raised an
orphaned leopard cub and a tiger cub.

In each case the young cat was terrified by its first glimpses of the
jungle and had to be patiently soothed, repeatedly taken for walks in
the jungle, and generally convinced that it was worth visiting.

Cody, an orangutan raised from infancy by humans, was stricken with
terror on first beholding another orangutan.  The hair stood up all over
his body.  He recoiled in fear and hid behind his human "parent,"
clinging so hard that he left marks.  The placid orangutan who
frightened him so much happened to be his own mother.

Jim Crumley has described watching a flock of two hundred whooper swans
resting in a field in Scotland.  As he looked on, a wave of disturbance
passed through the flock.  Sleeping birds raised their heads and stood
looking to the west, but then the flock settled down.  The swans
gradually relaxed, and then suddenly became agitated again: all heads
shot up, and they called to each other in alarm.  This happened three
times before the perplexed Crumley understood what was worrying the
swans.  A thunderstorm was approaching, and the swans had heard it
coming before he did.  He watched them through the ensuing storm, and
saw that the flashes of lightning brought no reaction, but that every
clap of thunder terrified them.

Learning to Be Afraid

Much fear is learned.  This accords with classical behavioral
conditioning theory, in which animals, including humans, learn to
associate negative stimuli with particular events.  It is important to
be wary of too readily explaining things as innate or instinctive, when
they might just as easily be learned by hard experience, or even somehow
taught by other members of the species.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas notes
some of the specific fears of a husky, Koki, she acquired as an adult
animal.  The sound made by an object whizzing through the air, such as a
rope or a stick, would cause Koki to cower, with chattering teeth and
hair on end.  According to Marshall Thomas, "the sound of alcohol in a
man's voice" had the same effect.  It is possible that Koki was reacting
to scent rather

than sound, since alcohol affects the odor of human perspiration; but in
any case, she had learned to be frightened of men who had been drinking.
It is hard to avoid thinking she had been hit by a drunken man.

Classical conditioning theory was shaken up when it was discovered that
some stimuli are far more easily associated with fear than others.  Rats
readily associate food with illness, and will avoid a food if they have
been ill after eating it.  But they are very unlikely to associate an
electrical shock or a loud noise with illness, no matter how often
experimenters pair the two stimuli.  Many people are afraid of snakes or
spiders who have never had a bad experience with them and who seldom see
them.  Yet, as Martin Seligrnan has pointed out, very few people have
phobias about hammers or knives, although they are much more likely to
have been injured by these.  Perhaps their familiarity with other uses
of these objects dulls fear.

Mountain goats have learned to fear avalanches or rock slides and to
take evasive action.  When goats hear the rumble of a slide overhead,
they put their tails up and their ears back and run for a sheltering
overhang, if one is nearby.  If not, they stamp, crouch, and press
themselves against the mountain.  Some goats take off at the last
moment.

N,m,less F ...  s

Everyone has experienced fear without an apparent objectthe sense that
an unknown misfortune impends.  At other times, the fear is in response
to the sense that we are on unfamiliar ground, like Singh's tiger and
leopard cubs.  We feel that something bad could happen, though we don't
know what.  Fear can exist without an object, a vertigo of the morale.

In Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe the elephants are culled annually.
During this culling, elephant family groups are herded by aircraft
toward hunters who shoot all except the young calves, who are rounded up
for sale.  The elephant calves run around, scream, and search for their
mothers.  One year a wildlife

de at a private sanctuary ninety miles away from the park noticed that
eighty elephants vanished from their usual haunts on the day culling
started at Hwange.  He found them several days later, bunched at the end
of the sanctuary as far from the park as they were able to get.

It has been discovered quite recently that elephants can communicate
over long distances by means of subsonic calls-sounds pitched too low
for people to hear.  So it is not surprising that the sanctuary
elephants apparently received some frightening message from the Hwange
elephants.  But unless elephant communication is far more refined than
anyone has yet speculated, the message cannot have been very specific.
The sanctuary elephants must have known that something very bad was
happening to Hwange elephants, but they can hardly have known what it
was.  The object of their fear was inchoate, but the fear was real.

Fear for Others

Humans not only fear for themselves, but may fear for others. This
feeling borders on empathy, something people are much less likely to
concede to animals than fear.  While examples of animals frightened for
themselves are numerous, examples of fear for others are scarcer.  Often
the situation is equivocal: a monkey that shows physical signs of fear
when watching another monkey being attacked may be fearing for itself as
a possible victim, rather than (or as well as) fearing for the other
monkey.  The clearest evidence of animals frightened for others, as one
might expect, comes from parents frightened for their young.

Wildlife biologist Thomas Bledsoe describes the actions of Red Collar, a
mother grizzly brown bear whose cubs vanished while she fished for
salmon in the McNeil River, a gathering place for bears.  First she
looked up and down the riverbank, then ran to the top of the bluff and
looked there, running faster and faster.  She stood on her hind legs to
see farther, jerking her head around, panting and drooling.  After some
minutes Red Collar gave up the search and went back to fishing.  Here
her behavior is puzzling and

susceptible to varying interpretations, ranging from loss of interest
(which humans would find difficult to identify with) to belief that no
disaster had befallen her cubs.  It is worth noting that on the
occasions when Red Collar's cubs disappeared from the river, they had
invariably gone off with one of the other mother bears and her family
and were in fact safe.  According to Bledsoe, at one point tmo of Red
Collar's cubs were with another bear for three days before she
encountered and reclaimed them.

Parents fear not only losing their young but also that they will be
injured.  Another brown bear Bledsoe observed, Big Mama, was alarmed
when her two curious yearling cubs chose to investigate human observers,
going after them uttering alarm calls until her cubs left the humans
alone.  Lynn Rogers, who studies the smaller black bear, says that when
faced by danger, mother bears not only urge cubs up trees, but also
discourage them from climbing smooth-barked trees like aspens in favor
of rougher-barked pines (which are easier for small cubs to climb). Paul
Leyhausen observed several mother cats who would allow their kittens to
chase mice, but would interfere if the kittens went after rats.  Tested
away from their mothers, the kittens proved quite capable of tackling

rats.

Mountain goat nannies vigilantly try to prevent their kids from taking
dangerous or fatal falls.  According to Douglas Chadwick, nannies try to
stay on the downhill side of their kids, both when the kids are moving
about and when they sleep.  Due to the exuberance of the kids, the
nannies must watch constantly.  Chadwick notes of one mountain goat, "I
could hear her literally cry out when the baby took a hard spill, and
she would rush over to lick and nuzzle it, and then encourage it to
nurse." The mother's cry is very like a human reaction to seeing someone
fall, and it tells a perfect story of empathy.

A peregrine falcon father attacked one of his sons every time the young
falcon came too close to human observers.  Eventually the young bird
changed his behavior, avoiding the observers afterward.  The father's
fear for his son altered the young bird's actions.

Social animals may fear for other members of the group.  One
experimenter decided to investigate the reaction of some young

chimpanzees to "a bold man" and "a timid man." The chimpanzee Lia
avoided the bold man, but the chimpanzee NEmi fought him. One day the
"bold man" bent Nhmi's finger back until she screamed.  Lia joined the
attack, but stopped when she got punched (such is the elegance of
experimental research).  After that, Lia devoted her efforts to wing to
hold Mhmi back, by grabbing her hands and pulling her away.  In a group
of caged chimpanzees at Oklahoma's Institute for Primate Studies, a
female chimpanzee with an infant, whose previous babies had been
removed, became apprehensive when approached by scientists.  So did the
other chimpanzees in the group in nearby cages.  In this case, however,
it is not clear whether the other chimpanzees were actually fearfal;
they may have been merely hostile.  The deep fears that being in a
laboratory may occasion in an animal have never been the object of
study.  Possibly the ethical dilemma created by causing such fear is too
transparent to be acknowledged by scientific scrutiny.

The Spectrum of Fear

Fear at its mildest-a readiness to fear-may be characterized as caution
or alertness and has obvious survival value.  The alert worm hears the
early bird coming and escapes.  When this feeling intensifies it becomes
anxiety, a painful uneasiness of mind.  Psychiatry has made a good
living from the fact that some people seem to be incapacitated by the
degree of anxiety they feel, while others think their anxiety
unnecessary or exaggerated.

Very great fear, like very great pain, can produce shock.  The term
shock has a medical definition, and there is no doubt that animals
experience it.  Hans Kruuk describes what looks like shock in
wildebeestcornered by hyenas.  These animals scarcely try to defend
themselves once they have been brought to a standstill. They will stand
in one spot, moaning, and be torn apart by the hyenas.

Pandora, a two-year-old mountain goat to be fitted with a radio collar,
was trapped at a salt lick by wildlife biologist Douglas Chadwick and
his wife.  At first she made spirited attempts to escape.  She tried to
jump out of the enclosure, hooked a horn at Chadwick, and when tackled
and brought down, attempted to get up again. While being blindfolded she
went into shock, falling limp.  Pandora had injured herself only
slightly in this struggle, so it seems the reaction was the result of
her intense fear.  (After being collared, she was revived with smelling
salts and released, showing no ill effects.)

In Africa a buffalo was knocked down, but not injured, by a lion, and
simply lay on the ground in shock while the lion (perhaps an
inexperienced animal) chewed on the buffalo's tail.  Such an instance is
another demonstration that fear does not always lead to survival.

Brave as a lion

Bravery, sometimes considered an emotion, is related to fearfulness.
Unfortunately bravery, or courage, is poorly defined in humans, so it is
difficult to look for it in animals.  It is often considered to involve
proceedinl, alainst fear, overriding it or setting it aside.  But is a
dangerous act brave if you have no fear when you do it?  Or is it only
brave if you are afraid?

Hans Kruuk reports several instances in which cow and calf wildebeest
were pursued by hyenas.  In each case, when the hyenas caught up with
the calf, the mother turned and attacked the hyenas, butting them so
fiercely as to bowl them over.  Perhaps this counts as bravery.  Without
a calf, a wildebeest cow keeps running. Surely fear makes her run.  On
the other hand, a human in a parallel situation may declare, "I was so
angry I forgot to be scared."

Perhaps a mother wildebeest is so angry she forgets fear.  Is she brave?

For a nature program about cheetahs on television, a lioness was filmed
killing a litter of cheetah cubs.  While she was still there, the mother
cheetah returned.  Seeing the lion, the cheetah circled, hesitated, and
then darted close to the lion until the lion pursued her.  The cubs had
already been killed, though the cheetah probably didn't know this.  The
mother cheetah evidently feared that the

lion would kill her cubs and also feared being attacked by the (much
larger) lion.  Her attempt to draw the lion away seems to qualify as a
brave act.  After the lion was gone, the cheetah found the dead cubs,
picked one up, and carriedit away.  During a sudden storm she was filmed
sitting in the rain, crouched over the cub's body.  When the rain
stopped, she trotted off without a backward look.

Charles Darwin, too, was interested in animal bravery and gave the
following account:

Several years ago a keeper at the Zoological Gardens showed

me some deep and scarcely healed wounds on the nape of his

own neck, inflicted on him, whilst kneeling on the floor, by a

fierce baboon.  The little American monkey, who was a warm

friend of this keeper, lived in the same compartment, and was

dreadfully afraid of the great baboon.  Nevertheless, as soon as

he saw his friend in peril, he rushed to the rescue, and by

screams and bites so distracted the baboon that the man was

able to escape, after, the surgeons thought, running great risk

to his life.

For Darwin, then, it was clear that a "mere" monkey could be a friend
and a brave one at that.  For this he was severely criticized by a
modern scientist for his "tendency to anthropomorphize animal behavior,"
noting "it is small wonder that he was able to find evidence of all the
human attributes [in animals], even moral behavior and bravery." It
apparently upsets some scientists deeply for Darwin of all people to
tell a story about the bravery of a small monkey who puts his own
genetic future at risk for the sake of a member of another species, with
whom he developed not dependence, but warm friendship.  Bravery and
courage are not words scientists are eager to see applied to a monkey by
the founder of evolutionary theory.

Elephant calves, like mountain goat kids or bear cubs, do not always
fear what their elders think they should.  Cynthia Moss, who studies
elephants in Kenya, reports that very young calves appear largely
fearless.  They may come up to her Land Rover and examine it-while
people are in it.  This often alarms their mothers and aunts, producing
visible conflict, Moss reports.  Apparently they would like to hustle
the calves away but are too frightened to come close enough to do so.
They stand very tall, and shuffle back and forth or swing one leg.  When
the calf eventually wanders back, the adults pull it to them, feel it,
and make threatening gestures at the vehicle.

A Possible Need to Fear

By the time elephant calves are grown, they are likely to have had
reason to fear things besides people in Land Rovers.  jects that justify
fear appear in most creatures' lives.  But what about an animal that is
so protected and sheltered that it never encounters anything
frightening?  What happens to its capacity for fear?  It is possible
that such a creature will feel fearful anyway, that its capacity to fear
will demand expression, fastening on an object that seems arbitrary.

Koko, a gorilla, was born in a zoo and raised by humans in a sheltered,
loving environment.  Koko was never exposed to big older gorillas, to
leopards, to hunters, or to anything that might frighten her.  Yet she
has fears-of alligators, for instance, though she has never seen a real
one.  For years she acted afraid of toy alligators unless their lower
jaws were missing.  Though not frightened of her alligator puppet, she
would play chasing games with it. She once threatened an aide in
American Sign Language with being chased by an alligator if she didn't
make lunch faster.  She also appeared to be afraid of iguanas,
specifically a pet iguana whom she saw often.  Although the iguana
(described as "comatose") never made threatening moves toward her, Koko
would run into her own room if the iguana was brought out.

Possibly Koko's fear of lizards and alligators is instinctive, or partly
instinctive; perhaps it is strengthened by the lack of anything else to
fear.  It may be that fear demands an object, and that no matter how
secure and protected a child is, vampires, werewolves, or fire engines
will be conjured up to serve as that object.  In later

years, perhaps because she received gifts of dozens of toy alligators of
various descriptions, Koko seemed to lose her fear of them.

The chimpanzee Viki, raised by humans, had a fear of tarpaulins so
severe that she could be kept from entering forbidden rooms by hanging
pieces of tarpaulin on the doorknobs.  The famous Washoe, while
unimpressed by tarpaulins, has been reported to fear dust mops.  Moja,
another chimpanzee in the same group, was unmoved by dust mops but found
the dividers from ice-cube trays so alarming that researchers kept
ice-cube dividers hidden in drawers and cupboards so that, if Moja
became unruly, they could punish her by taking out a divider and
exhibiting it.

In a remarkable use of narration, Washoe and the other chimpanzees in
her group were also led to fear an imaginary "bogeydog." This grew from
an effort to get the easygoing young Washoe to use the sign for no more
often.  One evening researcher Roger Fouts looked out the window of
Washoe's trailer, and signed to Washoe that he saw a big black dog with
long teeth that ate baby chimpanzees.  He asked Washoe if she wanted to
go out, and got a most emphatic "no." On other occasions,.  when Washoe
was playing outside and did not want to go in, researchers would sign
that they saw the big black dog coming-and Washoe would hasten inside.

Isl,nd Fea,lessn,ss

Fearless animals sometimes greet travelers to remote islands. These bold
creatures, rather than running from humans, may gaze attentively at a
person walking up to them with a net or a gun.  The botanist Sherwin
Carlquist describes an encounter with an insular species of burrowing
owl.  He came close and photographed the owl, which stood and blinked
lazily.  A snake slithered by and Carlquist picked it up.  Unperturbed,
the snake draped itself on his shoulders and allowed him to carry it
about all day.  In the same archipelago, Carlquist was able to stroke
elephant seals lying on the beach and boobies sitting on their eggs.
Elsewhere, an island

species of chuckwalla (a large lizard) was so placid that it would even
disregard "a mild kick from a biologist's shoe."

Biologists who arrived on one uninhabited island after an arduous trip
paused to rest; one researcher lying on the beach fell asleep.  An
island wren alighted on his foot, scrutinized his bootlaces, hopped
along his body, perched on his chin and-to the joy of the sleeper's
companions-peered long and carefully down each of his nostrils before
flying off.  Such fearlessness is found in species living on small
islands where predators are few or absent.  Carlquist argues, "Excessive
skittishness is no virtue, in terms of evolution.  If a bird spends much
of its time flying away from false alarms, it will have that much less
time for feeding and other essential activities. Thus, in a
predator-free situation, a reasonably oblivious animal might be more
successful than a perpetually nervous one." It is not reported whether
island-tame species retain other fears-of heights or of water-but it
seems likely.  Many island species have calmly met their doom through
fearlessness.  The great auk and the dodo are only two who disappeared
because they did not flee hungry humans or their animal companions.

The Other Side of Fear

If fear is the feeling that something bad is imminent, then its converse
may be hope, the feeling that something good is imminent.  In humans
hope, like fear, can be unreasoning and irrational or logical and
conscious.  One of the most endearing traits of pet animals is their
(quite reasonable) hope of being fed, and their unsophisticated joy at
the prospect.  Dogs whirl around in anticipation, cats purr loudly and
rub against objects, people, or other animals.

When Washoe grew older, she had a baby that died four hours after birth
because of a defective heart.  Three years later she had a second baby,
Sequoyah.  Sequoyah was sickly, and despite excellent care from Washoe,
died of pneumonia at the age of two months. Determined that Washoe
should raise a baby, researchers made frantic efforts to find a
replacement, and eventually procured Lou

his, a ten-month-old chimpanzee.  Fifteen days after Sequoyah's death,
Fouts went to Washoe's enclosure and signed "I have baby for you." Every
hair on Washoe's body stood on end.  She displayed signs of great
excitement, hooting, swaggering bipedally and signing "baby" repeatedly.
"Then when she signed 'my baby,' I knew we were in trouble," Fouts said.

When Fouts returned with Loulis, Washoe's excitement vanished instantly.
Her hair flattened and she declined to pick Loulis up, impassively
signing "baby." But after an hour had passed, Washoe began approaching
Loulis, trying to play with him.  That evening, she tried to get him to
sleep in her arms, as Sequoyah had done.  At first she was unsuccessful,
but by the next morning they were clasped together, and from that time
Washoe has been a devoted mother to Loulis, who eventually acquired a
vocabulary of fifty signs from Washoe and the other chimpanzees in the
group.  It seems clear that when told she would get a baby, Washoe hoped
to see Sequoyah again.

Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that animals may feel frightened but not
hopeful.  He wrote, in the 1940s, "One can imagine an animal angry,
frightened, unhappy, happy, startled.  But hopeful?  .  .  .  A dog
believes his master is at the door.  But can he also believe his master
will come the day-after-tomorrow?" Wittgenstein argues that only those
who have mastered the use of language can hope.  Not only does this
statement remain unproven to this day, but there seems no good reason to
doubt that an animal can imagine or even possibly dream about the
future.  Animals may lack the language of hope, but the feelings that
underlie it are probably shared by humans and animals alike.  If animals
can remember and dream about the past, if fear can be relived, why can
they not imagine and project a future in which fear will be unnecessary?

One evening in the 1930s Ma Shwe, a work elephant, and her
three-month-old calf were trapped in rising floodwaters in the Upper
Taungdwin River in Burma.  Elephant handlers rushed to the river when
they heard the calf screaming but could do nothing to help, for the
steep banks were twelve to fifteen feet high.  Ma Shwe's feet were still
on the river bottom, but her calf was floating. Ma Shwe held the baby
against her body; whenever she began to drift away, she used her trunk
to pull the calf back against the current.  The fast-rising water soon
washed the calf away and Ma Shwe plunged downstream for fifty yards and
retrieved it.  She pinned her calf against the bank with her head, then
lifted it in her trunk, reared up on her hind legs, and placed it on a
rocky ledge five feet above the water.  Ma Shwe then fell back into the
torrent and disappeared downstream.

The elephant handlers turned their attention to the calf, which could
barely fit on the narrow ledge where it stood shivering, eight feet
below.  Half an hour later, J.  H.  Williams, the British manager of the
elephant camp, was peering down at the calf wondering how to rescue her
when he heard "the grandest sounds of a

mother's love I can remember.  Ma Shwe had crossed the river and got up
the bank and was making her way back as fast as she could, calling the
whole time-a defiant roar, but to her calf it was music. The two little
ears, like little maps of India, were cocked forward listening to the
only sounds that mattered, the call of her mother."

When Ma Shwe saw her calf, safe on the other side of the river, her call
changed to the nunble that elephants typically make when pleased.  The
two elephants were left where they were.  By morning Ma Shwe had crossed
the river, no longer in flood, and the calf was off the ledge.

Too Noble for Animals

Humans-who are, after all, social primates-believe they know what love
is and esteem it highly.  Yet love is not considered an emotion by many
theorists, but rather a "drive," like hunger.

Whether it is called emotion or drive, in most scientific circles it is
forbidden to say that animals love.  Had Williams been an animal
behaviorist describing Ma Shwe and her calf, he would probably have felt
constrained from using the word love to describe her behavior.  He might
instead have written of a "bond" between Ma Shwe and her calf.  In a
critique of Harry Harrow's deprivation experiments in which young rhesus
monkeys were forced to grow up without mothers, biologist Catherine
Roberts has written, "Does he not know that human love differs
qualitatively from animal love?  Does he not know that a human mother is
unique because she has an abstract idea of the Good and that therefore
human love, unlike animal love, has its ontogenetic beginnings in a
spiritual bond between mother and child?" Animals, in other words,
cannot love like people can because their bonds are not spiritual.

The evolutionary approach stresses the survival value of love over its
emotional authenticity.  The writer of one book for a popular audience
has noted that there is general approval of animals that mate for life,
and added, "It's important to remember .  .  .  that these animals are
not displaying 'true love,' but simply following

the dictates of their genes.  They are survival machines, and their
mission is to multiply their own genes in the gene pool.  If a male felt
that his partner could raise young without him, he'd be off in a flash.
But this would not be abandonment in our terms, and we need not feel
sorry for the female.  Both are pursuing their own game plan that will
lead to the best positioning of their genes-a pursuit that is adaptive
and, therefore, beautiful." Whatever their scientific view of human
coupling may be, most people would not accept this as an accurate way of
looking at their own loves and families, yet where the difference on
this point lies between animals and people is not stated.  Would the
most "beautiful" human love be one that sought dominant genes to
reproduce?  The fact that an animal is described on the one hand as a
machine, and on the other as a being that may ponder whether its partner
can raise young alone is only one of the inconsistencies in such
thinking. Ostensibly objective statements like this that reduce the
complexity of inner life to its function are all too typical.  Perhaps
love, the emotion, has evolutionary value.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
argues of two dogs, Misha and Maria:

Popular prejudice might hold that romantic love, with its

resulting benefit of fidelity, sexual and otherwise, is not a concept
that can be applied to dogs, and that to do so is anthropo morphic.  Not
true.  Fully as much as any human love story, the

story of Misha and Maria shows the evolutionary value of to-

mantic love.  The force that drove Romeo and Juliet is no less

strong or important if harbored by a nonhuman species, because the
strength of the bond helps to assure the male that

he, instead of, say, Tybalt or Bingo, is the father of any children born
and that both parents are in a cooperative frame of

mind when the time comes to raise those children.

Even though she observed that the emotion could serve a scientific
rationale, Thomas has been castigated for using the word love rather
than bond in writing of dogs.

Parental Love

The evolutionary approach suggests that parental lovewatching over
young-makes urgent sense.  Parental care allows more young to survive.
If parents protect their young, the young can grow biLLer before they
have to fend for themselves.  A baboon can even inherit its mother's
status in the troop and an adult female black bear can use her mother's
territory while her mother is still occupying it.  A young animal can
learn survival practices while safely under the protection of its
parent.  Perhaps-this is debated -the parent even teaches it some of
those things.

Not all creatures protect their young.  A turtle lays eggs in the sand
and departs.  Presumably it would not recognize, let alone love, its
offspring.  But if an animal lays eggs and guards them, as crocodiles
do, there must be something that motivates it to do so, and then
prevents it from eating the young when they hatch.  This might not
necessarily be love-it could be brought about by such simple mechanisms
as an inhibition against eating eggs and young crocodiles.  But
expressing care may be evidence of feeling love. Crocodiles also dig
their young out of the nest when they hatch, guard the babies, carry
them in their jaws, and respond vigorously to their distress calls.
Females of a southeast Asian diadem butterfly apparently guard their
eggs by standing over them.  This probably increases their chances of
survival.  However, a female will sometimes continue this behavior even
unto death, her rotted corpse standing guard over a batch of as yet
unhatched eggs.

Mother wolf spiders not only tend their eggs but carry their babies on
their backs.  Perhaps the babies need to learn hunting skills.  More
likely, they just need protection while they grow.  J.  T.

Moggridge tells the story of a trap-door spider he had collected and
decided to preserve in alcohol.  While he knew that spiders twitched for
a long time after being put in alcohol, it was then believed that this
was mere reflex action.  Moggridge shook the baby spiders off her back
and dropped her into alcohol.  After a while, supposing her to be "dead
to sense," he dropped her twenty-four babies in too.  To his horror, the
mother spider reached out her legs, folded the babies beneath her, and
clasped

them until she died.  After this, Moggridge switched to the use of
chloroform.

Can a spider love her babies?  Was it a mere reflex that caused the
trap-door spider to reach for her young?  In this case it seems
possible, but it is hard to be certain.  One can imagine a simple
instinct to draw close to anything that looks like a baby spider.  Or
she might have seized any objects that happened to be floating in the
alcohol.  A mother wolf spider is just as kind to strange baby wolf
spiders as to her own.  This might or might not be accompanied by an
emotional state.

Does a spider love its eggs, something the writer John Crompton compares
to loving a box of billiard balls?  It is so hard to have insight into a
spider's mind that it is almost impossible to guess, based on present
knowledge.  Yet spiders have evolved to produce complex venoms and
digestive fluids, and spin silks of varying types from six different
kinds of silk glands.  Building a spider's web is an extremely
complicated behavior.  One can argue that a spider is not really a
simple organism and that the development of maternal love might well be
a shorter evolutionary step than web building.  Perhaps one day we will
know.  What if it was discovered that when a mother wolf spider sees
young spiders, her body is flooded with a hormone whose presence is
associated with feelings of love in higher animals?  Would that be
evidence that the spider loves her young?  What if it was a hormone
peculiar to spiders?  Would that mean it wasn't love?

When trying to comprehend the inner lives of creatures so unlike us, it
is more useful and accurate to think not of a hierarchy with human
beings at the top, but of a spectrum of creature commonality.  A spider
might have a rich inner life with a riot of emotions including some so
different that using our own emotional range as a touchstone can only
fail us.

While the question of whether a spider can feel parental love is
baffling, there seems little doubt for "higher" animals.  Their behavior
is so complex that to dismiss it as the exclusive result of inhibitions,
reflexes, and fixed action patterns is patently inadequate.  Parental
care manifests itself in feeding the young, washing them, playing with
them, and protecting them from external dangers and from their own
inexperience.  Mammals, even "primitive" ones such as platypuses and
spiny anteaters, suckle their young. The suckling mother is extremely
vulnerable in a way that she will seldom allow herself to be with adult
animals-in a way that many protective instincts would advise against.

Young mammals are safest in their own nests.  In a series of classic
experiments on rats, researchers put baby rats on cage floors.  Mother
rats, and in some cases females who were not mothers, proved zealous at
retrieving the babies and bringing them into their nests.  They would
cross an electrified grid to get to the babies and retrieve unrelated
babies as quickly as their own.  Curious to see how long this would be
kept up, the experimenters offered one rat no fewer than fifty-eight
babies, every one of whom she picked up and crammed into her nest.  "The
female appeared to be as eager at the end of the experiment, which had
to be interrupted because we had no more young at our disposal, as she
had at the beginning." This behavior did not enhance her own survival.
Similarly, when biologists climb up to ledges to band young thick-billed
murres (penguinlike seabirds), most of the adults fly away in panic, but
a few staunch birds sit tight.  Frightened chicks whose own parents have
flown off seek out the remaining adults.  "It is not uncommon to see one
motivated brooder vainly attempting to shelter a dozen or more chicks,"
seabird biologists have noted.

In contrast to the zealous rats and motivated murres, Nubian ibex who
bear triplets instead of twins are reported to reject one fawn.
Presumably the doe cannot produce milk for three, so if she kept them
all, they would all be malnourished.  This "lifeboat behavior" could
also be a form of ethically responsible love.  When most of a lioness's
cubs die or are killed, she may abandon the last cub.  Some biologists
suggest that it is energetically inefficient for her to put the effort
of raising a litter into just one cub, when she can breed again sooner
if she does not, and that her "instinctive sense of investment" tells
her so.  What an instinctive sense of investment may be or feel like,
and how it differs from making difficult, loving decisions under
conditions of constraint, is not clear.  Human parents have been known
to take similar actions.

What goes on in the mind of an ibex doe or a lioness in this situation
is as yet unknown.

As young mammals grow older, their parents often feed them. Some animals
simply let the young steal pieces of their ovrn food, while others bring
food to the young.  An ocean bird may begin by regurgitating partially
digested food for its chick.  When the chick is older, the parent shifts
to bringing whole fish, which it holds until the chick manages to grab
it properly.  As baby animals grow bigger, most of them play, sometimes
with their littermates and sometimes with their parents.  As anyone who
has observed kittens or puppies knows, young animals can be rough on
adults.  Biologists studying wild dogs in Africa commented that when the
dogs brought food to a mother and her three-week-old puppies, the pups
were aggressive in taking their share.  If their mother had a chunk of
meat a pup wanted, it would tweak the side of her face with its sharp
teeth and she would let go.  Older pups followed hunting adults and took
over the carcasses of prey, sometimes even nipping the adults on the
rear to make them leave faster.

One of the most important tasks of parents is to protect the young. Baby
animals are typically small, inept, and defenseless and make desirable
meals for predators.  Some parents protect their young by hiding them.
At other times parents must fight to save their young.  In a typical
instance, a lion was seen to attack a herd of six giraffe.  Most ran
away, but one calf was too slow.  Its mother tried to push the calf to
run faster, but when she saw this would not work, she stood over it and
faced the lion.  The mother was in real danger, since lions frequently
succeed in killing giraffe.  The lion circled the giraffe, and the
mother wheeled to face him.  Whenever he got close, she kicked at him
with her forelegs.  After an hour, the lion gave up and left.  The two
giraffe rejoined the herd.

The willingness of animal parents to fight in defense of their young is
well-known, since it is often humans who are the threat. But humans are
so menacing that such encounters seldom develop into actual fights.  The
last known whooping crane nest in the United States was found in Iowa by
ornithologist and egg collector J.  W.  Preston.  He wrote, "When I
approached the nest, the bird, which had walked some distance away, came
running back .  .  .

wings and tail spread drooping, with head and shoulders brought level
with the water; then it began picking up bunches of moss and sticks
which it threw down in a defiant way; then, with pitiable mien, it
spread itself upon the water and begged me to leave its treasure, which,
in a heartless manner, I did not do." This might have been either a male
or female crane, since both sit on the eggs.

Animals also try to rescue their young from dangers other than
predators, as in the case of a cat who had never entered water but
jumped into a swimming pool to rescue her kittens.  To the north of
Hudson Bay, explorer Peter Freuchen came across a family of six wolves,
two adults and four cubs.  The wolves were howling.  One of the cubs was
caught in a trap set at a can of stones over a food cache.  The other
wolves had overturned many of the large stones and scraped the frozen
earth around the stone to which the trap was fastened in their efforts
to free the cub.  When humans protect their young this way we call it
love.

Since so many examples given of parental love are of motherly love, it
is worth stressing that fatherly love is apparent in some species.  It
is estimated that direct paternal care is found in ten percent of
mammalian genera.  Paternal care ranges from slight to intense devotion.
The conservationist Gerald Durrell has described the birth of
cotton-topped marmosets at the jersey Zoo. After the mother had
delivered the usual marmoset twins, the father took them, washed them,
and carried them with him everywhere he went, often one on each hip,
only retaming them to the mother to suckle.  As they grew older, they
would leave his side to explore.  If he felt there was a threat to their
safety, he would rush over and snatch them up.  Wild marmoset fathers of
various species behave in the same way.  Often they assist at the birth.
Lion-headed marmoset fathers have been seen to mash fruit in their
fingers for the babies when they begin to wean.  Father owl monkeys (or
night monkeys) also usually carry their babies, play with them, and
share food with them.  As a result, a father owl monkey often trails
behind the mother and older offspring and arrives at fruit trees when
they are alreadypartly depleted.  The mother suckles the infant and then
returns it to the father.

Red fox researcher David Macdonald describes a new father wriggling with
eagerness to care for his children:

Smudge was almost comical in his husbandly diligence.  Before

eating a scrap for himself, he gathered as much food as he

could wedge into his gaping jaws, and lugged it to Whitepaws'

earth.  There he would warble at the entrance.  If she did not

emerge, he would use his nose like a billiard cue to poke the

lumps of food through the entrance and into the den.

When the cubs were older, Smudge's ambition was to play with them,
something the mother and her sisters did not always allow.  "Smudge
would skulk in the vegetation, waiting for Big Ears [their maternal
aunt] to fall asleep, whereupon he would quietly warble to the cubs who
would sneak off to gambol with him.  Soon their exuberance led to
squeals and smirks that awoke Big Ears who would vigorously reprimand
Smudge."

The psychoanalytic paradigm of murderous rivalry between fathers and
sons claims to represent the state of nature.  Psychoanalysis, like
sociobiology, has been mainly interested in observations that support
received theory.  Counterexamples tend to be ignored: father zebras
remain on good terms with their grown sons, who eventually leave the
herd not because they are driven out but because they are looking for
others to play with.  Researchers studying wild zebras once decided to
mark a stallion who was still living in his father's herd at the age of
four and a half years, so that they could follow his subsequent travels.
To their sorrow, the anesthetic dart killed him.  The old stallion came
over to the body repeatedly and tried to rouse him.  Later that day he
spent hours roaming from herd to herd, calling for his son.

Direct paternal care is seen in many species of birds, including the
kiwi, in which case the father incubates the eggs and raises the chicks
without help from the mother.  In many other instancesthe father beaver
playing with his children; the father wolf letting his cubs chew his
tail- the father dwarf mongoose taking the kits foraging with him-it
appears that they love their children, or at least enjoy their company.

Is It Love?

In these and other ways animal parents appear to act out of love for
their young.  To argue that it cannot be compared to human love, as many
theorists do, is a classic example of what Roger Fouts calls the rubber
ruler, in which the standards are changed depending on whether the
behavior is human or nonhuman.  In considering if it is possible to know
whether a mother ape loves her baby, it is worth asking if it is
possible to know whether the people down the street love their baby.
They feed it and care for it.  They tickle it and play with it.  They
defend it with all their might.  But all that is not considered proof in
the case of the ape.

Unlike the ape, the people down the street may say they love their baby,
but how do we know they are telling the truth?  Ultimately we cannot
know exactly what other people mean when they speak of love.  Yet in
reality, we are usually quite sure they love that baby.  If we see
parents with a baby they don't love, we are shocked. When we learn of
child abuse, we are outraged, in part because we believe that a
relationship of love is violated.  In truth, most people believe that
the ape loves her baby, that the dog loves her puppies, and that the cat
loves her kittens.  Most scientists probably believe it, too, though
they may be hesitant to say so, at least in a scientific document.  A
skeptical observer might still object that an ape with her baby is
acting out of mere instinct.  Could it not be that the people down the
street are acting out of instinct as well?  It depends on whether love
is defined as an instinct.  And, in either case, if it is called
instinct, does that mean no feelings of love can also be there?

On the flip side of parental love is filial love, the youngster's love
for his or her parents, which is harder to pin down.  To almost any
demonstration of attachment on the part of an animal to its parent-of
the tiger cubs licking their mother, of the wolf cubs running to greet
their father-the skeptic can simply argue that it is self-interest.  The
younger animal may simply wish to be around the source of food, warmth,
and safety.  Young animals do not, as a rule, fight to protect their
parents.  Nonetheless, one adolescent wild baboon, Paul, tried to defend
his mother against large adult males in the troop.  He was not very
successful, but a scientific

observer felt that he risked a great deal in his mother's defense. VThen
they grow older, many young animals are so reluctant to leave their
family that they must be driven away by their parents. But this alone
cannot prove that they love their parents.  They might be reluctant to
depart from safety and their accustomed habits, to go into unknown
territory.  Not all young animals are driven away-in some families the
bonds of affection are lasting.  Chimpanzees usually remain in the same
group as their mothers.  They spend time with each other, and the young
apes may help their mothers care for the next generation.  Elephants,
too, live in stable maternal herds and cooperate in extraordinary ways
with one another.  Elephant aunts play important roles in child care.

In a captive baboon colony, experimenters removed female baboons as soon
as they began to have menstrual cycles after the birth of an infant. The
babies were usually about six months old and were left behind.  Other
females in the colony took over their care.  Seven or eight months
later, the original mothers were returned to the colony, often
anesthetized.  Each time an unconscious baboon was carried in, her baby
began to utter "lost baby" calls. When she was returned to the enclosure
the baby went to her and the mother-child relationship resumed.  Despite
the excellent care they were receiving, these young apes recognized and
yearned for their mothers.  Baboons are individuals, however, and one
baby chose to remain with its foster mother.

Jane Goodall describes the reaction of a male chimpanzee called Flint,
who was eight years old when his mother, Flo, died. Flint sat over Flo's
body for many hours, occasionally tugging at her hand.  As the days
passed, he grew increasingly apathetic and lethargic.  In one remarkable
instance, three days after his mother's death, Flint was seen to climb a
tree and stare at the sleeping nest he had shared with his mother a few
days before.  He became more and more listless, and died within the
month, probably of gastroenteritis.  Goodall's scientific conclusion
was: "It seems likely that psycholo 'cal and physiological disturbances
associated with 91 loss made him more vulnerable to disease." Sy
Montgomery quotes Goodall's poignant commonsense rendering of the same
idea: "Flint died of grief."

AAoption

The flexibility of parental love is seen in those animals who adopt
unrelated babies.  Black bear researchers regularly persuade wild
females to adopt orphaned cubs.  Researchers in Africa kidnapped infant
and juvenile hamadryas baboons and released them near unrelated troops.
Invariably these young monkeys were promptly adopted by young adult male
baboons, who cared for them tenderly.  In general, the younger a baby
animal is, the more apt it is to be adopted.

Even greater flexibility in parental love is demonstrated by instances
of animals adopting the young of other species.  The experimenters who
gave the mother rat the opportunity to adopt fifty-eight babies went on
to offer mother rats odder babies.  The rats readily adopted baby mice
and baby rabbits.  They also retrieved young kittens and tried to keep
experimenters from taking them out of the nest again.  But since kittens
nurse from a mother who is lying down, and mother rats nurse from a
standing position, the rats could not suckle the kittens despite their
vigorous attempts to shove them into position.  Curious to know how far
this would go, the experimenters procured two bantam chicks, and the
rats "eagerly and repeatedly" tried to tuck these into their nests. This
was an even worse match, however, as the chicks "became very loud and
flapped" when the rats tried to grab them by the neck and drag them
home.

There are, of course, innumerable cases of dogs or cats who have adopted
orphaned skunks or piglets, and pictures of such odd families are
frequently seen in the newspapers.  There is an old story of an unusual
adoption, not initiated by humans:

At Northrepps Hall, near Cromer, the seat of the late Sir

Fowell Buxton, a large colony of parrots and macaws had been

established, for whom a home had been provided near the

house in a large open aviary, with hutches for them to lay in.

But the birds as a rule preferred the woods .  .  .  only coming

home at feeding-time, when, on the well-known tinkling of

the spoon on the tin containing their food, a large covey of

gayly plumaged birds came fluttering down to the feed-place,

presenting a sight not often to be seen in England.  The

hutches being then practically deserted, a cat found one of

them a convenient place to kitten in.  While the mother-cat

was away foraging, one of the female parrots paid a chance

visit to the place, and finding the young kittens in her nest, at

once adopted them as her own, and was found by Lady

Buxton's man covering her strange adopted children with her

wings.

Other species seem not to adopt.  According to researchers, a wildebeest
calf who loses its mother among the vast herds will not be adopted and
will perish.  This raises the question of how seleclivity in love is
esteemed.  Humans are not likely to be favorably impressed when parents
cannot tell whether or not a baby is their own, but they also do not
like to see parents discriminating too harshly against the babies of
others.  There seems to be no reason why either response should be
considered incompatible with parental love, though we esteem one more
than the other.

Imprinting

Ducklings and gosling will grow attached to and follow whatever creature
they see during a short period after they hatch.  They become
"imprinted" on that creature.  In this sense, a mallard is not born to
love only a mallard, and a teal is not born to love only a teal.  They
come to love whomever seems to be their primary caretaker.  For a
mallard this is usually a mallard, and for a teal a teal, but mallards
raised by humans, and who become attached to their human foster parents
are common.  It is often said of animals raised by humans, "He thinks he
is a human." Or maybe he thinks the human is a mallard.  Either
illustrates the flexibility built into filial love.

Besides parents and children, love can extend to other family members.
One young wild elephant seemed to be as fond of his grandmother,
Teresia, as he was of his mother.  Often he would

suckle from his mother and then go to Teresia, who was more than fifty
years old, and stand with her or follow her.  In many species, from
beavers to gibbons, young animals may remain with their parents and help
raise the younger offspring.  Young coyotes often remain with their
parents and help raise subsequent new pups. These older siblings may
feed, wash, protect, and simply baby-sit the pups.  The arrangement,
referred to as allomothering, clearly benefits the parents, who need all
the help they can get with raising the pups; and it benefits the pups,
who have more adults looking after their welfare.  In some instances the
helpers are siblings of the parents, not of the young.  If the parents
are killed, the older siblings or aunts and uncles can raise the pups if
they are not too young.  In one pack of wild dogs in the African
savanna, the mother of nine pups died when they were five weeks old.
Apparently they were old enough to switch to solid food, for the rest of
the pack, consisting of five males, reared them successfully.

Avoiding any mention of fondness, evolutionary biologists have
identified a number of ways this benefits siblings and aunts and uncles.
Possibly they have more time to learn hunting skills.  If there are no
good coyote territories available, they are spared the necessity of
going out and fighting for one.  They also increase the chances of their
genes being passed on, since they share many genes with their young
siblings, nieces and nephews.  But possibly, also, they love their
families.

Year-old beavers typically remain with their parents and help take care
of their younger siblings.  Frangoise Patenaude, who observed wild
beavers in Quebec, saw the yearlings grooming the babies and fetching
food for them.  During the winter, the entire family was largely
confined to the lodge.  On more than one occasion, when an infant beaver
fell into the water in the entrance to the lodge, a yearling picked it
up and carried it in its arms to the dry floor of the lodge.  (Beavers
can walk on their hind legs and carry things, including very small
beavers, in their forelegs.)  The yearlings later played with their
younger siblings and helped perform every aspect of parental care
except, of course, suckling.

Social Animals

Social animals who live in groups often behave in a friendly way toward
other members of the group, even when they are not relatives.  Troops of
baboons and herds of zebra or elephants are not just crowds of
strangers.  This can go far beyond toleration to a kind of need: a
monkey kept alone will work for the reward of seeing other monkeys, just
as a hungry one will work to get food. The animals in a social group
have relationships with each other, some of which are affectionate.
Lionesses baby-sit for one another just as house cats sometimes do.  In
baboon troops, many baboons have alliances with other baboons, whom they
can count on to take their side in squabbles.

Elephants appear to make allowances for other members of their herd. One
African herd always traveled slowly because one of its members had never
fully recovered from a broken leg suffered as a calf.  A park warden
reported coming across a herd with a female carrying a small calf
several days dead, which she placed on the ground whenever she ate or
drank: she traveled very slowly and the rest of the elephants waited for
her.  This suggests that animals, like people, act on feelings as such,
rather than solely for purposes of survival.  It suggests that the
evolutionary approach is no more adequate to explain animal feelings
than human ones.  A single example such as this one, no matter how well
documented, may not challenge the entire evolutionary paradigm for
feelings, but it raises questions that biologists have yet to face.
There appears to be so little survival value in the behavior of this
herd, that perhaps one has to believe.  that they behaved this way just
because they loved their grieving friend who loved her dead baby, and
wanted to support her.

As with humans, sometimes affection among animals combines with
admiration, and can flow to other species as well. Wolves display what
appears to be admiration for the dominant (or alpha) wolves in their
pack.  In the wolf's close relative, the dog, this capacity to admire
leaders has made domestication a success. The average dog-in its
eagerness to please-treats its owners the way a wolf treats an alpha
wolf.

Other social animals are also often willing to accord humans this kind
of status.  Researcher Jennifer Zeligs, who studies and trains sea
lions, appears to be in this position with her experimental subjects.
Her success in training them to retrieve objects underwater and to
perform other tasks seems to be the result of their desire to please her
and receive her praise and attention.  She does not reward them with
food, working with them only after they have eaten.  One could object
that this is not love, because the sea lions get pleasure from Zeligs:
attention, grooming, and fun.  That is why they give her the attention
they do.  But is human love any different?  Must love be unrewarding to
be real?  The point is that sea lions seem capable of love and
affection.  That they can, under special conditions, extend these
feelings beyond their own kind, to an alien species, merely demonstrates
some of the conditions of those feelings.  Two sea lions can feel
affection for one another, and Zeli benefits from the extension of that
feeling to a human.

gs

Sometimes the benefit of social behavior appears obvious, but at other
times the advantage is less clear.  Hans Kruuk's study of spotted hyenas
showed that their social behavior was highly advantageous, but was
puzzled when he turned his attention to European badgers.  Though they
live together in communal burrows or setts, badgers do not forage
together, patrol territory together, defend each other, or cooperate to
raise their young.  "Badgers do not have an effective alarm call, so
they do not even warn clan members of approaching danger." The only
material benefit Kruuk could point to was the practice of sleeping in a
huddle to keep warm.

If it is true that social life offers badgers no survival edge, then why
do they live together?  Perhaps they simply enjoy the companionship.

Friendship

In general, animals are friendly only toward animals of their own
species.  Significant exceptions occur in captive animals, who are often
isolated from others of their kind or confined with animals of other
species.  In these circumstances some animals make

friends with animals of other species, including humans.  John Teal, who
experimented with raising endangered musk oxen, was once shut in a pen
with them when some dogs came running up.  To his alarm, the musk oxen
snorted, stamped, and thundered toward him.  Before he could move, they
formed a defensive ring around him and lowered their horns, pointing at
the dogs.  This is how musk oxen protect their calves from predators.
But friendship with an animal of another species does not guarantee
friendship with the entire species: a hand-reared leopard was raised
with a dog and loved to play with her, but tried to kill other dogs,
even dogs that closely resembled her friend.

Although it is rare, wild animals have been observed in friendly
associations.  Biologist NEchael Ghiglieri, patiently waiting for
chimpanzees to come to a fruiting tree in the Tanzanian rain forest, was
astonished when the first chimpanzee, a male, arrived in the company of
an adult male baboon.

Overtures of friendship are not always received kindly.  Wild dogs and
hyenas in the Serengeti are competitors who regularly steal kills from
one another.  A group of wild dogs had had a kill stolen by spotted
hyenas and then chased one hyena, biting its -,jump so fiercely that it
sat in a hole and snarled until the dogs left. Yet that evening, when
the wild dogs bedded down for the night and the hyenas prowled, a young
hyena (still with a fluffy coat) approached the dominant male wild dog,
Baskerville, sniffing him enthusiastically.  Baskerville twitched and
growled, yet every time he tried to go back to sleep, the hyena inched
closer.  The hyena began to lick and groom Baskerville, who at first
seemed to be ignoring this.  servers could tell he was not asleep,
however, for his eyes got wider and wider as the young hyena continued
these sociable ministrations.  Baskerville pulled himself into a tight
ball and glared over his shoulder, but the hyena calmly lay down next to
him, apparently ready to settle in for the night.  This was too much for
Baskerville.  He leapt to his feet with a loud bark.  The pack awoke and
moved off-followed by seven spotted hyenas. Eventually the wild dogs
were able to elude the hyenas, but when they killed a gazelle the next
morning, hyenas stole it from them. Given the relationship between
hyenas and wild dogs, it is not hard

to understand why Baskerville rejected the young hyena's advances.
Perhaps many friendly gestures between wild animals receive cold
responses for similar reasons.

Sometimes animals try to make friends across species out of desperation.
In Madagascar a brown lemur was trapped and transported to another area,
where he escaped.  There were no brown lemurs, so he joined a troop of
ring-tailed lemurs.  The species have different coloration, calls, scent
glands, and marking habits.  The ing-tails did not welcome the brown
lemur, but tolerated him. The males deferred to him and so, by
definition, he became the dominant male in the troop.  The females would
not allow him to scent-mark them and usually would not let him sit next
to them and groom them.  During one breeding season he made advances to
a female named Grin, who let him sit with her only five times in
twenty-four attempts and who refused to mate with him, although she
mated with some male ring-tails.  His friendliest reception came from
juveniles, who not only let him sit with them, but groomed him, and
occasionally made the first approach.  While his acceptance into the
troop was only partial, it clearly meant a great deal to him.

Even an animal not considered social may make friends in captivity.
Ocelots, usually considered solitary animals, can become quite friendly
with humans.  Perplexed by the amicability of his ocelot, Paul Leyhausen
speculated that such cats have a capacity to be friendly as kittens, but
that once adult they cannot help seeing other cats as rivals or
intruders.  Humans, he hypothesized, are similar enough to be friends
with, yet sufficiently dissimilar that we do not seem like rivals: "Thus
genuine and lasting friendship, of a kind which may never occur between
cats themselves, is possible between humans and members of various
species of solitary cats.  In other words, if the above hypothesis is
correct, the individual wild cat would really 'like' to be friendly with
other cats, but feels toward them much like the eccentric who offends
everyone and then, asked why he has no friends, replies in amazement, 'I
wish I did, but everyone else is so horrible!'

It is rare for animals to make friends with humans when they are not
captive, for their own species make more suitable friends,

and humans are usually feared.  Wild beavers, given time, will tolerate
well-mannered humans.  If the humans supply favored beaver food, the
beavers will associate with them, even to the point of climbing into
their laps to get especially tasty food.  They distinguish humans they
know from strangers.  Yet there is no reason to suppose that the beavers
actually enjoy the company of the humans.  Lack of fear does not equal
friendship.

When Animals Have Pets

Friendship between people and animals often occurs when the animal is a
pet.  Animals also have pets occasionally-usually captive animals, since
having a pet is a luxury.  Lucy, a chimpanzee reared by humans, was
given a kitten to allay her loneliness.  The first time she saw the
little cat, her hair stood on end.  Barking, she grabbed it, flung it to
the ground, hitting out and trying to bite it. Their second encounter
was similar, but at their third meeting she was calmer.  As she wandered
about the kitten followed her, and after half an hour Lucy picked it up,
kissed it and hugged it, marking a complete change of attitude.
Subsequently she groomed and cradled the kitten, carried it constantly,
made nests for it and guarded it from humans.  She behaved as do
affectionate small children with imperfect ideas of what actually
pleases their pets.  The kitten "never appeared anxious to be
transported by the chimpanzee" and was unwilling to cling to Lucy's
stomach, so she either carried it in one hand or urged it to ride on her
back.  Koko the gorilla showed great tenderness toward a pet kitten she
herself named All Ball.  This is strikingly like love, the real thing,
because it is chosen without regard for survival value.

It is common for horses to make friends with other animals such as
goats.  They are careful not to hurt the goats.  Accounts of racehorses
who mope and do not run well when separated from their goat friends are
numerous.  These goats may well be the equivalent of pets.  The horses
are not confused about species: they know that the goat is not a horse,
but they like it anyway.  It is also

reported that one captive elephant routinely put aside a little of its
grain for a mouse to eat.

Romantic Love

As much as people admire friendship and familial love, our highest
esteem is accorded romantic love, which is considered the most suspect
to ascribe to animals.  Many people consider romantic love so rarefied
that they believe people in other cultures do not experience it, let
alone animals.  It has been claimed that the whole idea of romantic love
was invented in medieval Europe and that it is only a pastime of the
privileged.  In any case, anthropologists studying human beings had not
deemed it a fit subject for study until the American Anthropological
Association held its first session on the anthropology of romance in
1992.  Anthropologist William jankowiak said it took him three years to
organize the session. "I would call up people and they would just
laugh." When asked why romantic love had been ignored, Jankowiak said
researchers had assumed that "this type of behavior was
culture-specific." He also pointed to a bias toward linguistic evidence.
"The dominant model was a linguistic one that said if it isn't in the
language it's not important." Not only do some cultures lack words for
romantic love, but it is undefined in the anthropological lexicon. "They
themselves don't have the categories for this."

Jankowiak said that when he asked colleagues for contributions to the
session on love and was told in reply that romantic love did not exist
in the cultures they studied, he would ask whether people in those
cultures ever had clandestine affairs, ever refused arranged marriages,
ever eloped or committed suicide over love. The answer was always yes,
such things did occur, but that the researchers had not examined it or
followed up on it.

Another reason that romantic love in other cultures has been ignored is
the assumption that it is a frill.  As Charles Lindholm, a pioneer in
this field, said, "The general paradigm in anthropology, as in all
social sciences, is utilitarian, maximizing gain.  Romantic love doesn't
seem to fit the paradigm very well.  .  .  .  When you

have people sacrificing their lives for each other, it doesn't seem like
you're maximizing gain.........  He laughed.  "Another part of it is
that it's embarrassing!  You're asking people about personal
relationships and anthropologists, like everybody else, aren't
comfortable asking people about that." Nor has the general academic
milieu favored the study of love.  "It's sort of a woman's type of
thing, you know.  It's not good for your career."

All these factors-the denigration of love as a luxury or feminine, the
absence of linguistic evidence, the stress on utility, the
embarrassment, the lack of a theoretical framework, even the career
concerns-may help explain the parallel lack of the study of romance
among animals.

Jane Goodall, whose work has illuminated the emotional life of
chimpanzees, has nevertheless argued that chimpanzees do not know
romantic love.  She describes the chimpanzees Pooch and Figan, who
repeatedly showed a preference for one another when Pooch was sexually
active, leaving the group and going off together into the forest for a
few days.  This is in contrast to chimpanzees who remain with the larger
group while sexually active.  Goodall writes, "I cannot conceive of
chimpanzees developing emotions, one for the other, comparable in any
way to the tenderness, the protectiveness, tolerance, and spiritual
exhilaration that are the hallmarks of human love in its truest and
deepest sense.  .  .  .  The most the female chimpanzee can expect of
her suitor is a brief courtship display, a sexual contact lasting at
most half a minute, and, sometimes, a session of social grooming
afterward.  Not for them the romance, the mystery, the boundless joys of
human love." Perhaps this is true.  And yet we do not fully grasp what
chimpanzees feel, or whether there are boundless joys of simian love
chimpanzees feel that we do not.

Some animals pair for life, staying together for as long as both live.
Some animals pair off for a season, and others mate and separate at
once.  Among animals who form relationships of significant duration,
some form pairs and others form larger groups, such as trios, or the
elephant seal "harem." Evolutionary biologists often describe pairing as
a device to ensure adequate parental care, but it is not always clear
that this is the case.  The butterfly fish of Hawaii

ian reefs (Chaetodontidae), for example, are said to provide no parental
care for their eggs or larvae but do form lasting pairs.

Some people argue that there is no affection between animals who do not
form partnerships, who mate and then separate, but this is illogical. A.
J.  Magoun and P.  Valkenburg, who used a small airplane to track
wolverines across the tundra, have described the mating of these rare,
solitary animals.  To an observer, they write, most wolverine mating
appears to be a matter of aggressive males and reluctant females.  They
were surprised by the behavior of the female they called F9 and an
unidentified male.  F9 and the male joined in exploring a rock
outcropping on the ttmdra.  They played. They rolled on the ground. Like
an exuberant dog, F9 crouched and lashed her tail, then bounded away.
When the male did not respond to her sniffing him, F9 turned and bumped
him with her hip.  After playing, they rested and then mated.  Two days
later they separated, perhaps never to meet again.  This describes a
friendly, playful interaction, not one-sided lust or a convenient
arrangement.  Is it reasonable to call it love?  Liking?  Mutual
interest?  F9 was just a year old, so her playfulness might be ascribed
to youth. Yet even if her emotions-and those of the male-sprang from her
youth, that does not mean they did not exist.

It might be argued that whatever one wolverine feels for another, it
cannot be love because the encounter is so brief.  But to use duration
as a valid measure of love would rule out much love between humans.

After all, my erstzvhile dear,

MY no longer cherished,

Need we say it was not love

Yust because it perished?

It is reasonable to say that F9 and her consort enjoyed one another's
companionship for those few days, that they liked each other.  There was
no necessity to play together: they did so because they wanted to.

If it seems suspect to grant romance to wolverines and their brief
affairs, what about the animals who do mate for life?  These

are animals who court, mate, raise young, and accompany each other when
not raising young.  Sometimes they are in a larger group of animals,
such as a flock of swans.  At other times they may leave the group, as
when swans are actually nesting.  Mates commonly sleep together, groom
one another, and in some cases forage together.  Usually they feed one
another only when courting or when one is staying with very young
offspring.  In most species sexual activity is confined to a brief
period.

The most common proof offered of love between mates is the sorrow they
exhibit when one of the pair dies.  Konrad Lorenz describes as a typical
example the behavior of the gander Ado when his mate, Susanne-Elisabeth,
was killed by a fox.  He stood silently by her partly eaten body, which
lay across their nest.  In the following days he hunched his body and
hung his head.  His eyes became sunken.  His status in the flock
plummeted, since he did not have the heart to defend himself from the
attacks of the other geese.  A year later, Ado had pulled himself
together and met another goose.

Animals may fall in love dramatically.  Konrad Lorenz said that two
greylag geese are most apt to fall in love when they have known each
other as youngsters, been separated and then met again.  He made the
comparison to an astonished human asking, "Are you the same little girl
I used to see running around in pigtails and braces?" and went on,
"That's how I met my wife." According to parrot behavior consultant
Mattie Sue Athan, it is common for some of the larger species of parrots
to fall in love at first sight, and this is known as "the thunderbolt."

Animals don't fall in love with just anyone.  Seeking a mate for a male
umbrella cockatoo, Athan purchased a young female cockatoo with
beautiful plumage and put them together.  To Athan's chagrin, "He acted
like she wasn't even in the room." A few months later Athan was given an
older female in bad condition. She had been plucking her feathers out,
an effect of captivity.  "She didn't have a feather from the neck down.
The skin on her feet was all gnarly.  She had wrinkles around her beak.
He thought she was the love of his life." The two birds immediately
paired off and began rearing a series of baby cockatoos.

Zookeepers know to their despair that many species of animals

will not breed with just any other animal of their species.  Orangutans
are among the most notoriously selective, even though they do not form
lasting pairs in the wild.  No doubt wild animals are selective, too,
but this is less obvious, since they are not locked up with uncongenial
partners.  Timmy, a gorilla in the Cleveland Zoo, did not get along with
two different female gorillas introduced to him and declined to mate.
But when he met a gorilla named Katie, they took to each other at once,
playing, mating, and sleeping together.  When it was discovered that
Katie was infertile, zookeepers decided to send Timmy to another zoo
where he might have a chance of breeding and contributing to the gene
pool of his endangered species.  When a public outcry resulted against
the idea of separating Timmy and Katie, the zoo director fumed, "It
sickens me when people start to put human emotions in animals, and it
demeans the animal.  We can't think of them as some kind of magnificent
human being; they are animals.  When people start saying animals have
emotions, they cross the bridge of reality." His vehement response shows
how strong the fear of anthropomorphism can be even in people who work
with animals, notwithstanding their obvious expressions of joy in each
other.

Left on their own, are animals faithful to one another?  Much has been
made of the significant rates of infidelity in some songbirds (both male
and female), demonstrated by genetic analysis of parents and offspring
and by field observation of the parent birds. Not surprisingly,
scientists have not indulged in comic opera experiments to see if these
songbirds ever resist romantic temptation, though it is known that some
animals do seem to reject opportunities for infidelity.  For example,
male prairie voles who have formed a pair with a female chase away other
voles of either sex.

Female African elephants in estrus sometimes form consortships with
males, but it is not clear whether they simply prefer a certain male and
desire only his company, or whether by staying with one male-who
vigorously attacks other males that come near -they gain protection from
the pursuit of other males.  According to Cynthia Moss, consort behavior
is something that female elephants learn, as young females who do not
form a consortship may be "chased and harassed" by many males.

In other species females may not be as vulnerable.  Rhinos in the
Serengeti, despite their reputation as loners, sometimes do seem to form
pair bonds during estrus.  One observer saw the male of one pair wander
off, whereupon another male appeared and sought to mate, only to be
chased off by the female.  The male she had paired with then wandered
back and they immediately mated. This seems to show that it was not
simple lack of interest in mating that caused the female to reject the
second male, but a more selective personal principle-perhaps
affection-at work.  In the light of such observations, it seems possible
that among the songbirds whose infidelity has been so carefully studied,
those birds who remain faithful to their mates might be exhibiting
fidelity based on feelings, rather than lack of other opportunities.

The devotion that members of pairs lavish on one another also gives
evidence of love.  Some birds are famous examples of fidelity.  Geese,
swans, and mandarin ducks are all symbols of marital devotion; field
biologists tell us this image is accurate.  Coyotes, who are considered
symbolic of trickery, would make equally good symbols of devotion, since
they form lasting pairs.  servations of captive coyotes indicate that
they begin to form pair attachments before they are sexually active.
Coyote pairs observed by Hope Ryden curled up together, hunted mice
together, greeted each other with elaborate displays of wagging and
licking, and performed howling duets.  Ryden describes two coyotes
mating after howling together.  Afterward the female tapped the male
with her paw and licked his face.  Then they curled up together to
sleep. This looks a lot like romantic love.  Whatever distinctions can
be made between the love of two people and the love of two animals, the
essence frequently seems the same.

Lovingness may have evolved because animals that had it have been more
successful-that is, left more children-than animals that did not.  But
lovingness is flexible.  Instinct may urge the animal to love but does
not say who it will love, though it may drop heavy hints.  Lovingness
instructs an animal to protect and care for its young but does not
identify the young.  Humans are not so different.

An animal raised by another species will often want a member

of that species as its mate when it grows up.  A bird, if it is of a
species that forms pair bonds, may have the capacity to love a mate. It
may also have very specific instincts to court the mate in certain ways.
When Tex, a female whooping crane hand-reared by humans, was ready to
mate, she rejected male cranes.  Instead she was attracted to "Caucasian
men of average height with dark hair."

Since whooping cranes are so close to extinction, it was considered
vital to bring Tex into breeding condition so that she could be
artificially inseminated.  To do this, International Crane Foundation
director George Archibald, a dark-haired Caucasian man, spent many weeks
courting Tex.  "My duties involved endless hours of 'just being there,'
several minutes of dancing early in the morning and again in the
evening, long walks in quest of earthworms, nest building, and defending
our territory against humans.  .  .  .

The effort was successful and eventually resulted in a crane chick. If
the whooping crane dance and nest building are fixed action patterns,
the lovingness seems to be a more diffuse impulse.  The crane has made
an error through no fault of her own.  If Tex had been raised by cranes,
she would have fallen in love with one, as most cranes do.  If George
Archibald had been raised by cranes, with whom would he have fallen in
love?

Tibby, an otter described in Gavin Maxwell's Raven, Seek Thy Brother,
was raised by a man who lived on an island off the coast of Scotland,
and who got around on crutches.  When he became seriously ill, he
brought Tibby to Maxwell and asked him to care for her.  He died not
long thereafter and never returned for her.  Tibby did not care for life
in the enclosure Maxwell provided, and made a habit of escaping and
visiting the nearest village.  There she found a man who used crutches
and decided to live with him.  She tried to build a nest under his
house, but he chased her away.  A short time later, Tibby disappeared.
One day Maxwell received a call from a person who had been alarmed by an
otter that had acted strangely, even trying to follow him indoors.
Maxwell wrote, "Acting on a sudden inspiration I asked, 'You don't by
any chance use crutches, do you?" 'Yes,' he replied, with astonishment
in his voice, 'but how in the world could you know that?"' Tibby may
have been imprinted on humans who used crutches or she may just have
been

fond of such people because they reminded her of the affectionate man
who had vanished from her life.

While people generally believe other people can and do feel love, we are
sometimes skeptical that one particular human loves another, no matter
what they say.  Parents who do not love their children exist; some
children hate their parents, and some husbands and wives or brothers and
sisters do not love each other.  Yet we continue to believe-to know in
our hearts-that there are parents, children, spouses, and siblings who
do feel love.  It makes sense to use the same standard for animals.

Why has the idea of love among animals been so neglected?

Why are we reduced to the rather tedious explanations offered by the
evolutionary approach?  This is the approach taught in universities,
where its wider implications go almost unnoticed.  It suggests that the
more elaborate the parental tasks an animal performs, the more
advantageous it is to have an overarching emotion like love driving
them.  If parental behavior consists of nothing more than refraining
from eating the children, no great emotional drama is necessary.  But to
feed them, wash them, and risk your life for them -or (perhaps even
harder) to let them chew on you, to let them snatch your dinner, and to
put up with their noise-you had better love them deeply, at least for
the time being.  Yet, in the biological analysis, love, however it
feels, is principally a device by which subsequent generations are
produced.  Rather than the reason it exists, this could just be one
function it serves.  "Scientific" statements about love have captured
remarkably little of its essence. Love between two women, between a man
and his father, between people and the animals they live with, and love
from animal to animal is rarely illuminated by science and more often
the subject of wonder and delight in personal statements, poems, novels,
and letters.  Freeing ourselves from the tyranny of a purely biological
explanation might widen the horizon.  Love among animals might appear as
mysterious and baffling as human love has over the centuries.

 Grief, Sadness, and the Bones of Elephants

In the Rocky Mountains, biologist Marcy Cottrell Houle was observing the
eyrie of two peregrine falcons, Arthur and jenny, as both parents busily
fed their five nestlings.  One morning only the male falcon visited the
nest.  Jenny did not appear at all, and Arthur's behavior changed
markedly.  When he arrived with food, he waited by the eyrie for as much
as an hour before flying off to hunt again, something he had never done
before.  He called out again and again and listened for his mate's
answer, or looked into the nest uttering an enquiring "echup." Houle
struggled not to interpret his behavior as expectation and
disappointment.  Jenny did not appear the next day or the next.  Late on
the third day, perched by the eyrie, Arthur uttered an unfamiliar sound,
"a cry like the screeching moan of a wounded animal, the cry of a
creature in suffering." The shocked Houle wrote, "The sadness in the
outcry was unmistakable; having heard it, I will never doubt that an
animal can suffer emotions that we humans think belong to our species
alone."

After the cry, Arthur sat motionless on the rock and did not stir for a
whole day.  On the fifth day after jenny's disappearance,

Arthur went on a frenzy of hunting, bringing food to his nestlings from
dawn to dusk, without pausing to rest.  Before Jenny's disappearance,
his efforts had been less frenetic; Houle notes that she never again saw
a falcon work so incessantly.  When biologists climbed to the nest a
week after Jenny's disappearance, they found that three of the nesdings
had starved to death, but two had survived and were thriving under their
father's care.  Houle later learned that jenny had probably been shot.
The two surviving nestlings fledged successfully.

It is impossible to predict how deeply affected we will be when somebody
close to us dies.  Sometimes people show no external reaction, but their
lives are shattered.  They may feel nothing consciously, or even feel
relief, when they are inwardly devastated and may never recover.  The
external signs of grief tell something, but they may not tell
everything.  Introspection may tell something, too, but may be
misleading.  Faced with human sadness in its depths, scientific
curiosity should be tempered with humility: no one, certainly not the
somatically oriented psychiatrist (offering pills for misery), can speak
with any authority about its source, duration, or pathology.  Even
greater humility is required before the permutations of nonhuman grief
and sadness.

When nonscientists speak of animal sadness, the most common evidence
they give is the behavior of one of a pair when its mate dies, or the
behavior of a pet when its owner dies or leaves. This kind of grief
receives notice and respect, yet there are many other griefs that pass
unremarked-the cow separated from its calf or the dog deliberately
abandoned.  Then there are all the griefs humans never see: unheard
cries in the forest, herds in the remote hills whose losses are unknown.

Mourning Lost Love

Wild animals have been observed mourning for a mate.  According to
naturalist Georg Steller, the now-extinct sea cow named after him was a
monogamous species, with families consistin usually of a female, a male,
and two young of different ages: "one

grown offspring, and a little, tender one." Steller, a ship's
naturalist, saw that when the crew of the ship killed a female whose
body washed up on the beach, the male returned to her body for two
consecutive days, "as if he were inquiring about her."

As the fate of the three dead peregrine nesdings shows, it can be
disastrous for a wild animal to display grief.  There is no survival
value in not eating, or moping and grieving.  While love can be readily
reduced to evolutionary function (for those so inclined), grief over the
loss of a loved one-another expression of loveoften threatens survival.
Grief thus calls for explanation on its own terms.

The sorrow of bereavement is easily observed in captive or pet animals.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas gives a moving account of Maria and Misha, two
huskies who had formed a pair bond, when Misha's owners gave him away.

Both he and Maria knew that something was terribly wrong

when his owners came for him the last time, so that Maria

struggled to follow him out the door.  When she was prevented, she
rushed to the window seat and, with her back to

the room, watched Misha get into the car.  She stayed in the

window for weeks thereafter, sitting backward on the seat with

her face to the window and her tail to the room, watching and

waiting for Misha.  At last she must have realized that he

wasn't going to come.  Something happened to her at that

point.  She lost her radiance and became depressed.  She moved

more slowly, was less responsive, and got angry rather easily at

things that before she would have overlooked.  .  .  .  Maria

never recovered from her loss, and although she never for feited her
place as alpha female, she showed no interest in

forming a permanent bond with another male.  .  .  .

Maria knew that Misha was gone from her.  Her behavior is reminiscent of
human grief at permanent separation and loss of a loved one.  Wolves and
coyotes, to whom dogs are very closely related, do form pairs.  The
conditions in which dogs are kept are very different from those in which
wild caneds live.  Probably dog

behavior is more flexible than has been realized, more strongly dictated
by the conditions humans provide for them.  While both female and male
dogs have come to symbolize promiscuity to many humans, this behavior
has been created by the way humans breed and maintain dogs; it is not
intrinsic to their nature.  One has to wonder how much so-called
"natural" human sexuality is equally produced by social arrangements and
expectations.

Some animals who do not form pairs in the wild are housed in pairs in
captivity and grow deeply attached to one another.  Often the mate is
the only companion the animal has.  Ackinan and Alle, two circus horses,
were stabled together.  No particular attachment between them was
noticed until Ackman's unexpected death.  Alle "whinnied continually."
She scarcely ate or slept.  In an effort to distract her, she was moved,
given new companions, and offered special foods.  She was examined and
medicated, in case she was ill. Within two months she had wasted to
death.

Two Pacific "kiko" dolphins in a marine park in Hawaii, Kiko and Hoku,
were devoted to each other for years, often making a point to touch one
another with a fin while swimming around in their tank.  When Kiko
suddenly died, Hoku refused to eat.  he swam slowly in circles, with his
eyes clenched shut "as if he did not want to look on a world that did
not contain Kiko," as trainer Karen Pryor wrote.  He was given a new
companion, Kolohi, who swam beside him and caressed him.  Eventually he
opened his eyes and ate once more.  Although he became attached to
Kolohi, observers felt that he never became as fond of her as he had
been of Kiko.  While the interpretation that Hoku did not want to see a
world without Kiko remains speculative, it is clear that Hoku was
grieving.

Researchers who had caught a dolphin on a fishhook and put her in a
holding tank soon despaired for her life.  Pauline, as they named her,
could not even keep herself upright and had to be supported constantly.
On the third day of her captivity, a male dolphin was captured and
placed in the same tank.  This raised her spirits; the male helped her
swim, at times nudging her to the surface.  Pauline appeared to make a
complete recovery but suddenly died two months later from an abscess
caused by the fish

hook, whereupon the male refused to eat and died three days later. An
autopsy revealed a perforated gastric ulcer, surely aggravated by his
mournful fasting.

It would be the end of most species if every bereaved animal died of
grief.  Such cases must be extreme and unusual.  Dying of grief is not
the only proof of love and affection in animals, but these incidents do
illuminate an emotional range and emotional possibilities.  Animals in
the wild also grieve for companions other than mates.  Lions do not form
pairs, yet a lion has been known to remain by the body of another lion
that had been shot and killed, licking its fur.  As is so often the
case, elephants offer examples that are uncannily similar to human
feelings.  Cynthia Moss, a researcher who has studied wild African
elephants for years, describes mother elephants who appear in perfect
health but become lethargic for many days after a calf dies and trail
behind the rest of the family.

An observer once came across a band of African elephants surrounding a
dying matriarch as she swayed and fell.  The other elephants clustered
around her and tried mightily to get her up.  A young male tried to
raise her with his tusks, put food into her mouth, and even tried
sexually mounting her, all in vain.  The other elephants stroked her
with their trunks; one calf knelt and tried to suckle.  At last the
group moved off, but one female and her calf stayed behind.  The female
stood with her back to the dead matriarch, now and then reaching back to
touch her with one foot.  The other elephants called to her.  Finally,
she walked slowly away.

Cynthia Moss describes the behavior of an elephant herd circling a dead
companion "disconsolately several times, and if it is still motionless
they come to an uncertain halt.  They then face outward, their trunks
hanging limply down to the ground.  After a while they may prod and
circle again, and then again stand, facing outward." Finallperhaps when
it is clear the elephant is dead"they may tear out branches and grass
clumps from the surrounding vegetation and drop these on and around the
carcass." The standing outward suggests that the elephants may find the
sight painful; maybe they want to stay close but find it intrusive to
watch

such suffering; perhaps it has a ritual meaning we do not yet
comprehend.

It was once thought that elephants went to special elephant graveyards
to die.  While this has been disproved, Moss speculates that elephants
do have a concept of death.  They are strongly interested in elephant
bones, not at all in the bones of other species. Their reaction to
elephant bones is so predictable that cinematographers have no
difficulty filming elephants examining bones. Smelling them, turning
them over, running their trunks over the bones, the elephants pick them
up, feel them, and sometimes carry them off for a distance before
dropping them.  They show the greatest interest in skulls and tusks.
Moss speculates that they are trying to recognize the individual.

Once Moss brought the jawbone of a dead elephant-an adult female-into
her camp to determine its exact age.  A few weeks after this elephant's
death, her family happened to pass through the camp area.  They made a
detour to be with and examine the jaw. Long after the others had moved
on, the elephant's seven-year-old calf stayed behind, touching the jaw
and turning it over with his feet and trunk.  One can only agree with
Moss's conclusion that the calf was somehow reminded of his
mother-perhaps remembering the contours of her face.  He felt her there.
It seems certain that the calf's memory is at work here.  Whether he
experienced a feeling of melancholic nostalgia, sorrow, perhaps joy in
remembering his mother, or was moved by some emotional experience we
might not be able to identify, it would be difficult to deny that
feelings were involved.

Based on their behavior, the feelings of the Gombe chimpanzees who
witnessed one of their number fall to his death seem similarly complex.
Three small groups of chimpanzees, mostly males, but including a female
in estrus, had come together when Rix, an adult male, somehow fell into
a rocky gully and broke his neck.  The reaction was immediate
pandemonium-apes screaming, charging, displaying, embracing, copulating,
throwing stones, barking, and whimpering seemingly at random. Eventually
they grew quieter.  For several hours the chimps gathered around the
corpse.  They came close and peered at Rix's body silently, climbed

on branches to get a different vantage point.  They never touched him.
One male adolescent, Godi, seemed particularly intent, whimpering and
groaning repeatedly as he gazed at Rix.  Godi became highly agitated
when several large males drew very close to the body.  After several
hours the chimpanzees drifted away.  Before leaving, Godi leaned over
Rix and stared at him intently before hurrying after his companions.

During this episode the chimpanzees repeatedly uttered "wraah" calls,
common when chimps are disturbed by strange humans or by Cape buffalo,
but also when they sight a dead chimp or baboon.  On one occasion chimps
wraahed for four hours after witnessing the death of a baboon injured in
a fight with other baboons.

A chimpanzee at the Arnhem Zoo, rather confusingly named Gorilla, had
several babies who died despite her tender care.  Each time an infant
died she would become visibly depressed.  Gorilla would sit huddled in a
corner for weeks on end, ignoring the other chimpanzees.  At times she
would burst out screaming.  This story had a happy sequel: Gorilla
became a successful mother when she was given the care of Roosje, a
ten-week-old baby chimpanzee, whom she was taught to bottle-feed.

Loneliness

Loneliness appears to affect animals who live in social or family
groups.  It is probably one factor causing death in many captive
animals.  For captive beavers, for example, the presence or absence of a
companion is an important factor in survival.  One wildlife biologist
noted that yearling beavers, "if they do not get companionship, may
simply sit where they are put down until they die."

Loneliness, a frequent result of confinement and domesticity, is often
observed in captive animals.  A lonely wild beaver could presumably set
off in search of other beavers.

Animals seek each other out more than biologists once assumed, perhaps
in an effort to avoid feelings of sadness, loneliness, and sorrow.  In
some species, males who have been "kicked out of

the nest" by their mothers form bachelor herds.  Male African elephants
gather in groups in "bull areas." Many animals are rather sweepingly
described as solitary, but careful field studies of animals famous for
their solitary natures-tigers, leopards, rhinoceros, and bears-often
reveal that they spend more time associating with each other than was
previously thought.  The European wildcat and the fishing cat are said
to be solitary species in which the female and male mate and then
separate, and the female raises the kittens alone.  In zoos, however,
the female and male may be caged in pairs, with interesting results.
Usually the male is taken out before kittens are born, in case he should
harm them.  In the Cracow Zoo this precaution was omitted, and instead
of attacking the kittens the male wildcat carried his meat to the
entrance of the den and made coaxing sounds.  Similarly, in the
Magdeburg Zoo the father wildcat guarded the den day and night and,
though normally peaceful, attacked the keeper if he came too near.  The
father brought food to the den, and when the kittens were old enough to
come out and play, he hissed and threatened any zoo-goers who startled
his kittens.  Fishing cats at the Frankfurt Zoo also led a surprisingly
warm family life.  The male not only brought food, but often curled up
in the nest box with the rest of the family.  He was such a
conscientious parent that if he was out of the nest box and the female
also came out, he became anxious and went in the nest box with the
kittens.

Possibly these species are less solitary than has been thought, or
perhaps this is another demonstration of the flexibility of animal
behavior.  Paul Leyhausen, who observed these cats, speculates that
while males in the wild may have nothing to do with their mates and
kittens, in captivity they may be "subjected to stimuli which awaken
normally dormant behavior patterns." If so, we are entitled to wonder
whether a male fishing cat, wandering by a southeast Asian stream or
through a forest, ever gets a twinge from those normally dormant
patterns, and feels lonely.

Imprisonment

Even when captive animals are not confined in solitude, their
imprisonment may make them sad.  It is often said of zoo animals that
the way to tell if they are happy is to ask whether the young play and
the adults breed.  Most zookeepers would not accept this standard of
happiness for themselves.  As Jane Goodall noted, "Even in concentration
camps, babies were born, and there is no good reason to believe that it
is different for chimpanzees."

Captivity is undoubtedly more painful to some animals than others. Lions
seem to have less difficulty with the notion of lying in the sun all day
than do tigers, for example.  Yet even lions can be seen in many zoos
pacing restlessly back and forth in the stereotyped motions seen in so
many captive animals.  The concept of _funktionslust, the enjoyment of
one's abilities, also suggests its opposite, the feeling of frustration
and misery that overtakes an animal when its capacities cannot be
expressed.  If an animal enjoys using its natural abilities, it is also
possible that the animal misses using them.  Although a gradual trend in
zoo construction and design is to make the cages better resemble the
natural habitat, most zoo animals, particularly the large ones, have
little or no opportunity to use their abilities.  Eagles have no room to
fly, cheetahs have no room to run, goats have but a single boulder to
climb.

There is no reason to suppose that zoo life is not a source of sadness
to most animals imprisoned there, like displaced persons in wartime.  It
would be comforting to believe that they are happy there, delighted to
receive medical care and grateful to be sure of their next meal.
Unfortunately, in the main, there is no evidence to suppose that they
are.  Most take every possible opportunity to escape.  Most will not
breed.  Probably they want to go home.  Some captive animals die of
grief when taken from the wild.  Sometimes these deaths appear to be
from disease, perhaps because an animal under great stress becomes
vulnerable to illness.  Others are quite obviously deaths from
despair-near-suicides.  Wild animals may refuse to eat, killing
themselves in the only way open to them.  We do not know if they are
aware that they will die if they do not eat, but it is clear that they
are extremely unhappy.  In 1913 Jasper Von

Oertzen described the death of a young gorilla imported to Europe:
"Hum-Hum had lost all joy in living.  She succeeded in living to reach
Hamburg, and from there, the Animal Park at Stellingen, with all her
caretakers, but her energy did not return again.  With signs of the
greatest sadness of soul Hum-Hum mourned over the happy past.  One could
find no fatal illness; it was as always with these costly animals: 'She
died of a broken heart."'

Marine mammals have a high death rate in captivity, a fact not always
apparent to visitors at marine parks and oceanariums.  A pilot whale
celebrity at one oceanarium was actually thirteen different pilot
whales, each successive one being introduced to visitors by the same
name, as if it were the same animal.  It takes little reflection to see
the great difference in a marine mammal's life when kept in an
oceanariums.  Orcas grow to twenty-three feet long, weigh up to 9,000
pounds, and roam a hundred miles a day.  No cage, and certainly not the
swimming pools where they are confined in all oceanariums, could
possibly provide satisfaction, let alon-- joy.  They are believed to
have a life expectancy as long as our own.  Yet at Sea World, in San
Diego, the oceanarium with the best track record for keeping orcas
alive, they last an average of eleven years.

If a person's life span were shortened this much, would one still speak
of happiness?  Asked whether their animals were happy, a number of
marine mammal trainers all said yes: they ate, engaged in sexual
intercourse (it is extremely rare for an orca to give birth in
captivity), and were almost never sick.  This could mean that they were
not depressed, but does it mean they were happy?  The fact that people
ask this question again and again indicates a malaise, perhaps profound
guilt at subjecting these lively sea travelers to unnatural confinement.

Which animals suffer the most in captivity can be unpredictable.  Harbor
seals often thrive in oceanariums and zoos.  Hawaiian monk seals almost
invariably die-sometimes they refuse to eat, sometimes they succumb to
illness.  One way or another, one observer noted, they have generally
"just moped to death."

The issue of the effects of captivity is most painful when one considers
animals that can live nowhere but in captivity because

their habitat is gone-as is the case for an increasing number of
species-or because they are physically incapacitated.  When fewer than a
dozen California condors were left in the wild, arguments raged about
whether to capture the remaining birds for captive breeding or to let
the species perish freely, without undergoing the ignominy of captivity.
The condor is a soaring bird that can easily fly fifty miles in a day, a
life that can hardly be simulated in a cage. In the end the birds were
captured, and so for a time there were no California condors in the
wild.  Since then, captive-bred birds have been released in an attempt
to reestablish the species.

The fact that animals can be sad must first be acknowledged before it
can be studied and understood.  Zookeepers ask whether animals are
healthy, and whether they are likely to breed, but rarely ask, "What
would make this animal happy?" Nor have the studies by animal
behaviorists been of much help.  The Ox ord Dictionary ofanimal Behavior
notes: "It seems reasonable to allow that animals may be distressed by
being unable to feed and drink, to move their limbs, to sleep, and to
have social interaction with their fellows, but the difficulty of
defining distress in an objective and convincing way has been a
stumbling-block in the formation of animal welfare legislation even in
countries where there is widespread public interest in the way that
animals are treated."

Depression and Learned Helplessness

In humans, extreme sadness is called depression.  As used by
psychiatrists and psychologists, depression is a catchall diagnosis,
referring to melancholy springing from a number of sources.  In the
quest to validate the medical model of psychiatry, scientists have
sought to produce clinically depressed animals in the laboratoryto which
end some experimenters have worked to provide animals with spectacularly
unhappy childhoods.

Among the most widely reported experiments in the history of animal
behavior are those psychologist Harry Harlow performed on rhesus
monkeys.  The baby monkeys under his aegis who preferred soft, huggable
dummy mothers to hard, wire surrogates,

even when only the wire ones dispensed milk, are famous and have been
used as evidence that psychological studies on animals-really forms of
torture-can teach humans about their emotions.  While the study suggests
that the nurturant feelings in mothering can be even more important than
its survival value, surely this gruesome experiment was gratuitously
emotionally cruel as well as unnecessary to prove this point.

Other rhesus monkeys, at the age of six weeks, were placed alone in the
"depression chamber," or vertical chamber, a stainless-steel trough
intended to reproduce a psychological "well of despair." Forty-five days
of solitary confinement in the chamber produced permanently impaired
monkeys.  Even when months had passed since their experience, the
once-chambered monkeys were listless, incurious, and almost completely
asocial, huddling in one spot and clasping themselves.  No knowledge
gained, no point proved, can justify such abuse.

Similarly, dogs, cats, and rats in the laboratory have been induced to
feel the global pessimism known as "learned helplessness." In the
classic experiment, dogs were strapped into a harness and given electric
shocks at unpredictable intervals.  The shock was inescapable-nothing
they could do prevented or lessened it.  Afterward they were placed in a
divided chamber.  When a tone sounded, the dogs needed to jump into the
other side of the chamher to avoid being shocked.  Most dogs learned
this quickly, but two thirds of the dogs who had been given inescapable
shocks just lay still and whined, making no attempt to escape.  Their
previous experience had apparently taught them despair.  This effect
wore off in a few days.  Yet, if the dogs were subjected to inescapable
shocks four times in a week, their "learned helplessness" was lasting.
Psychologist Martin Seligman, the principal researcher in the study of
learned helplessness (and author of the bestselling book Learned
Optimism), argues that the shocked animal is frightened at first, but
when it comes to believe that it is helpless, sinks into depression.  In
his explanation of how he came upon the notion of doing experiments on
learned helplessness in animals Seligman cites the research of C.  P.
Richter during the fifties, "who reasoned that for a wild rat, being
held in the hand of a predator like man,

having whiskers trimmed, and being put in a vat of hot water from which
escape is impossible produces a sense of helplessness in the rat."

Learned helplessness has been experimentally produced in humans, though
not by means of shock.  People given tasks at which they repeatedly fail
quickly come to believe that they will fail at other tasks and do poorly
at them, compared to those who have not been put through a sequence of
failures.  In the real world, battered women may be unable to leave
their batterers, although the risks of leaving and the lack of anywhere
to go may be as important as their perception that any action on their
part to save themselves from continued abuse is pointless.  The animal
research really shows nothing about humans-the alleged purpose of such
researchthat one cannot learn by talking to battered women about their
lives.

Having produced depressed dogs, Seligman wanted to cure them.  He placed
"helpless" dogs in the chamber and removed the partition to make it easy
for them to cross and avoid shock, but the despondent dogs made no
effort to get away and so did not discover escape was possible. Seligman
got in the chamber and called them, and offered them food, but the dogs
did not move.  Eventually he was reduced to dragging the dogs back and
forth on leashes. Some dogs were dragged back and forth two hundred
times before they discovered that this time they could escape the
electric shocks. According to Seligman, their recovery from learned
helplessness was lasting and complete.  Their experience, however, must
have had some lasting effect on them.

Many other experimenters have produced learned helplessness in the
laboratory by various means, with sometimes fiendish results.  One
experimenter raised rhesus monkeys in solitude, in black-walled
isolation cages, from infancy until six months, to induce "social
helplessness." Then he taped each young monkey to a cruciform
restraining device and placed it, for an hour a day, in a cage with
other young monkeys.  After initial withdrawal, the unrestrained monkeys
poked and prodded the restrained monkeys, pulling their hair, gouged
their eyes, and pried their mouths open.  The restrained monkeys
struggled, but could not escape.  All they could

do was cry out.  After two to three months of this abuse, their behavior
changed.  They stopped struggling, though they still cried out.  And as
the experimenter noted, "No advantage was taken of numerous
opportunities to bite the oppressor which thrust fingers or sex organs
against or into its mouth." These monkeys were lastingly traumatized and
were terrified of other monkeys even when unrestrained.  Like the other
experiments, this one is distinguished by its cruelty.

Comparatively few depressed humans became so through being placed in
solitary confinement for half their childhoods, or by being raised in
solitary confinement and then tortured by peers. Oddly enough, the
argument on the part of the scientists conducting these experiments has
been that animals are so similar to us in their feelings that we can
learn about human depression by studying animal depression.  But this
raises the important ethical question asked by many animal-rights
groups: If animals suffer the way we do, which is the whole
justification for the experiments, is it not sadistic to conduct them?
Clearly the animals can be made deeply unhappy, but this fact could have
been observed under naturally occurring conditions, without subjecting
sensitive creatures to pointless cruelty.

Through all these griefs and torments, animals display sorrow through
their movements, postures, and actions.  Often animal vocalizations
provide evidence of sadness.  Wolves seem to have a special mourning
howl or lonesome howl that differs from their usual convivial howling.
Other animals are said to wall, moan, or cry.  When Marchessa, an
elderly female mountain gorilla, died, the silverback male of her group
became subdued and was heard to whimper frequently, the only time such a
sound had been heard from a silverback.  These two wild gorillas may
have spent as much as thirty years of their lives together.  One
observer wrote of orangutans, "In disappointment the young specimen
quite commonly whimpers or weeps, without, however, shedding tears."

No one knows for certain why humans weep.  Newborn babies cry, but they
do not usually shed tears until they are a few months old.  Adults cry
less, and some adults never shed tears.  Tears have been classified into
three kinds: continuous tears, which keep the

eye moist; reflex tears, which flush foreign objects or irritating gases
out of the eye; and emotional tears, the tears of grief, happiness, or
rage.  Emotional tears are different in that they contain a higher
percentage of protein than other tears.  Curiously, since Darwin's
survey of the subject in 1872, weeping has been little studied, but it
has been speculated that emotional tears may have both physical and
social or communicative functions.

Since it is possible for people to feel great unhappiness and not weep,
it is also unclear why tears communicate so effectively.  It may be that
our reaction is instinctive, and perhaps part of the respect accorded to
tears comes from the possibility that they are ours alone.  It has been
suggested that almost every human bodily secretion is considered
disgusting (such as feces, urine, and mucus), and its ingestion is taboo
with one exception: tears.  This is the one body product that may be
uniquely human and hence does not remind us of what we have in common
with animals.

Perhaps it isn't only humans who are impressed by tears, however.  The
chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky, who regularly sought to comfort people who
looked sad, was particularly tender when he saw tears, which he would
wipe away.  Since Nim was raised by humans, he may have learned the
connection between tears and unhappiness.

It would be interesting to discover whether any animals who have not had
the opportunity to learn about tears respond to tears as evidence of
sadness in humans or even in other animals.  This could be answered
experimentally.  If a chimpanzee reared with other chimps saw another
who appeared to be shedding tears, would it react as Nim did?  If a
chimpanzee accustomed to humans saw a person cry for the first time,
would it behave as though it was a sign of distress?

Tears keep the eyes of animals moist.  Their eyes also water when
irritated.  Tears may spill from the eyes of an animal in pain. Tears
have been seen in the eyes of animals as diverse as an injured horse and
an eggbound grey parrot.  Some animals are more tearful than others.
Seals, who have no nasolachrymal ducts into which tears drain, are
especially apt to have tears rolling down their faces. This is thought
to help them cool down when they are on land.

Charles Darwin, in researching The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals, looked for evidence that animals did or did not shed emotional
tears.  He complained, "The Macacus maurus, which formerly wept so
copiously in the Zoological Gardens, would have been a fine case for
observation; but the two monkeys now there, and which are believed to be
of the same species, do not weep." He was not able to observe animals
shedding emotional tears, and called weeping one of the "special
expressions of man."

Darwin noted one exception: the Indian elephant.  It was reported to him
by Sir E.  Tennant that some newly captured elephants in Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka), tied up and lying motionless on the ground, showed "no other
indication of suffering than the tears which suffused their eyes and
flowed incessantly." Another captured elephant, when bound, sank to the
ground, "uttering choking cries, with tears trickling down his cheeks."
A captured elephant is usually also separated from its family.  Other
elephant observers in Ceylon assured Darwin that they had not seen
elephants weep, and that Ceylonese hunters said they had never seen
elephants weep.  Darwin put his trust in Tennant's observations,
however, because they were confirmed by the elephant keeper at the
London Zoo, who said he had several times seen an old female there
shedding tears when her young companion was taken out.

In the years since Darwin, the balance of the evidence has been the
same: most elephant watchers have never seen them weep -or have, rarely,
seen them weep when injured-yet a few observers have claimed to have
seen them weep when not injured.  An elephant trainer with a small
American circus told researcher William Frey that his elephant, Okha,
does cry at times, but that he had no idea why.  Okha sometimes shed a
tear when being scolded, it is reported, and at least once wept while
giving children rides.

lain Douglas-Hamilton, who has spent years working with African
elephants, has seen elephants shed tears only when injured.  Tears fell
from the eyes of Claudia, a captive elephant, during a difficult labor
with her first calf.

R.  Gordon Cummings, an eighteenth-century hunter in South Africa,
described killing the biggest male elephant he had ever

seen.  He first shot it in the shoulder so that it could not run away.
The elephant limped over to a tree and leaned against it.  Deciding to
contemplate the elephant before killing it, Cummings paused to make
coffee and then chose to experimentally determine which were an
elephant's vulnerable spots.  He walked up to it and fired bullets into
various parts of the head.  The elephant did not move except to touch
the bullet wounds with the tip of his t=k.  "Surprised and shocked to
find that I was only tormenting and prolonging the sufferings of the
noble beast, which bore his trials with such dignified composure,"
Cummings wrote, he decided to finish him off and shot him nine times
behind the shoulder.  "Large tears now trickled from his eyes, which he
slowly shut and opened; his colossal frame quivered convulsively, and,
falling on his side, he expired." This elephant must have been in great
pain, however, and that alone would have been cause enough for him to
shed tears. Other than humans, no animal runs torture experiments on
other animals.

In his book Elephant Tramp, George Lewis, an itinerant elephant trainer,
reported in 1955 that in the years he had worked with elephants he bad
seen only one weeping.  This was a young, timid female named Sadie, who
was being trained along with five others to do an act for the Robbins
Brothers Circus.  The elephants were being taught their acts quickly,
since the show would start in three weeks, but Sadie had trouble
learningwhat was wanted.  One day, unable to understand what she was
being told to do, she ran out of the ring.  "We brought her back and
began to punish her for being so stupid." (Based on information Lewis
gives elsewhere, they probably punished her by hitting her on the side
of the head with a large stick.)  To their astonishment, Sadie, who was
lying down, began to utter racking sobs, and tears poured from her eyes.
The dumbfounded trainers knelt by Sadie, caressing her.  Lewis says that
he never punished her again, and that she learned the act and became a
"good" circus elephant.  His fellow elephant trainers, who had never
witnessed such a thing, were skeptical.  But reports are not confined to
animal behaviorists.  Victor Hugo wrote in his diary on January 2, 1871:
"On a ahbabut illiphant du 7ardin des

Plantes.  II a pleura.  On va k manger.  " ["The elephant in the jardin
des Plantes was slaughtered.  He wept.  He will be eaten."] That
elephants weep emotional tears is widely believed in India, where
elephants have been kept for many centuries.  It is said that when the
conqueror Tamerlane captured three thousand elephants in battle, snuff
was put in their eyes so they would appear to be weeping at the loss.
Douglas Chadwick was told of a young Indian elephant shedding tears when
scolded for playing too boisterously and knocking someone down, and also
of an elephant that ran away and, when found by its mahout, wept along
with him.  serving young orphaned elephants in an Asian stable, Chadwick
noticed that one was shedding tears.  A mahout told him that the babies
often cried when they were hungry and that it was almost feeding time.
But after being fed, the baby still wept.

Elephant handlers say that the eyes of elephants water heavily,
presumably to keep them moist.  Fluid may also stream from their
temporal glands, which are between the eye and ear.  But no one familiar
with elephants would be confused by this.  Possibly there is some
significance to the fact that many of the elephants shedding tears were
lying down, not a usual position for an elephant.  Perhaps the position
somehow prevents drainage of tears.  For all we know elephants often
shed tears of grief, but if standing, the tears run through
nasolachrymal ducts and down the inside of their trunks.

Emotional tears have been reported in some other species. Biochemist
William Frey, who studies human emotional tears, has received reports of
dogs-particularly poodles-shedding tears in emotional situations, such
as being left behind by their owner, but despite repeated efforts, he
has been unable to confirm this in the laboratory.  No one but their
owners has witnessed these tears, and poodles are a particularly
damp-eyed breed even at their most cheerful.

It has been reported that tears rolled from the eyes of adult seals who
saw seal pups clubbed by hunters.  This is undoubtedly true.  But since
tears often roll from seals' eyes, there is no proof that these were
emotional tears.

Beavers have also been suspected of crying emotional tears. Trappers
have said that a beaver in a trap sheds tears, but such beavers may be
crying in pain.  However, one biologist has reported that beavers also
weep copiously when manually restrained.  Dian Fossey reported tears
shed by Coco, an orphaned mountain gorilla. Coco was three or four years
old when her family was killed before her eyes to secure her capture.
She had spent a month in a tiny cage before coming into Fossey's
possession and was very ill.  She was released into an indoor pen with
windows.  When Coco first looked out the window of her pen at a forested
mountainside like the one on which she grew up, she suddenly began "to
sob and shed actual tears." Fossey said she never witnessed a gorilla do
this before or afterward.

Montaigne, who may be the first Western author to express distaste for
the hunt, wrote in his 1580 essay "Of Cruelty":

For myself, I have not even been able without distress to see

pursued and killed an innocent animal which is defenseless

and which does us no harm.  And as it commonly happens that

the stag, feeling himself out of breath and strength, having no

other remedy left, throws himself back and surrenders to

ourselves who are pursuing him, asking for our mercy by his

tears .  .  .  that has always seemed to me a very unpleasant

spectacle.

In the end, it hardly matters whether stags, beavers, seals, or
elephants weep.  Tears are not grief, but tokens of grief.  The evidence
of grief from other animal behaviors is strong.  It is hard to doubt
that Darwin's sobbing elephants were unhappy, even if their tears sprang
from mechanical causes.  A seal surely feels sad when its pup is killed,
whether it is dry-eyed or not.  just as a psychiatrist cannot really
know when a person has crossed the border of "normal" grief to
"pathologica!" mourning, so humans cannot know that the world of sorrow
is beyond the emotional capacities of any animal.  Sadness, nostalgia,
disappointment, are feelings we know from direct experience; animals we
know intimately hint at their parallel feelings in this dark world.
Should science accept their

challenge and try to understand animal sorrow, even its accurate
description will need to be complex and subtle, well beyond the clumsy
categories and reductive causalities that prevail in the psychology of
human pain.

Far out at sea, a tuna fleet surrounded a group of spinner dolphins
swimming over a school of tuna, catching them in a gigantic net. Small,
powerful speedboat,, circled the animals, creating a wall of sound that
disoriented and terrified the dolphins, who sank down silently into the
net, only the movement of their eyes showing signs of life.  Biologists
trying to learn how to save dolphins looked on in despair.  But when a
dolphin crossed the corkline at the edge of the net, "It knew it was
free.  It burst forward, propelled by powerful wide-amplitude tail
strokes .  .  .  [it] then dove, swimming at full speed .  .  .  down
and away into the dark water, only to burst from the surface in a high
bounding series of leaps."

In an account of this episode, dolphin biologist Kenneth Norris focused
on the state of the trapped dolphins, persuasively arguing that their
behavior demonstrated not apathy but deep fear. Equally compelling is
the joy of the freed dolphins, springing through air and water.

Theorists of human joy have sought to categorize it and to analyze its
causes in terms that range from a "sharp reduction in the gradient of
neural stimulation" to "what obtains after some

creative or socially beneficial act that was not done for the express
purpose of obtaining joy or doing good." Such theorists tend to ignore
the possibility that animals, too, feel joyous.

No one who has ever had a dog or cat can doubt the animal capacity for
happiness.  Beholding and sharing their open joy is one of the great
pleasures people take in animals.  We see them leap or run, hear them
bark or chirrup, and put words to their delight: "You're home!"

"You're going to feed me!"

"We're going for a walk!" Like uninhibited human happiness, the pleasure
is contagious, so that pets serve as a conduit to joyful feelings.  It
is rare to find a person as openly ecstatic as a cat about to be fed, or
a dog about to go for a walk.  If such joy were a figment of
anthropomorphic projection, it would be a remarkable collective
delusion.

Happiness can be a reward, a response of pleasure in accomplishment.  If
an animal feels good from doing things that have selective value,
certainly that happiness can be said to have selective value.  But that
does not necessarily mean that the happiness exists only because it has
selective value.  The grim tasks of survival, even surviving well, do
not make a lot of people happy.  Part of happiness is often its lack of
relation, or even its perverse relation, to any rational end, its utter
functionlessness.  The evidence is good that animals as well as people
do feel such pure joy.

One of the many signs by which joy in animals can be recognized is
vocalization.  Pet cats are admired for purring, a sound that usually
indicates contentment, though it may also be used to appease another
animal.  Big cats purr too.  Cheetahs purr loudly when they lick each
other, and cubs purr when they rest with their mother.  Lions purr,
though not as often as house cats, and only while exhaling.  Both young
and adult lions also have a soft hum they utter in similar
circumstances-when playing gently, rubbing their cheeks together,
licking each other, or resting.

Happy gorillas are said to sing.  Biologist Ian Redmond reports that
they make a sound-something between a dog whining and a human
singing-when they are especially happy.  On a rare sunny day, when the
foraging is particularly good, the family group will eat, "sing" and put
their arms around each other.  Howling wolves

may be asserting territorial rights or cementing social bonds, but
observers say it also appears to make them happy.

Black bear cubs express their emotions more clearly than adults, says
wildlife biologist Lynn Rogers.  "When a cub is very comfortable,
particularly when it's nursing, they give what I call a comfort sound. I
used to call it a nursing vocalization until I saw cubs doing it when
they were not nursing." He imitates the sound, a low squeal.  "A
pleasing little sound that they make.  One time I gave a big bear a
piece of warm fat.  It just really seemed to like it. In fact, it made
that same sound in a deeper voice.  So I don't know -is that happiness
or not?  Is it just comfort?  It was pleased, anyway.))

Joy can also be expressed silently.  servers of almost any species will
quickly learn to know the body language of a happy animal.  Darwin cited
the frisking of a horse turned out to pasture and the grins of
orangutans and monkeys being caressed.  In a personal letter he also
gave a charming account of animal joy:

Two days since, when it was very warm, I rode to the Zoological Society,
& by the greatest piece of good fortune it was the

first time this year, that the Rhinoceros was turned out.-Such

a sight has seldom been seen, as to behold the rhinoceros

kicking & rearing, (though neither end reached any great

height) out of joy.-The elephant was in the adjoining yard &

was greatly amazed at seeing the rhinoceros so frisky: He

came close to the palings & after looking very intently, set off

trotting himself, with his tail sticking out at one end & his

trunk at the other,-squeeling and braying like half a dozen

broken trumpets.

Signs of happiness can no doubt be misinterpreted.  One of the many
factors contributing to the fascination with bottle-nosed dolphins is
their permanent "smile," created by the shape of their jaws rather than
by an emotional state.  Since a dolphin doesn't have a mobile face, it
"smiles" even if furious or despondent.

Despite this, biologist Kenneth Norris believes that people and dolphins
can recognize the emotional freight of many of each

other's signals.  That is, the two species can recognize or learn to
recognize friendliness, hostility, or fear across species, even if we do
not understand each other's vocalizations.  He cites a spinner dolphin's
"peremptory" barks, which indicate boisterous behavior, as compared with
soft chuckles that indicate friendly contact, often between female and
male.  The body language of human and dolphin mothers with their babies,
Norris says, is not only comparable, but easily understood by both
species.

When the ice finally melted from one New England beaver pond in spring,
a male beaver and his yearling daughter swam over to look at their dam,
"porpoising" on the way, swimming over one another's backs.  Afterward
they swam across the pond together, rolling, diving, popping up again
and turning somersaults, in a display of delight with which even a
nonswimmer could identify.

In an example of more literal language, several apes have been taught
the sign for "happy." Nim Chimpsky used the word when he was excited, as
when he was being tickled.  Koko, asked what gorillas say when they're
happy, signed "gorilla hug." Whether Nim and Koko would understand one
another's use of "happy" is unknown.  One criticism of ape-language
teaching has been that the animals, with the exception of the gorilla
Koko, were usually not taught words to express emotion, though it seemed
likely that they would want to communicate emotive states to their
friends and enemies.  Carolyn Ristau suggested: "It could be worthwhile
to attempt teaching a chimpanzee to associate signs with such mental
states as aggressive, frightened, in pain, hungry, thirsty or wanting to
play." These might be the words that would interest them deeply.

One rainy day in Washington the signing chimpanzees Moja and Tatu were
offered a chance to go outside into an exercise area. Moja, who hates
rain, went out but scurried into a cave.  Tatu climbed to the top of a
play structure and sat in the rain, signing &&out out out out out out."
A researcher said, "It looked like she was singing in the rain."

An equally expressive behavior called "war dancing" is seen in mountain
goats and chamois.  One animal starts rearing, leaping, tossing its
horns, and whirling about.  One after another, the whole

band takes it up.  Goats war dance most often in the summer, when food
is plentiful.  The sight of a slanting snow bank can start a war dance
and send the band bucking, twirling, and sliding downhill, kicking up
the snow.  They expend so much energy in their dance that some goats
have been seen to make almost two full turns in the air in one jump.

What have these goats got to be happy about?  They have not heard news
of an inheritance, received a job offer, or seen their names in the
newspaper.  They have nothing to be pleased about except life, sunshine,
and being well fed.  They jump for joy.

Sometimes the source of the joy is obvious and recognizable, such as the
excitement displayed by a group of wild chimpanzees finding a large pile
of food.  "Three or four adults may pat each other, embrace, hold hands,
press their mouths against one another, and utter loud screams for
several minutes before calming down sufficiently to start feeding,"
Goodall and Hamburg reported.  The implications seemed obvious.  "This
kind of behavior," they wrote, "is similar to that shown by a human
child, who, when told of a special treat, may fling his arms
ecstatically around the bearer of the good news and squeal with
delight."

A principal source of joy for social animals is the presence of their
family and the members of their group.  Nim Chimpsky was raised in a
human family for the first year and a half of his life. When he was
about four years old, a reunion was arranged with the family that had
raised him.  When he spotted them, in a place where he had never seen
them before, Nim smiled hugely, shrieked, and pounded the ground for
three minutes, gazing back and forth at the different members of the
family.  Finally he calmed down enough to go and hug his foster mother,
still smiling, and shrieking intermittently.  He spent more than an hour
hugging his family, grooming them and playing with them before they
left. This was the only occasion on which Nim was seen to smile for more
than a few minutes.

Reunions after separation are a common source of joy.  Two male
bottle-nosed dolphins at an oceanarium did not have the adversarial
relationship seen between many male dolphins confined together.  One was
removed to another exhibit for three weeks.

When he was returned, the two seemed very excited.  For hours they
hurtled around the tank side by side, occasionally leaping out of the
water.  For several days they spent all their time together, ignoring
the other dolphin in the tank.

The meeting of two related groups of elephants seems to be a very
emotional time, full of ecstasy and drama.  Cynthia Moss has reported
the meeting of two such groups, one led by the old female Teresia, the
other led by Slit Ear.  From a quarter of a mile away they began calling
to each other.  (Since elephants can communicate over long distances
with sounds too low for us to hear, they might have been aware of each
other before they started calling audibly.)  Teresia changed direction
and began walking fast.  Their heads and ears were up, and fluid poured
from the temporal glands (small glands between the eye and ear) of all
the elephants in the herd.  They stopped, called, got a response,
changed course slightly, and sped ahead.  Slit Ear's group appeared out
of some trees, running toward them.

The groups ran toward each other, screaming and trumpeting. Teresia and
Slit Ear rushed together, clicked tusks and twined trunks together while
rumbling and flapping their ears.  All the elephants performed similar
greetings, spinning around, leaning on each other, rubbing each other,
clasping trunks and trumpeting, rumbling and screaming.  So much fluid
streamed from their temporal glands that it ran down their chins.  Moss
writes: "I have no doubt even in my most scientifically rigorous moments
that the elephants are experiencing joy when they find each other again.
It may not be similar to human j'oy or even comparable, but it is
elephantine joy and it plays a very important part in their whole social
system." Elephantine joy can only be recognized as joy because it
resembles human joy.  Yet Moss is right in saying that we should not
assume it is identical joy.  After all, we have no idea how one feels
when one's temporal glands are streaming fluid.  There may be forms of
joy in elephant society different from any joy that humans experience.

Biologist Lars Wilsson observed that Tuff, a beaver, looked grim when
watching over her baby as it swam, and deeply unhappy

if a stranger came near it, but when she was nursing it or grooming it
"radiated pure maternal happiness."

A principal source of delight for many animals is their young. Certain
features signal "baby animal," such as big eyes, uncertain gait, big
feet, and large head.  Humans respond warmly to these traits not only in
baby humans but in baby animals, as well as in some adult animals. Some
animals react to youthful traits with affection, others with lack of
aggression or with protectiveness. Such recognition of baby features is
considered to be largely innate; animals may at times feel what people
feel when they say a baby is adorable.  The presence of such traits in
baby dinosaurs has caused paleontologist John Homer to aver that some
dinosaurs must have found their babies "cute."

Tenderness may also cross the species barrier, with some animals showing
distinct pleasure in caretaking.  When a young sparrow crash-landed in
the chimpanzee cage at the Basel Zoo, one of the apes instantly snatched
it in her hand.  Expecting to see the bird gobbled up, the keeper was
astonished to see the chimpanzee cradle the terrified fledgling tenderly
in a cupped palm, gazing at it with what seemed like delight.  The other
chimpanzees gathered and the bird was delicately passed from hand to
hand.  The last to receive the bird took it to the bars and handed it to
the astounded keeper.

Another source of human happiness is pride, the feeling that we have
done something well.  It is unclear to what extent this can be called a
self-conscious emotion and to what extent it corresponds to
J-unktionslust.  Lars Wilsson described the changed demeanor of Greta
and Stina, when the captive beavers managed to build a dam in their
enclosure.  These yearling beavers had been captured as infants and had
never seen a dam.  Until they built theirs, they had not been
particularly friendly and snarled at one another if they got too close.
After the dam was built they began eating side by side, uttering
friendly "talk" sounds.  Not only did they no longer object to one
another, they sought each other out to vocalize or groom.  Greta and
Stina also spent more time out of their nest box, swimming and diving in
the water that their dam

had deepened.  The pride in accomplishment also seemed to have created
friendship.

One observer described wild beavers whose dam had been severely damaged
by human vandals at a season when material to repair it was hard to get.
The observer arranged for suitable branches to be deposited in the pond
while the beavers were asleep.  The male of the pair was removing wood
from his lodge to transfer to the dam when he discovered the branches.
He began to swim among the branches, sniffing them and uttering loud,
excited cries.  One observer thought that the beaver was "rejoicing,"
the other that he was "marveling," but then, coming to their scientific
sense s, they agreed that the beaver's "subjective feelings .  .  . were
beyond our power to ascertain."

Some captive animals experience little joy in life.  For some,
performing may be a chance to work, to display prowess, to feel proud. A
tiger who cannot hunt, cannot mate with other tigers, and cannot explore
and survey its territory has little chance of feeling pride.  Perhaps,
for some tigers, a chance to jump through a flaming hoop is better than
nothing.  But why should tigers have to settle for something that is
better than nothing?  To turn these magnificent animals into slaves, and
then degrade them further by making them perform tricks for human
amusement shows as much about human abasement as it does about animal
capacities.  That a tiger is condemned to slow death by boredom unless
it finds pleasure in performing is a sad commentary on what humans have
done to these magnificent predators.

The results of this distorted behavior affect the animals and trainers
alike.  Animal trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams had a tiger named India in
his act for over twenty years.  When he felt she was too old and
deserved a rest, he stopped using her in the act, but every time he
passed her cage while bringing the other tigers into the ring, she
"cried." Gebel-Williams felt so sorry for India that he put her back in
the act, with unfortunate results, as she was later attacked and injured
by another of the tigers.  Her performance may have been a source of
pride, and hence greater happiness than being caged into forced
retirement, but that it was the only one she had was hardly of her own
choice.  Along with the pride, it is important to recognize the loss of
dignity.  If animal dignity is little documented, it may be because the
history of human dealings with animals gives little occasion for its
display.  The human sense of animals as "lower" by definition provides
little sense of its loss.

Arguing that dolphins may be on the verge of "accepting domesncation,"
Karen Pryor says that they enjoy performing tasks humans set for them.
"I have seen a dolphin, striving to master an athletically difficult
trick, actually refuse to eat its 'reward' fish until it got the stunt
right." It is difficult to maintain that the dolphin "enjoys" the
challenge, unless we know what its alternatives are.  Would a wild
dolphin ever find pleasure in such a task?

Perhaps this incident speaks for dolphins having a notion of justice, or
just reward, but it is difficult to say.  Similar behavior in wild
dolphins would be more resonant and tell us more about their society.

Horse trainers commonly observe that some horses feel pride.
Secretariat, who won the Kentucky Derby in 1973, was said to be proud.
As evidence it was noted by trainers and jockeys that he refused to run
unless he was allowed to run the race his wato use his burst of speed
early or late in a race, as he chose-despite the fact that he was
usually a docile, biddable horse.  When asked whether a dog that
performs well in an obedience competition is proud of itself, animal
trainer Ralph Dennard replied cautiously, "It seems like it's proud of
itself.  They look like they're proud. They're confident; they're happy;
they stand up there," and he threw out his chest as such a dog might.

Mike Del Ross of Guide Dogs for the Blind describes the gradual
development of pride in dogs being trained for guide work. During the
early stages, many dogs become uncertain of themselves.  "It's as if
they're thinking 'This is way too hard.  I can't do this."' The eyes of
such dogs widen, giving them an overwhelmed look.  They may lie down, go
into a corner, or even huddle up in a ball.  "If you don't pick that up
right away you'll lose that dog." But if the trainer backs up, gives the
dog a break from work, lets it shake off its tension, and then walks the
dog through the task (which can be something as simple as leading in a
straight line), the dog can regain confidence.  As the dog masters what
it's being

asked to do, "All of a sudden their work gets a lot less shaky.  .  .  .

Everything comes together for them." The body language of these dogs
speaks of their self-confidence and pride.  "Then in the end they
realize, 'I can do this!" and they enjoy it.  They're proud of
themselves."

One Guide Dog trainee appeared to take pride in an accomplishment she
was not taught.  The dogs were housed in separate stalls opening onto a
large run.  Each morning when the trainers arrived, the dogs were let
out into this area.  A young German shepherd learned to flip the
horseshoe latches on the stalls.  Every morning she would let herself
out and go from stall to stall letting the other dogs out.  The
horseshoe latches were replaced with leash hooks, and she learned to
open those too.  Finally the stalls were fastened with leather straps,
and the shepherd's efforts were thwarted, but kennel supervisor Kathy
Finger smiles at the thought of the dog's delight when she could still
open the gates.  "She was so proud of herself.  She came running to us,
as happy as could be, wagging her tail

People experience territorial pride; perhaps animals can too The
chimpanzee colony of which Washoe is a member recently moved into a
large, new facility, with indoor and outdoor exercise areas.  When one
of Washoe's human companions visited for the first time since the move,
Washoe took her by the hand and led her from room to room, carefully
showing her every nook and cranny. Washoe may have had other
motivations, but she may simply have been proud of her spacious new
quarters.  Sharing her place, and her happiness in it, was also a sign
of her feelings of friendship.

Reveling in Freedom

Freedom gives joy.  Zookeepers, scientists who experiment with animals,
and others with entrenched interests often argue that if all an animal's
needs are met, it will not care whether it is free or not.  But many
well-fed, well-treated captive animals regularly try to escape over an
(I over again.  Freedom is relative.  In spring, when the chimpanzees at
the Arnhem Zoo are allowed out of their winter quarters for the first
time, there is a scene of exultation as they scream and hoot, clasp and
kiss one another, jump up and down and pound one another on the back.
They are not free, but the additional space, the relatively greater
freedom, thrills them.  It looks as if it gives them joy.

George Schaller describes a two-year-old panda at a Chinese breeding
center being given a rare chance to go into an outdoor enclosure.  The
panda burst from its darkened cage, trotted up a hill with a
high-stepping gait, and somersaulted down.  Again and again it raced up
the hill and rolled back down.  It "exploded with joy," Schaller wrote.

One of the joys of freedom is surely the ability to control one's own
destiny, and a few scientists have argued that animals feel the need for
such control.  Zoologist J.  Lee Kavanau gave white-footed mice (deer
mice) the opportunity to adjust light levels in their cages by pressing
a lever.  He found that the mice preferred dim light to bright light or
darkness, and if left alone would adjust the light level accordingly.
But if he turned the lights up high the mice would frequently respond by
making the cage completely dark.  Conversely, if he made the cage
completely dark, the mice would make the light as bright as possible. He
also found that if he disturbed sleeping mice, so that they came out of
their nest boxes to investigate, they would soon go back inside, but if
he put them inside by hand, they would immediately come out, no matter
how many times he replaced them.  They cared about choice more than
comfort.  When given the opportunity to manage their environment, they
balded fiercely for control.  Because wild white-footed mice have far
more control over their surroundings and activities, this matters more
to a captive animal.  Even if a zoo animal is supplied with all material
wants, there may be something vital lacking, something it needs to be
happy.  One of the joys of freedom may simply be the ability to evade
compulsion.

In a related vein is the story of Charles, a small octopus who was the
subject of an experiment to see whether invertebrates could learn
conditioned tasks as vertebrates do.  With two others, Albert and
Bertram, each housed in a small tank, Charles was to be trained to pull
a switch so that a light went on, and then swim over

to the light to be rewarded with a minute piece of fish.  Albert and
Bertram learned to perform this task and Charles seemed at first to be
doing the same.  But then Charles rebelled.  He began anchoring himself
to the side of the tank and yanking on the lever so fiercely that he
eventually broke it.  Instead of waiting under the light to receive his
smidgen of fish, Charles reached out of the water, grabbed the light,
and dragged it into the tank.  Finally, he took to floating at the top
of the tank, with his eyes above the surface, accurately squirting water
at the experimenters.  "The variables responsible for the maintenance
and strengthening of the lamp-pulling and squirting behavior in this
animal were not apparent," the experimenter noted primly.

In a captive breeding and release site for thick-billed parrots located
in an Arizona forest, the captive parrots awaiting release were healthy,
glossy, and well fed.  Amply supplied with food, water, safety, and
companionship, they resembled the best-treated pet parrots.  All the
same, the free-flying parrots looked startlingly better to observers. It
was hard to pin down the difference.  Both groups of birds had glossy
plumage and bright eyes.  The demeanor of the two groups probably
conveyed the difference.  The captive parrots were not hunched or
pathetic, but the wild parrots seemed ten times better: stronger,
happier, and more confident.  Even as they eyed the sky for hawks, they
seemed to be reveling in life.  In F.  Fraser Darling's classic A Herd
of Red Deer, a similar observation is made of deer kept in paddocks
compared to wild deer: something is missing.

Can animals ever be happy in captivity?  Can a zoo ever be a good zoo in
the sense of being a joyful zoo?  Since animal behavior is so often
flexible, this ought to be possible, but then most animals are not held
captive by people who are asking what it would take to make the animal
happy.  They ask what it would take to make the animal docile, or to
make a good exhibit, or to breed.  The art of making zoo animals
contented, thrilled, or joyous is not a subject of expertise.

Wolves breed in captivity, but it seems unlikely that a wolf who is
constantly being stared at from nearby, a wolf with no place to hide, a
wolf who cannot see the moon, can be a contented wolf.

It may be that a wolf cannot be happy while making a good exhibit. A
raccoon may be less likely to have this problem.  It may have other
problems, however, no less distorting of its nature.  A happy ammal
needs to feel safe most of the time.  If it is a social animal it needs
company.  It needs something that it can accomplish.  A dish of food
three times a day may be nutritionally equal to four hours of foraging,
but it is not emotionally equal.

When Indah, an orangutan, escaped from her enclosure at the San Diego
Zoo in June 1993 and clambered up onto the viewing deck, she neither
headed for the hills nor attacked people.  She chose to go through a
garbage can, put a bag on her head, taste what she found, and dump an
ashtray, surrounded by an interested audience.  In other words, she
indulged both her curiosity about what happens on the other side of the
viewing deck and her need to act on her world in her own way.  This
seems to indicate that in her enclosure Indah was bored.  She was not
fulfilled.  She had things she wanted to do that she was kept from
doing.  In zoos, visitor after visitor remarks on the apparent boredom
of so many of the animals.  Many people express a sense of unease, an
understanding of how they would feel under such circumstances.

An animal also needs room to wander over a range appropriate to its
species.  For some small animals who cherish the vicinity of a burrow or
nest, an ordinary zoo cage, if appropriately complex, might be big
enough.  No cage is big enough for a polar bear or a cougar.  Whether an
animal without freedom to choose its own environment, no matter how
small, can be happy is a question that needs to be asked.  Is not
freedom of choice basic to the meaning of happiness?  It is not
surprising that a favored task for captive animals to be taught is the
miming of happiness.  Dolphins, confined deprived of most companionship,
denied the use of

in nny spaces, many of their capacities, are trained to burst into the
air in a shower of spray, to dance across the surface of the water and
to leap in apparent joy.  The joy may even be real, but it does not
reflect the overall reality of the captive animals' life.

Play

Joy often expresses itself in play, which many animals indulge in all
their lives.  Play, which seems to be both a sign and a source of joy,
has been increasingly studied in recent years, following a long period
when the subject was considered in professional circles to be less than
respectable.  The longtime lack of study, according to Robert Fagen of
the University of Pennsylvania, was a blacklash against the work of Karl
Groos, who, at the end of the nineteenth century, argued for a link
between play and aesthetics, depicting play as a simplified form of
artistic endeavor.  Fagen notes that "the study of animal play has never
quite overcome its embarrassment at Groos's attempt to unite animal
psychology with aesthetics." Biologists continue to be dismayed by the
lay public's interest in possible links between animal play and human
creativity.

Fagen is unintimidated, and at the end of his book on play in animals,
he writes:

In the play of animals we find a pure aesthetic that frankly

defies science.  Why kittens or puppies chase and vigorously

paw at each other in reciprocal fashion without inflicting in jury,
repeating this behavior almost to the point of physical

exhaustion, is not known.  Yet this behavior fascinates, indeed

enchants.

Some researchers also feel that the study of play has been neglected
because play behavior has been inadequately defined. Various definitions
have been propounded, more or less ponderous.  Frustration is apparent
in ethologist Robert Hinde's definition: "Play is a general term for
activities which seem to the observer to make no immediate contribution
to survival." That is, play is something done simply for the joy of
doing it.

Unwieldy definitions of play (some mere lists of play behaviors) are
probably better than none, however.  Mare Bekoff, professor of biology
at the University of Colorado, has noted a tendency among ethologists
and behavioral scientists either to make definitions of difficult
concepts so narrow as to be useless or to say that a

concept that is difficult to define must therefore be impossible to
study.  "For example, some have claimed that social play is not a valid
category of behavior because it is so difficult to define.  While
suggesting that we do away with social play by stipulatively defining it
out of existence (or by defining social play as what it is not), few if
any viable alternatives were offered; thus we were left with nothing!"

Play is important to animals, and, although it carries risks, since
animals can be injured or killed while playing, a variety of
evolutionary functions for it have been proposed.  Perhaps it is a form
of practice, of learningto perform tasks, theorists suggest; or perhaps
it exercises developing social, neurological, or physical capacities.
Cynthia Moss may have spoken for many biologists when, watching African
elephants play in the rain-running, twirling, flapping ears and trunks,
spraying water at each other, flailing branches, uttering loud play
trumpets-she wrote in her notes,

ow can one do a serious study of animals that behave this way!"

Hans Kruuk, studying spotted hyenas, complained that play "is an
anthropomorphic term, negatively defined; I have merely used it as a
label for some activities which in our own species would be named that
way." As an example of such activities Kruuk cited four adult hyenas
swimming in a river, jumping in and out, splashing and pushing one
another underwater.  Kruuk adds that the hyenas made a substantial
detour to reach the pool.

Elephants, both Indian and African, are particularly playful.  A
traveling circus once pitched its tents next to a schoolyard with a set
of swings.  The older elephants were chained, but Norma, a young
elephant, was left loose.  When Norma saw children swinging she was
greatly intrigued.  Before long she went over, waved the children away
with her trunk, backed up to a swing, and attempted to sit on it.  She
was notably unsuccessful, even using her tail to hold the swing in
place.  Finally she flung the swing about irritably and returned to her
companions.  The children began to swing again, and Norma had to try
again.  Despite trying periodically for an hour, she was never able to
swing.

Norma may have been looking for entertainment because she was bored.
There seems no reason to doubt that animals can be

bored.  Nim Chimpsky often appeared to his sign language instructors to
be bored and would demand to be taken to the toilet or to go to bed when
his teachers felt strongly that he was just looking for a change from
his lessons, like any schoolchild.

The life of many herbivores strikes many humans as intrinsically boring.
Grazing animals eat the same foods all day long every day.  This would
certainly bore orrmivores like us, but maybe buffalo have a higher
tolerance for monotony.  Maybe each blade of grass seems vasity
different from the blade before.  Perhaps their life is a rich tapestry
of excitement and intrigue, but at a sensory level too far removed from
ours to be apparent.  In any case, to assume that a wild buffalo is
bored with its life because it would bore some humans is true
anthropomorphism.

Alaskan buffalo have been seen playing on ice.  One at a time, starting
from a ridge above a frozen lake, the buffalo charged down to the shore
and plunged onto the ice, bracing their legs so that they spun across
the ice, with their tails in the air.  As each buffalo skidded to a
halt, it let out a loud bellow, "a kind of g7vaaa sound" -and then
awkwardly picked its way back to shore to make another run.

Animals can play in complete solitude.  Bears are playful throughout
their lives and will slide on snowbanks like ottersheadfirst, feet
first, on the stomach, on the back, while somersaulting.  Two grizzly
bears in the Rockies were seen to wrestle for possession of a log.  The
bear who triumphed lay on its back and juggled the log on its feet while
roaring with delight.  A quieter grizzly floated in a mountain lake on a
hot day.  It ducked its muzzle beneath the water to blow bubbles-and
then reached out to pop them with its long claws.  Tiger cubs and
leopards love to jump off branches into water and will do so repeatedly.
Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) in the San Diego Zoo play solitary games of
blindman's bluff.  The bonobo covers its eyes with a leaf or bag or
simply puts its fingers or arm over its eyes, and then staggers about
the climbing frame.

At one time the gold leaf on the domes of the Kremlin was being
scratched off by hooded crows.  The crows were not indulging their
fabled penchant for theft.  They had simply found that it

was enormous fun to slide down those onion domes, and their claws did
significant damage.  Eventually they were driven away by a combination
of recorded crow distress calls and regular patrols by tame falcons.

Animals may also play with objects.  This can be seen even in some
animals that are not known to play with other animals.  A captive Komodo
dragon in a British zoo played with a shovel, pushing it noisily about
the enclosure.  A meter-long wild alligator in Georgia spent forty-five
minutes playing with the drops of water falling from a pipe into a pond,
stalking the pipe, snapping at the drops, letting them fall on his snout
and then snapping at them in midair.  Captive gorillas and chimpanzees
enjoy playing with dolls and spend time in other imaginative play, as
when Koko the gorilla pretends to brush her teeth with a toy banana, or
when the chimpanzee Loulis, playing alone, puts a board on his head,
signing "That's a hat."

In other animals, object play quickly becomes social play.  A captive
dolphin at an oceanarium played with a feather, carrying it to an intake
pipe, letting it be swept off by the current, and then chasing it.
Another dolphin joined in and they are said to have taken turns.  In
another game three or four dolphins vied for possession of a feather,
and wild dolphins play similar keep-away games with various objects.
Beluga whales carry stones or seaweed on their heads and the other
whales at once try to knock them off. Lions, both adults and cubs, may
try to wrest pieces of bark or twigs from each other.

Teasing is a form of play, at least for the one doing the teasing. Some
animals tease conspecifics; they may also tease members of other
species.  A captive dolphin teased a turtle by tossing it out of the
water and rolling it along the bottom of the tank.  Another dolphin
teased a fish that lived in a rock crevice in the tank by putting bits
of squid near the hole; when the fish came out to get the squid, the
dolphin would snatch it away.  Many people who visit captive dolphins
see them mercilessly tease sea lions and seals with whom they share
pools.  Ravens tease peregrines by flying closer and closer past them,
croaking, until the falcon lunges after them. Swans, with their large
dignity, are often the target of teasing.  In

the water, little grebes have been seen to tweak swans' tails and then
dive.  On land, carrion crows may pull their tails repeatedly, leaping
back each time the swan turns on them.

Foxes tease less nimble hyenas by coming close, circling, then sprinting
away until the hyena can no longer ignore it and lunges for the fox.
Several cases of hyenas actually catching and killing such a fox have
been reported.  Maybe the fox is gaining information about the hyena's
powers, useful when the fox snatches bites from the hyena's kills. Maybe
the fox is accustoming the hyena to its presence, also useful when
pillaging kills.  This gives a practical explanation for why such
behavior persists, but it does not explain what the fox feels.  Why
should the fox not feel the mischievousness that has been imputed to the
species over the centuries?

Games

Other forms of play seem to be enjoyable for all involved. Young animals
and sometimes adults commonly wrestle, mockfight, and chase one another.
Sifaka lemurs lie on their backs with the soles of their hind feet
pressed together and "bicycle." A favorite game of young animals of many
species, from wolves to red deer, is King of the Castle, where one
player occupies a high place and defends it against the onslaughts of
the others.  Troops of sifaka and ring-tailed lemurs often tease by
barring the other troop's passage, with animals jumping in front of each
other, over each other, around each other.  Unlike genuine territorial
disputes, the two troops mingle and bound in all directions rather than
aiming for a particular goal.

To what extent animals playing games recognize implicit rules is not
clear.  In a few instances trainers have successfully taught formalized
games to animals.  A simplified version of cricket was taught to
elephants of the Bertram Mills' Circus after several months of training.
Elephants understand throwing objects, but batting and fielding took
time to learn.  It is said that after some months the elephants began to
"enter into the spirit of the game" and subsequently played with great
enthusiasm.

At an oceanarium, several dolphins were trained in the sldlls of water
polo.  First they learned to put a ball through a goal, each team having
a different goal.  Then the trainers tried to teach them to compete by
keeping the other team from scoring.  After three training sessions the
dolphins caught on, all too well.  Uninterested in strictures against
foul play, the dolphins zesffidly attacked one another in such an
unsporting fashion that the training was discontinued and they were
never again given competitive games.  There is no indication that the
dolphins thereafter tried to play polo on their own.

Interspecies Play

Animals sometimes find playmates across the barrier of species.  In
captivity, species that would be unlikely to meet in the wild are often
brought together.  Thus a leopard and a dog may play together, or a cat
and a gorilla.  One family that kept red kangaroos in their backyard
with their dogs found the animals quite friendly toward each other,
although there were difficulties.  The dogs liked to chase and be chased
by their friends, barking.  The kangaroos preferred to wrestle and box,
pastimes the dogs did not care for. Somehow they managed to play
together.

Interspecies play, while not routine, is also found in the wild. Dwarf
mongooses in Kenya have been seen attempting to play with ground
squirrels, lizards, and birds.  Here again, the different styles of play
can form a barrier.  M'Bili, a young mongoose rebuffed by her mongoose
playmates, ran over to a large lizard, hopping and uttering play calls,
and began tossing dead leaves about.  When this produced no reaction,
she danced around the lizard, tapping it and pretending to nibble at the
lizard's back, forefoot, and face.  The lizard closed its eyes and did
not respond, and M'Bili gave up.

Another mongoose, Moja, tried to play with an African ground squirrel as
he would play with another mongoose.  Moja was playing with another
mongoose when the squirrel hopped into their midst and, standing on its
hind legs, stopped to gnaw on a nut.  Moja raced over giving the "play
call," rose on his hind legs,

put his forepaws on the squirrel's shoulders, and started to (&waltz"
around with the squirrel.  A playful mongoose follows this by pretending
to snap at the other animal's head and neck, which Moja did, but the
squirrel didn't respond, simply standing passively and letting itself be
waltzed around.  Then Moja pounced on the squirrel's tail and bit it,
whereupon the squirrel hopped away and Moja attacked a twig instead.

Tatu, another young mongoose, had better luck with a whiteheaded buffalo
weaverbird.  Tatu chased the bird, making jumps up into the air at it.
Instead of departing, the bird flew no more than a foot off the ground,
repeatedly skimmed over Tatu's head, and landed on twigs close to her.
Tatu was the first to tire of this game. In a still more successful
match, wild river otter cubs and beaver kits have been seen playing
together.  Adult beavers and otters were present and paid no attention
as two cubs and two kits nosed, nudged, and chased each other, both on a
stream bank and in the water.  The play continued until the otter
parents moved their family along.  Young mangabey and red-tailed
monkeys, whose troops often forage together in the Tanzanian rain
forest, also play-wrestle together.  Interspecies play, a commonality in
nature, has a special charm for humans.  If two species of animals can
reach out joyfully across the gap between them, it seems that humans,
too, might reach across and share their joy.

Sometimes the gap between species can be very wide.  Douglas Chadwick
describes an old bull elephant drinking at springs in Africa.  Near one
pool he met a tiny blacksmith ployer.  Ferociously the bird lifted its
wings and shrieked a threat.  The huge animal departed.  "While leaving,
though, the old bull pranced a little bit, shaking his head, as if
laughing to himself." Chadwick concedes that this description can be
called anthropomorphic, that some would insist on saying that the
elephant "was merely exhibiting displacement behavior, releasing a bit
of tension built up in response to the bird's threat.  But what is the
difference between this and many occasions that cause us to shrug and
shake our heads, laughing to ourselves?  In fact, that is exactly what I
did when blacksmith ployers stalked forward yelling at me." To refuse to
see the commonality between person and elephant is to deliberately

widen the gap.  Another gap may come between the elephant and the bird.
The elephant seems to have been amused by this encounter, but there is
no reason to guess that the ployer saw the joke.

Sometimes the gap may be too wide.  In Bert Hblldobler and Edward 0.
Wilson's authoritative work on ants, we find a section titled "Ants Do
Not Play" in which they refute the notion, put forward by several
observers, that ants may be seen to play.  The wrestling ants observed
by Huber and by Stumper were not playing but in earnest, Hblldobler and
Wilson argue: the contestants were members of different colonies
fighting to master each other. "In short, these activities have a simple
explanation having nothing to do with play.  We know of no behavior in
ants or any other social insects that can be construed as play or social
practice behavior approaching the mammalian type." Yet
nineteenth-century naturalist Henry Water Bates's description of Eciton
ants in Brazil does not sound like fighting.

I frequently saw them very leisurely employed in a way that

looked like recreation.  When this happened, the place was

always a sunny nook in the forest.  .  .  .  Instead of pressing

forward eagerly, and plundering right and left, they seemed to

have been all smitten with a sudden fit of laziness.  Some were

walking slowly about, others were brushing their antennae

with their fore feet; but the drollest sight was their cleaning

one another.  Here and there an ant was seen stretching forth

first one leg and then another, to be brushed and washed by

one or more of its comrades, who performed the task by passing the limb
between the jaws and the tongue, finishing by

giving the antennae a friendly wipe.  .  .  .  The actions of

those ants looked like simple indulgence in idle amusement.

Have these little creatures, then, an excess of energy beyond

what is required for labors absolutely necessary to the welfare

of their species, and do they thus expend it in mere sportive ness, like
young lambs or kittens, or in idle whims like rational

beings?  It is probable that these hours of relaxation and cleaning are
indispensable to the effective performance of their

harder labors; but while looking at them, the conclusion that

the ants were engaged merely in play was irresistible.

Perhaps Bates is right, and some ants do play.  When people think of
playing with animals, we tend to think of playing with dogs or cats.  It
is hard to imagine playing with an ant, but this is no reason to decide
that ants cannot play with one another.

There is something compelling in the recognition that other creatures
enjoy play as much as we do.  Jacques Cousteau wrote of whales as
"sociable, affectionate, devoted, gentle, captivating, high.  .  (I
creatures.  The entire ocean is their empire-and their

spirite

playground.  Theirs is a 'leisure society' that predates ours by some
forty million years.  They spend less than a tenth of their lives

looking for food and feeding.  The rest of the time they spend swimming,
frolicking in the waves, conversing with each other, wooing the opposite
sex, and rearing their young-an inoffensive agenda if ever there was
one!"

Scientists and laypeople alike have long been fascinated by the social
play of caneds-wolves, dogs, coyotes-because it so clearly involves a
shared understanding of language and of social bonds. The play bow-when
a canid lowers its forelegs to the ground and waves its tail-is a way of
saying: "Everything that follows is just a game.  Are you ready to
play?" Dogs will attempt to play with another animal, cats, for example,
but are usually disappointed in their lack of fluency in or indifference
to this canid metalanguage. This gives special poignance to the play
between a dog and its human friend, as if dogs recognize that they have
found a companion to whom they can teach the rules.  Nor do they seem
unhappy at trying to figure out human rules for the games we wish to
play with them.  The concentrated posture a dog assumes over a stick he
is waiting for his human friend to move is obviously meant to be
slightly humorous: that is part of the game.  Playing these games is
almost like looking through a window into the dog's mind.  We see what
he intends.  And the dog, too, gets a clear glimpse into our minds and
knows what we want.  Play, laughter, and friendship burst across the
species barrier.

In the fifteenth century, when giraffes were known in Europe as
camelopards, Cosimo de' Medici shut a giraffe in a pen with lions,
bloodhounds, and fighting bulls to see which species was the most
savage.  As Pope Pius 11 looked on, the lions and dogs dozed, the bulls
quietly chewed their cuds, and the giraffe huddled against the fence,
shaking in fear.  These leaders of men were disappointed at the absence
of bloodshed, and wondered why the animals were not more savage.

History texts, today's newspapers, and our own lives testify to the fact
that humans are moved by anger and hostility with regularity, despite
wishes to control or at least disguise these emotions. In contrast,
people are often eager to point out aggression among animals, and
identify it as "animal,"

"brutal," or "savage." While aggression among animals is a favored topic
for ethologists to study, the word anger is unlikely to appear in their
work.

Animals do seem to get angry; they certainly do commit aggressive acts
against each other, fight for turf, and hurt and kill one another.  They
may not do this in exactly the ways people expect, however.

Like de' Medici and Pius 11, scientists have had their expectanons about
animal aggression confounded.  Ethologists seeking to chart dominance
hierarchies in groups of wild animals are sometimes frustrated when they
cannot find who is dominant.  They seem to suppose that with luck or
labor, the true ranking among the animals will emerge.  It does not
always occur to them that the relations may not be hierarchical.  It is
as if animals at a waterhole must be arranged as neatly as academics at
a granting agency.

Some people nurture the hope that animals-and if not all animals, then
some cherished species-are not aggressive except in self-defense.  In
the society of wolves, the company of dolphins, or the murmuring of
doves, only harmony is imagined.  If the lion does not lie down with the
lamb, perhaps at least the lambs lie down together.  A look at the
evidence, however, shows that while lambs may lie down together, they
may very well rise to butt heads. Doves, dolphins, and wolves can treat
each other very roughly. This is not to say that their whole social life
is marked by conflict, only that the hope for a saintly species to
become our guru of peace, love, and benevolence is unlikely to be
fulfilled.  Perhaps it is the expectation that is unreasonable.

Aggression spans a range from unprovoked attack to self-defense.  When
an animal pushes another away from food or refuses to be pushed, growls
at an animal that comes near its young, or chases away a rival, it is
behaving aggressively.  From the viewpoint of survival, such behavior
often has comparative advantages.  The aggressive animal gets more to
eat, keeps its offspring safer, has a better chance to mate, or faces
less competition, all of which may enable it to leave more descendants.
Anger and other emotions related to aggression may produce such
behavior.

Of all the forms of physical force in the animal world, those most apt
to be forgiven by critical humans are self-defense and defense of young.
A wolf attacking a deer may be called savage and ravening, and the
deer's defense may be called brave and heroic. The tigress or the bear
defending her cubs is an archetype of justifiable rage.  Animals like
the red kangaroo, who may toss the larger of her joeys out of her pouch
if she is too closely pursued, are

viewed with great disfavor.  Such an incident is no one's favorite
animal story.

Waging War

One of the gravest charges against the human race is that only humans
make war.  The German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger began his recent
book on European civil war by saying, "Animals fight, but they do not
wage war." We are supposed to be shamed by the fact that animals do not
make war.  Yet some animals do.  Ant wars are the best known, but
insects are sufficiently dissimilar to us that people seldom take that
to heart.  In recent years it has become clear that animals as closely
related to us as chimpanzees can go to war.  The famous chimps of Gombe
attack other bands with no provocation and with deadly intent, not only
patrolling their borders but making raids.  They may kill and eat one
another.

One account, which includes both terrorist behavior and a sudden
recognition of commonality, is particularly evocative of human warfare.
When a group of chimpanzees from Gombe's Kasakela group found a strange
female and her infant in a tree, they barked threateningly.  After a few
blows had been aimed at her, there was a pause, during which some of the
chimps fed in the same tree.  She approached one of the males
submissively and touched him, but he made no response.  When she tried
to leave, several of the males blocked her way.  She approached another
male, Satan, submissively and again touched him.  His response, in an
apparently xenophobic gesture, was to pick some leaves and use them to
scrub the spot she had touched.  Immediately several chimpanzees
attacked her and grabbed her infant.  For eight minutes she fought
unsuccessfully for her baby, and finally escaped, badly injured.  One of
the Kasakela apes smashed the infant against trees and rocks and tossed
her down.  She was not dead, and Satan picked her up gently, groomed
her, and put her down.  Over the next few hours, three different males,
including Satan, carried the infant tenderly, supporting and grooming
her, before she was abandoned

to die of her wounds.  It is hard to know what to make of this strange
story.  Is it possible to attribute regret, a sense that they had gone
too far, to these chimpanzees?  Did they feel first hatred, then
compassion, as warring humans sometimes do?  In other encounters between
bands, infants have been killed and eaten.  This incident suggests mixed
feelings, in which the infant went from being "enemy" to "baby."

Bands of dwarf mongooses also join battle, apparently over territory.
Many are injured, and some die.  One battle began with the appearance in
one group's territory of a second group.  Each band gathered, twittered,
groomed, and marked each other with scent.  Then the resident group
advanced as a body and was met by the other group.  The "armies"
advanced and retreated, then suddenly began sinking their teeth into one
another.  At one point both bands retreated as if in truce, then swept
back into battle.  Eventually the invaders withdrew.  None of the
resident mongooses was killed, though toes had been bitten off, ears
chewed to stumps, a tail broken.  One was injured so badly that she
could no longer feed herself and later died.  In their next clash this
same group lost.

These mass conflicts seem to be over territory.  One group invades
another's territory and battle is joined.  Hans Kruuk observed fighting
between spotted hyenas, which occurred when members of one clan killed
prey in the other clan's range.  Such quarrels were usually won by the
residents, after prolonged threats and chasing, but sometimes the
conflict escalated, and hyenas were injured or killed.  Once, to Kruuk's
horror, a hyena whose clan had killed a wildebeest on another clan's
range was fatally injured.  His attackers bit off his ears, feet, and
testicles, and left him bleeding, paralyzed and partly eaten.

When Jane Goodall was able to show what looked like chimpanzees going to
war, one could almost feel a sigh of relief among scientists.  But
compared to our own history, as biologist Richard Lewontin points out,
it is the tiniest of blips, worthy of note only because it was
previously unknown.  We do not know, nor does Goodall pretend to know,
how common it is.  In many respects it feels like a man-bites-dog story,
interesting because it is so uncommon.  What i's common is the overall
peacefulness with which animals live together.  Human history is
incomparably more violent. Perhaps if we reversed our research strategy,
we could find out why: A Study of Human Aggression from the Standpoint
of Peacefailness Among Elephants.

Aggression over Resources

Aggression is employed by many animals to obtain access to resources
like food.  A principal delight of researchers on the African savannas
is keeping track of which hyenas killed a wildebeest, which lions stole
the carcass from them (or vice versa), and which jackals and vultures
managed to snatch a bite before being driven off.  Such conflict makes a
dramatic spectacle.  Most animals do not usually clash in this way.  The
wildebeest being struggled over did not, in life, stage bloody battles
with other wildebeest over which of them was going to graze a patch of
grass.

Competition uses a lot of energy, and many species seem to minimize such
strife.  In many animals there are postures of surrender that inhibit
the attacker of the same species.  The wolf rolls on its back, or the
monkey looks away, and the attacker stops.  What does an aggressor feel
whose attack is checked in this way?

For many animals the creature likely to be its closest competitor, to
want the same foods or the same nest sites, is another of its species,
in some cases its own mate.  Research suggests that size variation
within some species confers survival advantage.  For example, a female
osprey is larger than her mate; they catch fish of di rent sizes, which
reduces competition between them, increasing their joint supply of food.

Tame parrots often take a strong dislike to individual humans or to
classes of humans, often to a whole gender.  Veterinarians can grow
weary of hearing clients say, "He hates all men.  He must have been
abused by a man in the past." Parrots have been known to conceive
hatreds of all redheads, all brunettes, or all adults. While all
wild-caught parrots have been abused, due to the cruelty involved in
their capture and transport, this is less likely for parrots

reared in captivity.  But it remains unknown whether these kinds of
eccentric dislikes are found in the wild.

Perhaps these parrots simply enjoy having enemies.  This may promote
flock solidarity, prevent interbreeding between species, strengthen the
pair bond, or have some other valuable function.

Another possibility is that the irritability of parrots is related to
dominance struggles in the flock.  Ever since it was announced in the
1920s that chickens have "pecking orders," ethologists have been seeking
and finding pecking orders-now called dominance hierarchies-everywhere.
In a pecking order a chicken is dominant to so me other chickens, and
can peck them and push them away from food-unless it is the
lowest-ranking chicken of all.  And, unless it is the top bird, other
chickens will in turn be dominant to it, and the chicken will allow
these birds to peck it and oust it from food.  The idea of dominant and
submissive animals has found wide public popularity.  So has the idea
that aggression is valuable because it helps an animal dominate.

In recent years the idea of the dominance hierarchy has become more
controversial, with some scientists asking if such hierarchies are real
or a product of human expectation.  It is worth noting that in wild
flocks, chickens do not form rigid pecking orders as they do in poultry
yards.

Some ethologists now argue that while dominance relationships between
two animals ("the gray female is dominant to the black female") may be
real, dominance ranks assigned to individuals ("the second-ranking
female in the pack") are not.  Others point out that an animal may
dominate in one situation-competing to eat first-but not in
another-competing for a mate.  Still others say that while dominance may
be important between two adult male baboons, it may not be a realistic
way to describe the relationship between a female and her adolescent
daughter.

By far the most serious blow to theories about dominance is the
discovery that one of its most basic assumptions isn't always true. This
is the assumption that male animals who are dominant are able to mate
more often and produce more offspring.  Such males are romanticized-by
some-as potent princes of their kind, genetic heroes.  But recent
studies show that dominant males can't

always mate more often.  In the hamadryas baboon, for example, whether
or not females like a male is more significant to his reproductive
success than his dominance.  Shirley Strum found that the more
high-ranking and aggressive a male olive baboon was, the less likely
females were to mate with him.  Such males also lost out when special
foods were found, apparently because they had fewer friends to share
with them.  Leyhausen noted long ago that when tomcats fight over a
female in heat, the female is no more likely to mate with the winner
than with the loser-a fact that seems to have eluded most observers.
Such evidence means that many cherished theories must be reexamined.  A
better analysis of dominance will have to include the emotions of both
dominant and subordinate animals.  Increasingly, attempts to fit
theories of dominance to the way animals really live seems to require
such terms as respect, alltho?ity, tokrance, deference to age, and
leadership; terms that begin to mix emotional concepts with those of
status.

Far from trying to get mates by showing dominance, many animals try to
seem anything but dominant when courting, to avoid frightening the one
being wooed.  A courting male mountain goat lowers his back to look
smaller, keeps his horns back, and takes small steps.  A male brown bear
slouches, flattens his ears, takes care not to stare at the female, and
acts playful.

The idea of observing animals engaged in mysterious behavior and
charting a tidy hierarchy that produces testable predictions has great
appeal for scientists.  Sometimes the idea that hierarchies are
inevitable and that this proves certain things about humans is also part
of the appeal.  This may be why some theorists pay more attention to
aggressive species than to peaceful ones, and more attention to species
where males dominate than to species where females dominate, as in the
lemurs.  Human interest in dominance is so great that this seems to be a
particularly fertile area for errors caused by projection. Scientists'
behavior may, in this respect, parallel that of recreational hunters,
who often seek out the biggest males as trophy animals.  These animals,
likely dominant or alpha males, are not usually the tastiest animals, or
the easiest to find.

Yet dominance can be a real phenomenon in animals as well as people.
From human lives we recognize the drive for respect or

status that may be called ambition.  In a herd of scimitar-horned oryx
in a wildlife preserve in the Negey Desert, a male called Napoleon had
grown old and short of breath and had lost status. Rather than leave the
herd, he continued to challenge other males and pursue females.  His
challenges were ignored, but when he pursued females the other males
attacked, goring him with their yard-long horns.

The preserve managers put Napoleon in protective custodra five-acre
paddock.  He escaped the next day, and was injured by another oryx.  He
was recaptured and treated-and escaped again. After his eighth escape
from the paddock, now festooned with bolts and latches, the managers
changed their approach.  Since Napoleon could not be forcibly contained,
they decided to give him what he wanted in the paddock.  They decided
that he wanted not to attack males, nor to be with females, but to be
dominant.  So every morning the director would enter the paddock with a
bamboo pole.  In ritual battle, he clattered the pole on Napoleon's
horns and Napoleon threatened and charged until the director allowed the
victorious oryx to drive him out.  Napoleon stopped escaping and lived
in the paddock until he died of old age, the top oryx of his enclosure,
and apparently content.  It is worth asking how an animal feels when it
loses status.  Do animals get depressed, do they adapt, or is it ever a
relief)

Rape

Rape, a sexual form of aggression, has been observed in some animals.
Biologists have observed forcible rape in orangutans, dolphins, seals,
bighorn sheep, wild horses, and some birds.  In Arizona, an attempted
rape was observed in coatimundis (long-nosed raccoonlike animals).  A
large male bounded out of the bushes into a group of females and
juveniles, jumped on a young female and tried to mate with her.  She
squealed and instantly three adult females ran snarling at the male,
drove him away, and chased him for fifty yards down the canyon.  In none
of these species does rape appear to be the norm, but in several it does
occur regularly.  For

instance, although white-fronted bee-eaters (tunnel-nesting African
birds) form mated pairs, female bee-eaters leaving the nest must dodge
males who try to force them to the ground and rape them.  The males
preferentially attack females who are laying eggs and thus might lay an
egg fertilized by the rapist, rather than by the mate.

Among waterfowl like mallards, pintail, and teal, an unwilling female is
occasionally pursued by one or more males, which can result in her death
by drowning when many males try to pile on. She will fight back and
flee, and her mate will try to drive off the aggressors, but their
efforts at defense do not always succeed.  In addition, the male of a
pair of mallards will sometimes attempt to mate with the female
immediately after a rape attempt by another male.  These mating attempts
may not be preceded by the usual mutual displays of mated pairs.  In
most such cases "the female visibly struggled, but in no case did she
flee." The sociobiological explanation for such marital rapes is that it
gives the mate's sperm a better chance of competing with the rapist's
sperm.  It sheds no light on how the male or female birds feel.  Nor
does such behavior provide any evidence whatsoever that human rape is
"natural," biologically determined, or reproductively advantageous.

At one marine park, where newly captured dolphins would be given a
companion who was accustomed to captivity, bottle-nosed dolphins could
not be used as companions because they would torment and sometimes rape
the newcomer, if it was of another species.  In the wild, bottle-nosed
dolphins, despite their saintly popular image, have been seen to form
male gangs to sequester and rape females of their own species.

Hans Kruuk witnessed a male spotted hyena attempting to mate with a
female, who drove him off each time.  Her ten-monthold cub was nearby,
and the male hyena repeatedly mounted it and ejaculated on it. According
to Kruuk, the cub sometimes ignored this and sometimes struggled
"slightly as if in play." The mother did not intervene.  Yet such
behavior seems to be rare in animals and accounts are difficult to find.

Amaer andaggression

In most discussions of aggression and dominance, nothing is said about
anger or other emotions that might inhabit such behavior.  It is very
difficult to tell when anger is or is not involved in aggression.
Aggressive behavior in humans can be coolly calculated: whatever
motivates it does not seem to be the same thing that makes people shout
and fume.  There is some belief that penguins may push one of their
number into the water before they all dive, to see whether leopard seals
are waiting there to eat them.  If this proves true, it would seem
unlikely that penguins commit such aggressive acts out of anger.

Some instances of animal behavior do resonate with the human experience
of anger and irritation, and perhaps are easier to understand in this
way because they do not constitute stereotypical reactions.  Giraffes
seem to dislike cars.  When a car honked at one giraffe standing in the
road, the giraffe knocked the car over and kicked it vigorously. Another
driver encountered two giraffes crossing a road at night, stopped, and
dimmed the headlights.  One giraffe got off the road but the other
walked over, turned its back, and delivered a series of two-footed kicks
to the radiator.  To anyone who has ever been annoyed by a honking
vehicle, this is the very picture of irritated behavior, even the
fulfillment of a fantasy.

Karen Pryor notes that if you are teaching either people or porpoises to
do a task for which you have rewarded them in the past, and then stop
rewarding them, they both appear irritated: humans will grumble and look
sour; the porpoises will jump out of the water and splash you from head
to toe.

Pryor also describes Ola, a young false killer whale (resembling an
orca), reacting to a bird called a booby.  One day, during a show at the
oceanarium, a booby landed next to Ola's tank.  Ola stuck his head out
of the water and stared at the booby.  When the booby didn't move, Ola
leapt up at it with gaping jaws.  The booby still didn't move.  By this
time most of the audience was ignoring the show and watching Ola and the
bird.  Ola hurded around the tank, raising big waves that splashed over
the booby's feet.  Still the booby didn't move.  Ola submerged, took a
mouthful of water,

came up, and squirted it directly onto the booby.  The drenched bird
took flight and the audience burst out laughing.  Such laughter contains
an element of recognition.

Oddly, dog trainers disagree on whether dogs feel anger, although they
generally agree that dogs recognize anger in humans. A4ike Del Ross, an
experienced dog trainer at Guide Dogs for the Blind, although confident
that dogs feel fear, sadness, happiness, frustration, and other
emotions, doubted that they feel anger or jealousy, even when behaving
aggressively.  Another Guide Dog expert, Kathy Finger, disagreed
strongly, saying that dogs do indeed feel anger.

This difference of opinion may stern from differing definitions of
anger, but it may also be based upon a situation that every dog trainer
hears about constantly: the dog that destroys things when left alone.
The owner is certain that the dog is angry at being left and is chewing
furniture, digging holes, knocking things over, or barking as revenge.
The trainer may be just as certain that the dog is intensely bored, and
that the solution lies in better conditions for the dog, rather than in
discussions of what the owner considers its unjustifiable rage.  Yet the
two explanations are fully compatible.

One of the colleagues of the famous Ivan Pavlov tried to discover with
how much precision a dog could tell a circle from an ellipse.  Food
rewards were given along with the circle but not the ellipse.  Each time
the experimenter found (apparently by observing the flow of the dog's
saliva) that the dog could tell the shapes apart, new tests would begin,
with a rounder ellipse.  After three weeks the dog suddenly got worse at
making the distinction.  "The hitherto quiet dog began to squeal in its
stand, kept wriggling about, tore off with its teeth the apparatus for
mechanical stimulation of the skin, and bit through the tubes connecting
the animal's room with the observer, a behavior which never happened
before.  On being taken into the experimental room the dog now barked
violently, which was also contrary to its usual custom; in short it
presented all the symptoms of a condition of acute neurosis."

Common sense tells us that this is not a neurotic dog, it is an angry
and frustrated dog.

The difficulty of untangling anger and aggression is compounded with
predatory animals, whose way of getting food is more direct than
anything most people experience.  (A person eating a hamburger is not
thought to be gloating over the suffering of cows.)  This has sometimes
served as a pretext for the argument that animals are unlike humans in
their savagery.

Predators are often alleged to be cruel, as is nature itself.  This
charge has been used to justify hunting certain species almost out of
existence, like the wolf and the tiger, and is also used against smaller
predators like the fox and the blue jay.  Since they are cruel to one
another, the argument seems to go, humans have the right or duty to
exterminate them.

Cases where predators kill more than they can eat or begin eaing their
prey while it is still alive are viewed with particular horror.
Literature arguing against the protection of wolves, for example, is
full of accounts of deer "literally eaten alive" by wolves. The
whistling dog (Kipling's dhole) of India, because of its short canine
teeth, seldom kills its prey quickly, so is persecuted as treacherous
and vicious.

It is common for some predators to begin eating their prey before it is
dead.  It is routine for them to kill and eat baby animals before their
mothers' eyes.  Does this in fact reflect cruelty?  It certainly appears
indifferent, lacking in empathy.  In certain places and times the eating
of certain live animals is considered a delicacy by humans.  However,
the question is not whether humans can be cruel-history demonstrates
that irrefutably.  The question is whether animals can be cruel.

If animals are to be excused for cruel acts like eating the baby in
front of the anguished mother, on the grounds that they simply cannot
understand the feelings of the other, can we then believe that they are
ever kind, compassionate, or empathic, which also requires understanding
the feelings of another?

Torture: The Cat and the Mouse

Cruelty covers a continuum from lack of empathy to sadism.

Animals do commit cruel acts.  But are they cruel?  Do they torment

and torture?  Do they like to make others suffer?  (Extremists who deny
that animals can suffer must also deny that animals can be cruel, since
it is not possible to delight in nonexistent suffering.)  A familiar
instance of an animal torturing another is the cat with the mouse.  On
countless occasions a well-fed cat may be seen to catch a mouse that it
doesn't eat.  It may not kill the mouse at once.  It may, instead, toss
the mouse in the air, allow it to run off and almost escape-and then
pounce again.  It may hold the struggling creature down with a paw, and
view its desperate attempts to escape with an expression that certainly
looks like one of pleasure.  A leopard has been seen to play with
captured jackals in the same way.

The experiments of Paul Leyhausen and others with domestic and captive
wildcats show that a cat will go on chasing, catching, and killing mice
long after it has ceased to be hungry.  Eventually it may stop killing
them but will go on chasing and catching them. Then it may stop catching
them, but will still stalk them.  After a great while, it may give up on
mice for the time being.  But the stage during which the cat is chasing
and catching without killing and eating looks just like torture.

Note what the cat likes best: most of all to chase, then to catch, next
to kill, least of all to eat.  This may seem antithetical to survival,
but this hierarchy of appetites corresponds to what a successful hunter
needs to be able to do.  A predator may have to chase many animals
before it catches one, is not able to kill all that it catches (some
prey get away), and may have to catch more than it can eat (as when it
is providing for the young).  It has been estimated that a tiger catches
prey once in twenty tries.  Many kittens practice their predatory skills
with prey their mother catches but does not immediately kill.  A lioness
has been seen holding a live wart hog in her paws while cubs looked on
with fascination, and cheetah have been seen bringing live gazelles to
their cubs.

Does the cat who is sated with killing mice take pleasure in their
suffering?  Hunters enjoy their marksmanship, their ability to find
their prey.  They may enjoy killing the pheasant or the deer, but most
hunters would claim that they do not enjoy the suffering of the pheasant
or the deer.  As to cats, how can this be tested?

Consider prey that doesn't suffer.  A cat can hardly take pleasure in
the suffering of a ball of yarn or a wad of paper.  A cat is attracted
to certain attributes of prea scamper, an uneven gait.  Mice usually
show these attributes better than balls of yarn or wads of paper do. But
if a wad of paper could squeak and scamper as well, it might be just as
attractive to the cat.  Some cats have been seen to play with paper
balls while mice run around underfoot.

In addition to the movement of prey, cats are often fascinated by the
idea of prey in hiding.  Leyhausen reports that a captive serval (a
tall, lynxlike African cat), when no longer hungry, will catch a mouse,
carry it delicately over to a hole or crevice, and release it.  If the
mouse doesn't take the chance to hide, the serval will actually push it
into the hole with its forepaw-and then try to fish it out again.  This
can't be good for the nerves of the mouse, but servals also play the
same game with pieces of bark.

Alternatively one may ask whether cats take pleasure in the suffering of
prey if it does not involve flight behavior.  Would a cat enjoy seeing a
mouse beaten or stretched on a rack?  It seems unlikely-injured mice in
traps are of only fleeting interest to cats.  (If any person were to
suggest actually doing such experiments, one would instantly have more
data about cruelty in humans.)  A cat quickly loses interest in a mouse
who is too badly injured to scamper away.  Perhaps the cat bats it with
a paw to see if it can be induced to run again, but when it doesn't, the
cat is bored.  The mouse may be visibly suffering, gasping and bleeding,
but if it is not trying to escape, a well-fed cat is not interested.
Death itself holds no interest.

Whence comes that glee that seemed to flash over the cat's face?  The
cat loves to hunt, to catch, to triumph.  Many predators do.  They may
be said to enjoy killing their prey.  They are uninterested in how their
prey feels.  It is the mouse's movements, not its fear, that fascinates
the cat.  Catching prey is part of their work, and they enjoy being
successful.

sur]pluSKAling

Surplus killing has enraged shepherds and poultry keepers ever since
people began husbanding animals.  Typically, a weasel gets into a
henhouse and kills all the chickens, more than it can possibly eat; or a
fox jumps a fence and kills a flock of geese, making off with only one.
In the wild, orcas attack a school of fish and tear from one to another,
leaving bodies floating.  Bears, confronted by a river full of salmon,
become more and more selective about which parts of the fish they eat,
until, at times, they simply stand as if in a trance, catching and
releasing salmon without even killin them.  Hyenas invade a flock of
gazelles at night and kill dozens, far more than the pack can eat.

Such surplus killers are charged with cruelty, evil, and wastefulness.
The fact that predators may kill more than they need to eat is used to
justify killing them-that is, killing animals humans do not need to eat.

Predators who surplus kill are very often animals that store food to eat
later.  Foxes and weasels cache food.  Both wild and captive hyenas have
been seen to store meat in shallow water, which keeps it from rotting as
quickly as it would in air.  Perhaps predators that store food have the
capacity to surplus kill because sometimes the excess can be cached. And
it may still surplus kill when it will be unable to store the excess,
like the fox that kills a flock of geese when it can only carry off one.
When hyenas surplus kill, other pack members, including pups, often eat
some of the surplus.  Orcas that dispatch many fish in a frenzy succeed
in eating more than they would if they ate each fish when they killed
it, while the rest of the school escaped.  They may not estimate closely
how many fish will be eaten by the pod, and so may kill extra fish.

But these are simply arguments concerning the survival value of surplus
killing.  On the emotional side, the question is whether some creatures
enjoy the surplus killing.  Probably some do, not because they are
killing more than they need, but because they are using their abilities
to the fullest, exercising their capacities; they displayfunktionslust,
delight in their powers.  Scientist David Macdonald, author of Running
with the Fox, says this: "I have watched

foxes surplus killing.  Certainly their postures and expressions were
neither aggressive nor frantic.  If anything they looked playful, or
perhaps merely purposeful."

Is this a case of claiming nice emotions for animals and not nasty ones?
Does it seem likely that animals can be kind but never cruel?  Are we,
as a species, alone in our capacity for cruelty?

The Target Of Cruelty

If predators are not seen to torture and delight in the suffering of
their prey, they might still enjoy the suffering of one another.  It
would not be straying from a known pattern to hypothesize that the
target of real cruelty is a creature's very nearest-its family or the
members of its group.  Are cats cruel to other cats?  Do foxes ever take
pleasure in being cruel to foxes, hyenas to hyenas?  Little evidence is
available.  Certainly hyenas and foxes act cruelly to conspecifics at
times.  Even when young, littermates may attack and even kill each
other.  It is easy to argue that there is an ultimate evolutionary
benefit to the killer, but harder to guess what the killer feels.

Perhaps such animals feel hatred, yet hatred does not seem to describe
the relationship between predators and prey.  From an evolutionary
standpoint, rabbits would gain no advantage by hating owls, and they do
not appear to do so.  Fear is both more advantageous and more
descriptive of their behavior.  Nor do owls appear to hate rabbits.
However, something like hatred does seem to exist, albeit reserved for
competitors, of the same or other species.  The interaction between
lions and hyenas seems to be at times deeply hostile.  Even when not
fighting over a kill, they watch one another and attack a weakened or
isolated animal.  Schaller notes that a lion chasing a hyena, cheetah,
or leopard does not wear the impassive face of a lion hunting.  It bares
its teeth and utters the calls it would use against another lion.

Animals may also hate rivals of their own species.  No one is better
equipped to compete with an animal than a conspecifictheir needs may be
identical.  A wolf might not only be ousted from

its position in a pack, but might be viciously attacked, driven away, or
even killed by other wolves.

Congo, a chimpanzee raised by humans from an early age, became deeply
unhappy when he was moved to a zoo enclosure.  It was hoped that the
company of female chimps would please him, but he hated them and
rejected their friendly attentions.  He began soliciting lighted
cigarettes from zoo visitors and with these he would chase the other
apes around the cage, trying to burn them. Whether he felt contempt for
the nonsocialized chimpanzees or simply misdirected anger at being
abandoned by his companions is unknown, yet surely his feelings were
very strong.  Congo's spirits continued to decline and he eventually
stopped tormenting the female chimps.  He died a short time afterward.

Scapegoating, the identification of one animal as a target for a group's
aggression, has been seen in some animals.  This is especially clear
where captive animals are confined in close quarters. Leyhausen confined
many cats in small enclosures to see what relationships would form.  In
one, the "community of twelve," two cats became pariahs for no apparent
reason.  If they ventured down from a retreat on a pipe near the
ceiling, the other cats attacked. They dared not even come down to eat
unless Leyhausen stood guard.  But it is important not to succumb to the
idea that such situations are inevitable, since Leyhausen found that in
other ((communities" no pariahs or top cats emerged.  In the wild, a
pariah could leave, either to be solitary or to seek another group.  Yet
what drives wild animals away from their group sometimes looks like
cruelty.  To answer the question of cruelty in animals, we will have to
look harder at how they treat members of their own kind and not at how
they feed themselves.

Jealousy: A "Natural" Emotion?

 One source of aggression in social animals seems to be jealousy, a
feeling that is often expressed as anger in humans.  The evolutionary
approach readily attributes a value to jealousy.  Between siblings it
can ensure the individual's access to food and

parental care.  Between mates it can ensure that both parents focus
their care on their mutual offspring.

In humans jealousy is frequently repudiated.  jealous people are often
admonished not to feel that way.  Romantic jealousy is sometimes called
unnatural, a cultural artifact.  Without examining whether jealousy is
wrong or unwise, it is possible to examine the statement that it is a
product of human culture by asking whether animals are ever jealous.
(Whether it could be a product of animal culture is a subtler question.)

Although jealousy might appear in any situation where animals gather, it
is most often thought of in relation to siblings and to mates.  Animal
siblings can be quite vicious, going so far as to eat one another;
whether this involves jealousy is not known.  Group members other than
siblings may be the source of jealousy.  William Jordan has described
what happened when the first baby was born in a group of gorillas at a
zoo.  The group became closer and seemed more unified-except for the
mother's brother, Caesar, who was hostile toward the baby: throwing
branches at her, swatting her on the head.  Ultimately he climbed out of
the closure "in what appears to have been a jealous snit," and was
placed in another cage.

In a Swedish animal park, Bimbo, a young male elephant, was shown
special attention by Tabu, an older female.  When a younger calf, Mkuba,
arrived, Tabu lost interest in Bimbo.  Bimbo responded by
surreptitiously digging Mkuba with his tusks whenever possible, and
Mkuba responded to that with loud, histrionic shrieks for help from
Tabu.  This sort of behavior is so reminiscent of human actions that
strong scientists feel compelled to take a deep breath and start
numbering the animals they observe instead of naming them.

Freud formulated his notion of Oedipal jealousy in reference to humans,
but Herbert Terrace interprets the chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky's actions in
this light.  After being taken from his mother at the age of five days,
Nim was raised in a human household.  His foster mother, Stephanie,
observed that Nim displayed both affection and a certain hostility
toward her husband.  In one instance, Nim, Stephanie, and her husband
were taking an afternoon nap on

a large bed, with six-month-old Nim in the middle.  Nim appeared to be
asleep, but when Stephanie's husband put his arm around her, Nim leapt
up and bit him.  Terrace was unable to resist describing Nim's behavior
as "downright Oedipal," though other explanations are possible.

The famous grey parrot Alex, who speaks words whose meaning he
understands, is not a bird prodigy.  His trainer has worked with at
least one other grey parrot who learns just as quickly.  Asked why Alex
has learned so much more than thousands of pet parrots over the
centuries, Pepperberg ascribes his success to the model/ rival method.
(It may also be that some of those pet parrots did understand the
meaning of words they used, but that this was not believed.)  In this
method, two people work with the animal, one as trainer, the other as
model or rival.  Thus, if Alex is to be taught the word green, the model
(usually a graduate student) is shown a green object and asked what
color it is.  When the student says "green," the trainer praises her or
him, and bestows the green object as a reward.  When the student gets it
wrong, there is no reward.

Alex, who has watched, is then asked to do the same task.  The student
may be thought of as a model, who demonstrates what is wanted and what
the reward is.  But the student may also represent a rival, someone who
makes Alex feel jealous.  Perhaps Alex doesn't really want the green
object until he sees someone else get it. Perhaps he doesn't like to see
someone else praised instead of him. This is currently only speculation:
Irene Pepperberg's analysis of the modeurival system focuses on its
referentiality, contextual applicability, and interactivity, rather than
on Alex's feelings.

Parrots, who form enduring pairs, often seem jealous of their mate or
desired mate.  A tame parrot may suddenly become hostile to humans if it
acquires a mate.  Parrot behavior consultant Mattie Sue Athan estimates
that a third of the calls for help she receives arise from "love
triangles" when a parrot falls in love with one member of a human couple
and tries to get rid of the other with displays of hostility.  Orcas may
also show jealousy over mating.  At a California oceanarium three orcas
were kept, two female and one male.  When Nepo, the male, reached sexual
maturity, he showed a

strong preference for the female called Yaka.  The other female, Kianu,
repeatedly interrupted their mating by leaping out of the water and
falling on them.  Ultimately she attacked Yaka during a performance.

Scientists classifying animal mating have defined a number of systems in
which it would be in an animal's genetic interest not to allow its
partner to mate with others.  They speak in terms of "monopolizing,"

"defending" or "guarding" mates, not in terms of love and jealousy.  Yet
jealous behavior, in the sense of possessiveness or enforced exclusivity
in mating, can certainly have genetic effects.  In the famous chimpanzee
colony at the Arnhem Zoo, high-ranking males can often prevent females
from mating with low-ranking males by attacking both the females and the
males. Frans de Waal reports that, during the day, females may decline
invitations to mate from low-ranking males.  When the chimps go in at
night they are put in separate cages.  During this process, when the
high-ranking males are caged, females have a chance to mate with
low-ranking males without fear of attack, and will sometimes even rush
over to their cages to mate through the bars.  If it were not for the
cages, the females might never dare mate with the lower-ranking males.
Wild chimpanzees sometimes leave the group in pairs, in "consortships,"
and this may provide relief from jealous attacks.

Aggression and Nonaggression

Frans de Waal has pointed out that comparatively little study has been
made of the avoidance of aggression and of peacemaking and
reconciliation in animals or humans, although these are vital parts of
social life.  Watching chimpanzees in the Arnhem Zoo in 1975, de Waal
saw one ape attack another, an altercation in which other group members
immediately took part, resulting in shriekin pandemonium.  There was a
pause, and then the two apes who had the original quarrel embraced and
kissed, while the others hooted excitedly.  Pondering the episode, de
Waal suddenly perceived it as reconciliation.  "From that day on I
noticed that emotional re

unions between aggressors and victims were quite common.  The phenomenon
became so obvious that it was hard to imagine that it had been
overlooked for so long by me and by scores of other ethologists."

De Waal has since studied reconciliation in rhesus monkeys, stump-tailed
monkeys, and bonobos.  Not only do these primates strive to make peace
with each other after hostile encounters, but they also reconcile others
who have quarreled.  Mama, the oldest female in the Arnhem colony, once
ended a conflict between NikIcie and Yeroen, two dominant males.  She
went to Nikkie and put a finger in his mouth, a reassuring gesture.
Simultaneously she beckoned to Yeroen and when he came over gave him a
kiss.  When she moved from between them, Yeroen hugged Nikkie and their
breach was over.

De Waals argument is not that primates are unaggressive, but that the
ways they handle and dispel aggression are as important as the
antagonism and deserve equal attention.  A full understanding of
reconciliation awaits evidence on the emotions felt by the peacemakers.
Similarly, we will not understand aggression, cruelty, or dominance and
its attractions for animals and for humans until we understand their
emotional aspects.

 Compassion, Rescue and the Altruism Debate

One evening during the rainy season in Kenya, a black rhinoceros mother
and her baby came to a clearing where salt had been left out to attract
animals.  After licking up some of the salt the mother moved away, but
the rhino calf got stuck in the deep mud.  It called out, and its mother
returned, sniffed it, examined it, and headed back into the forest.  The
calf called again, the mother returned, and so on, until the calf was
exhausted.  Apparently the mother rhino either could not see the
problem-the calf was uninjuredor did not know what to do about it.

A group of elephants arrived at the salt lick.  The mother rhino charged
the elephant in the lead, who sidestepped her and went to a different
salt lick a hundred feet from the baby rhino.  Appeased, the mother went
to forage in the woods again.  An adult elephant with large tusks
approached the rhino calf and ran its trunk over it. Then the elephant
knelt, put its tusks under the calf, and began to lift.  As it did so,
the mother rhino came charging out of the woods, and so the elephant
dodged away and went back to the other salt lick.  Over several hours,
whenever the mother rhino returned to the forest, the elephant tried to
lift the young rhino out of the

mud, but each time the mother rushed out protectively and the elephant
retreated.  Finally the elephants all moved on, leaving the rhino still
mired.  The next morning, as humans prepared to pry it loose, the young
rhino managed to pull free from the drying mud on its own and join its
waiting mother.

The elephant who tried to rescue the young rhinoceros ran some risk of
being injured by the mother's attacks.  Why did it bother trying to
help?  Clearly it would gain no genetic benefit from the survival of the
rhino.  Though both are pachyderms, there is no reason to imagine that
elephants ever confuse rhinos with their own species.  Perhaps it
recognized the youth of the rhino and its predicament and felt a
generous impulse to help.

Elephants can also be nasty to rhinos, even young ones.  They have been
seen to tease a rhino by surrounding it and kicking dust in its face. In
Aberdare National Park in Kenya, a deadly encounter between elephants
and rhinos took place one night in 1979.  Elephants arriving at a water
hole chased a male rhino away.  Presently a mother rhino arrived with
her baby, who began to play with one of the baby elephants.  The mother
elephant picked up the young rhino, threw it into the forest, and made
as if to impale it with her tusks.  But the mother rhino charged, and
both mother and calf escaped.  At this point the male rhino who had been
chased away before made a return appearance.  The irate mother elephant
charged him, knocked him a distance of three meters, knelt on him, and
stabbed him with one tusk, killing him.

There should be no more difficulty reconciling these two incidents than
there is reconciling equally different human behaviors. Sometimes people
behave generously toward an unfamiliar child, sometimes badly.  However,
while there has been no significant movement to deny that animals can
fight and kill each other, there is much argument that they cannot
behave altruistically toward each other, and that they lack the capacity
for compassion and generosity.  Yet observations of what actually
happens in the real world do not confirm this view.

Young animals are often defended by unrelated animals.  Other members of
their group may defend them.  Young white oryx will be defended not only
by their mother, but by any oryx in the

group.  A mother Thomson's gazelle will defend her fawn from a hyena by
running between them-but so will other female gazelles. Four female
gazelles have been seen simultaneously "distracting" a hyena from a
single fawn.

It may not be necessary for a young animal to be a member of a group to
be defended by unrelated adults.  Thus a researcher who was trying to
mark rhino calves discovered to his dismay that the loud squeals of a
young rhino bring not only its mother to its aid, but also every rhino
within earshot.

When a group of chimpanzees in Gombe were hunting buslipigs and
adolescent Freud captured a piglet, a sow charged and bit him to the
bone.  The piglet ran away, but the sow hung on to the screaming Freud.
Gigi, a childless female chimp, charged the sow, who wheeled to face
her.  Though badly injured, Freud managed to clamber into a tree, and
Gigi leapt free, escaping the pig's teeth only by inches.

Zebras energetically defend both young and grown zebras of their group
from predators.  Hugo van Lawick saw wild dogs chase a group of about
twenty zebras, until they managed to separate a mare, foal, and
yearling.  As the rest of the herd vanished over a hill, the pack
surrounded these three zebras.  Their principal target was the foal, but
the mother and yearling kept them back.  After a while the wild dogs
began jumping at the mare, grabbing for her upper lip, a hold that
nearly immobilizes a zebra.  Van Lawick thought the dogs would soon
succeed and was astonished when he felt the ground shaking and looked up
to see ten zebras thundering toward the scene.  This herd galloped up,
engulfed the three embattled zebras within its ranks, and galloped away
again.  The wild dogs followed for only a short distance before giving
up.

Young animals are not the only ones to be defended.  African buffalo
sometimes defend other buffalo even when adult.  A lion was struggling
with an adult buffalo when several more buffalo ran up and chased away
the lion and two other lions that had been waiting nearby.

Not all scientists are thrilled by such behavior.  In the mid-nineteenth
century, naturalist Henry Walter Bates shot a curlcrested toucan near
the Amazon River for his ornithological collection.  When he picked it
up, he found that it was still alive, and it began to scream.

In an instant, as if by magic, the shady nook seemed alive with

these birds, although there was certainly none visible when I

entered the jungle.  They descended toward me, hopping from

bough to bough, some of them swinging on the loops and

cables of woody lianas, and all of them croaking and fluttering

their wings like so many furies.  If I had had a long stick in my

hand, I could have knocked several of them over.  After killing

the wounded one, I began to prepare for obtaining more specimens and
punishing the viragoes for their boldness; but the

screaming of their companion having ceased, they remounted

the trees, and before I could reload every one of them had

disappeared.

Though Bates was in no danger from these birds, they might have been
able to rescue their companion from a smaller, less well armed predator.

Consider the following claim in an article written in 1934 by the then
curator of birds at the Smithsonian, writing for an audience of
psychoanalysts: "There are no cases known to me of anything like
compassion or mercy for the wounded in any bird .  .  .

there are some cases on record that appear, on the surface, to be
examples of sympathy or compassion for other birds.  Thus, some parrots,
eminently gregarious in their feeding habits, exhibit what looks like
strong mutual attachment between the members of a flock.  If one of
their number has been killed or wounded by a hunter, the others, instead
of flying away in terror, hover over the fallen one calling vociferously
('shrieking,' as some writers have put it) and themselves may fall the
victims of the gunner who continues to shoot." This, the author tells
us, is "not true sympathy and compassion in the human sense," but a
feeling more like the "neurotic feigning behavior in birds whose nests
and eggs or young are endangered." The writer's approach is
psychoanalytic rather than behaviorist, yet in saying that the birds are
not compassionate but neurotic, he achieves a similar denial of animal
emotion.

Another form of altruism in the sense of selfless caring for others is
exemplified in animals who feed or share their food with another animal,
thus giving up a very tangible survival asset.  As lion watchers have
pointed out, old lionesses who no longer bear young and have worn or
missing teeth can survive for years because the younger lions share
their kills with them.

Although biologist and fox watcher David Macdonald has written that
"Thou shalt not share thy food" appears to be one of the commandments of
red fox behavior, he has also seen foxes bringing food to adult foxes
when they are injured.  One fox, Wide Eyes, was injured by a mowing
machine.  (Macdonald took her to a vet, who found that her injuries were
fatal.)  The next day her sister Big Ears brought food to the spot where
Wide Eyes had been injured, uttered the whimper that summons cubs to eat
(though Big Ears had no cubs), and left the food on the bloody spot
where her sister had lain.  Another time, a dog fox got a thorn in his
paw, which became infected.  The dominant vixen in his group brought him
food, and he recovered.

Compassion fo, Illness and Injury

Tatu, a dwarf mongoose whose accidental separation from her family is
described later in this chapter, injured her forepaw badly in a fight
with another group of mongooses.  She could no longer catch prey by
pouncing with both paws.  As she favored the paw and its nails grew
long, making it even more unusable, she traveled slowly and lost weight.
The other mongooses spent more time with Tatu, grooming her when she
stopped grooming herself They never brought her food.  However,
according to observer Anne Rasa, they began foraging next to Tatu at an
increased rate. When they caught something, she would ask for it and
they would often relinquish their food to her.  As a younger, female
mongoose, Tatu was "higher-ranking," so it wasn't surprising that they
gave up food to her, only that they chose to forage near her so that
this happened.  At first, Rasa notes, she thought it was coincidence,
but she soon became convinced that it was a deliberate choice on the

part of the other mongooses.  Although Tatu was getting almost half her
food in this way, it did not prevent her eventual death. When she died,
in a termite mound, the group stopped traveling, and only moved on when
her body began to decompose.

In a case of compassion for less dramatic illness, a woman who was
working with Koko, the signing gorilla, had indigestion one day, and
asked Koko what she should do for a "sick stomach."

Koko, who was given extra orange juice whenever she was ill, signed
"stomach you orange." When the woman burped, Koko signed stomach you
there drink orange," with "there" referring to the refrigerator where
the orange juice was kept.  The woman drank some juice, told Koko she
felt better, and offered her some juice.  Only then did Koko indicate
interest in juice for herself.  Ten days later, when the same woman
visited again, and gave Koko some juice, Koko offered it to her and had
to be assured that the visitor felt fine before she would drink the
juice herself

Male elephants have been seen carrying young branches to an old bull
elephant lying on the ground, too sick to forage for his own food.

Sick or injured animals may be helped in other ways besides feeding.  As
noted below, dolphins and whales will often support another member of
their species and carry it to the surface if it is having trouble
breathing.  This is exactly what a mother dolphin does with her newborn,
and what "midwife" dolphins do with a dolphin giving birth.

Animals have also been known to risk themselves for unrelated members of
their species.  An adult pilot whale swimming in the Pacific Ocean was
shot and instantly killed by people on a ship.  Its body was drifting
toward the ship when two more pilot whales appeared, one on each side of
the dead whale, pressed their noses on top of its head and dived with
it.  They managed to get it far enough away so that they were not seen
again.  This is particularly noteworthy because pressing down in this
manner is not known to be a stereotypical cetacean behavior.  Dolphins
and whales have also been seen helping injured companions away from
human attackers, and pushing and biting against lines fastened to nets
or harpoons when others are captured.

Shooting lions with anesthetizing darts can provoke diverse behaviors,
some altruistic, some not.  The lions may attack neighboring lions as if
they suspect them of having caused the pain. When the darted animals
pass out, other lions may attack them. Sometimes they look up into a
tree above them as if something has fallen on them, other times they
charge the car in which the person firing is seated.  They may ran away
for a short distance, and sometimes they climb a tree.  Often they pull
the dart out with their teeth, while on some occasions, other lions pull
the darts out for them.

Cynthia Moss reported the case of a young female elephant with a badly
crippled hind leg, broken when she was a small calf. This animal could
not possibly have survived had her mother and other members of her group
not made allowances for her, such as avoiding difficult terrain and
always waiting for her to catch up. Gorillas, too, travel slowly to
allow injured companions to keep pace.  It is hard to believe that this
is not a deliberate, conscious decision.

Ralph Dennard, a soft-spoken man with a military bearing, has spent
nearly twenty years training hearing dogs to assist deaf people.  These
energetic signal dogs run to alert their owners when they hear a
doorbell, telephone, timer, alarm clock, or smoke alarm.  Dennard
believes that dogs feel some emotions, such as fear, love, grief, and
curiosity, but doubts that they feel compassion.

One family got a signal dog from Dennard to assist the father of the
family.  Gilly, a Border collie, joined them a few months before the
birth of their second child, and they worried that she might be jealous
and hostile toward the new baby.  On the baby's first night home, Gilly
woke the mother from a deep sleep and ran urgently back and forth
between the bed and the baby's cot.  The mother went to the cot and
found that the one-day-old baby was silent and blue.  He had choked on
mucus and stopped breathing. His mother was able to clear his airway and
start his breathing again.  Later Gilly developed the habit of notifying
the mother whenever the baby cried.

In another incident, a hearing dog woke a woman when a visiting cat
jumped on the stove, accidentally filling the kitchen

with gas.  "Why did the dog respond to that?  We don't know," said
Dennard, pointing out that there was no sound-no ring or buzzer -to
signal the dog to respond.  Clearly, a dog might object to the smell of
gas and want a human to do something about it.  But in the case of the
baby, what troubled the dog?  The baby may have made choking sounds, but
the dog had not been trained to do anything with regard to the baby.  It
seems clear that the dog knew the baby needed help, and wanted to summon
that help.  In humans, this is what it is to feel compassion.

Another signal dog, Chelsea, also showed concern for infants. Traveling
with her owners on an airplane, Chelsea repeatedly tried to get them to
go to the aid of a crying baby.  Eventually, after a number of flights,
they managed to convince Chelsea to leave crying infants to their
parents' care.

An affecting account of sympathetic behavior tells of Toto, a captive
chimpanzee whose owner, Cherry Kearton, fell ill with malaria. According
to Kearton's account, written in 1925, Toto sat by him all day.  When
instructed, he would bring quinine and a glass. When Kearton asked for a
book, Toto would put his finger on one book after another (there were
fewer than a dozen) until Kearton indicated that Toto was touching the
desired book, whereupon Toto would bring it to him. Several times during
convalescence, Kearton fell asleep on his bed fully dressed, and Toto
removed his boots.  "It may be that some who read this book will say
that friendship between an ape and a man is absurd, and that Toto, being
'only an animal,' cannot really have felt the feelings that I attribute
to him," Kearton wrote.  "They would not say it if they had felt his
tenderness and seen his care as I felt and saw it at that time."

An ill, injured, or unhappy animal may also be offered comfort, as in
the grooming of the injured Tatu described earlier in this chapter.  An
adult wild chimpanzee, Little Bee, was seen by researchers to climb down
from a tree to bring mabungo fruit to her mother, who was too old and
tired to climb the tree herself.  It has already been noted that Nim, a
chimp who was taught sign language, was very tender with people who
wept.  He was also responsive to other signs of grief.  Indeed, his
foster mother declared that

during a time when her father was in the hospital, dying of cancer, Nim
was more direct and more comforting in his response to her sorrow than
was any other member of her family.  Nim's thirty-sixth word was sorry,
which he used when a companion was upset.

Compassion can occur by omission also.  In one grim and inexcusable
experiment, fifteen rhesus monkeys were trained to pull either of two
chains to get food.  After a while a new aspect was introduced: if they
pulled one of the chains a monkey in an adjacent compartment would
receive a powerful electric shock.  Two thirds of the monkeys preferred
to pull the chain that gave them food without shocking the other monkey.
Two other monkeys, after seeing shock administered, refused to pull
either chain.  Monkeys were less likely to shock other monkeys if they
knew those monkeys, and were less likely to shock other monkeys if they
had been shocked themselves.

The behavior of these resisters contrasts sharply with the experiment
described earlier, in which rhesus monkeys who had been reared in
isolation were taped to a cruciform restraining device and put in a cage
with "normal" cage-bred rhesus.  The unrestrained monkeys eventually
began performing various sadistic operations on the restrained monkeys.
While they did touch and bite the tape, the experimenter concluded that
they were not trying to free the restrained monkey, because they
manipulated the tape less often than they did when there was no monkey
in the restraining device. While one could argue about the restrained
monkeys' lack of ability to solicit compassion, or the ability of a
monkey to understand the concept of untaping another monkey, lack of
compassion in one situation with one group of monkeys does not
invalidate the presence of compassion under other conditions by other
individuals.

The Altruism Debate

Altruism in animals has been passionately debated over the years, with a
sizable school holding that its existence is impossible. Altruism in
this scientific debate is not the same as altruism in

everyday life.  It means behavior that benefits another but reduces the
altruist's ability to survive.  For example, Richard Dawkins has wr
itten, "Altruism, for our purposes, may be defined as selfdestructive
behavior performed for the benefit of others." How could natural
selection-the process by which only the fittest survive, passing on
their genetic endowment successfullever favor an animal that wasted its
energy or risked its life committing unselfish acts?  It is argued that
this could only benefit the animal-or rather, the animal's genes-if the
one it helps is a relative.  Extensive mathematical calculations have
been made to show just how closely related an animal must be for it to
be genetically worthwhile to help it.  Altruism toward a close relative
thus does not count as altruism under these rules.

Early in The Sepyh Gene, Richard Dawkins specifies that he uses the term
altruism to refer to behavior rather than "the psychology of motives."
But behavior and motivation are not so easily separated, and to do so is
to dodge an important issue.  The sociobiological debate about altruism
is deeply confused by the redefinition of this everyday word.  If
compassion for kin exists as an emotion, rather than exclusively as an
adaptive behavior, then compassion for nonkin also becomes possible.

An example of chimpanzee compassion for nonkin-a person who was not
suffering so very terribloccurred when a group of the Gombe chimps were
being followed by researcher Geza Teleki. He discovered that he had
forgotten his lunch, and tried to knock some fruit down with a stick
while the chimpanzees fed in some trees nearby.  After ten minutes of
unsuccessful efforts, an adolescent male chimpanzee, Sniff, collected
some fruit, climbed down from the tree, and gave it to Teleki.  This is
altruism by any definition, since the human and the chimp were not
related.

Sniff's mother died some years later, and Sniff adopted his
fourteen-month-old sister, sharing food with her, taking her into his
sleeping nest, and carrying her everywhere he went.  Still unweaned, she
could not survive without mother's milk, however, and she died after
three weeks.  A sociobiologist would not count Sniff's behavior as
altruism, since she shared some of Sniff's genes.  Yet in the usual
sense of the word, a similar compassion, differing in its

strength, may be said to have motivated his adoption of his sister and
his gift of fruit to a hungry human.

Some acts that may appear altruistic to the ordinary personrunning risks
to protect one's offspring, for example-are not considered altruism in
science.  Reproductive success guarantees the replication of genes; if
an animal does not protect its offspring, it is less likely to pass its
genes along.  Altruism is also discounted if aid is directed toward kin
other than children.  It has been shown that some animals who do not get
a chance to reproduce can still ensure that their genes will be passed
along by helping siblings, nieces, nephews, parents, and other
relatives, since they share some genes with those relatives.  Their
individual fitness may not be improved, but their inclusive fitness,
based on the number of their genes that survive in subsequent
generations, will be increased.  The more genes one has in common, the
more advantageous it is, in evolutionary terms, to help a relative. This
kin selection has been used to explain the existence of alloparenting,
in which an animal helps to raise children not its own. A wolf who
remains with his or her parents and helps raise their next litter is an
alloparent.  Perhaps there is no territory available for this young wolf
to start its own family, so its best chance of passing its genes along
lies in helping to raise its siblings, with whom it has an average of 50
percent of its genes in common.  Or perhaps it is just a caring wolf,
helping out the family.

Dawkins's calculations aim to predict whether altruism toward kin will
take place.  For example, he describes a hypothetical animal finding a
clump of mushrooms and debating whether to give a food call that will
attract its brother, its cousin, and an unrelated member of its own
species to share the food.  If it does so, it gets fewer mushrooms for
itself but also benefits the brother and cousin, who share some of its
genes.  Dawkins's equation for the advantage of summoning the animal's
relatives entails an elaborate cost-benefit calculation.  It comes as no
surprise to find that Dawkins does not suggest that any animal actually
makes such a computation.  What he does suggest is that "the gene pool
becomes filled with genes which influence bodies in such a way that they
behave as if they had made such calculations."

In another example, he discusses whether a male elephant seal should
attack another male who has access to many female elephant seals, or
whether he should wait for a more favorable time to attack.  After
imagining the elephant seal's internal debate on this subject, Dawkins
says:

This subjective soliloquy is just a way of pointing out that the

decision whether or not to fight should ideally be preceded by

a complex, if unconscious, "cost-benefit" calculation.  .  .  .  It

is important to realize that we are not thinking of the strategy

as being consciously worked out by the individual.  Remember

that we are picturing the animal as a robot survival machine

with a preprogrammed computer controlling the muscles.  To

write the strategy out as a set of simple instructions in English

is just a convenient way for us to think about it.  By some

unspecified mechanism the animal behaves as if he were following these
instructions.

But picturing the animal as a "robot survival machine" seems perverse.
Clearly it is a living, feeling creature.  Arguably, this "unspecified
mechanism" includes emotions.

In both people and animals altruism is likely to be accompanied by
emotions, which accordingly must be examined along with it.  In the case
of altruistic behavior, this "mechanism" includes the altruistic
emotions of compassion, empathy, and generosity.  These emotions, even
if they serve "selfish genes," may also bring into being genuine
altruism in the usual sense.

When discussing altruism, a hypothetical situation theorists frequently
use is that of saving others from drowning.  In a discussion of how a
gene for saving relatives from drowning might spread, biologist J.  B.
S.  Haldane noted that he had twice saved (possibly) drowning people
without ever pausing to consider whether doing so was genetically
beneficial.  Richard Dawkins notes: "Just as we may use a slide rule
without appreciating that we are, in effect, using logarithms, so an
animal may be preprogrammed in such a way that it behaves as if it had
made a complicated calculation."

In real life, do animals save unrelated others from drowning?

There are ancient tales of dolphins saving humans from drowning, but
although some of these are plausible, none are documented. They seem
plausible in part because dolphins and whales not only support other
cetaceans but also carry inanimate objects on their heads from time to
time.  When they do so, they act like a dolphin mother with a baby. When
a calf dies, mother cetaceans may support its body at the surface for as
long as several days.  Scientists who have seen female belugas
supporting logs or other driftwood on their heads in this way believe
that these are mothers whose calves have recently died.  An Atlantic
bottle-nosed dolphin carried a dead leopard shark on her snout for eight
days.  Perhaps it is species vanity, but it seems possible that humans
are at least as winsome as logs or dead sharks.

Washoe, the famous chimpanzee who was the first to be taught sign
language, lived for a time on a "chimp island" at a research institute.
When she was seven or eight years old, a chimpanzee who had just arrived
at the institute was placed on the island, but became panicky, jumped
over an electric fence, and fell into the moat with a tremendous splash.
As researcher Roger Fouts ran to the scene, intending to dive in and
rescue her (a risky endeavor, considering how much stronger chimps are
than humans), he saw Washoe run to the fence, leap over, land on a
narrow strip of bank at its base, edge out into the mud, and clinging to
the grass with one hand, pull the chimpanzee to safety with the other.
Fouts notes that the two chimpanzees were not acquainted.

Asked whether he was surprised at Washoe's actions, Fouts paused,
bemused.  "Only later, when that theory came out and people said that
there's no such thing as altruism.  But prior to that He burst out, "You
know, I was about to do the same thing.  I didn't know the chimp that
well either, and I was headed down into the water, too, taking my wallet
out of my pants and getting ready to go in after her.  Washoe beat me to
it.  So I guess I was responding to the same stimuli Washoe
was-individual in trouble." Unfortunately, how the other chimpanzee
behaved toward Washoe after being rescued is unknown.  Fouts also cited
a case in which an adult chimpanzee at the Detroit Zoo fell into a

moat.  The keepers were afraid to go in after him because adult
chimpanzees are so strong, but a zoo visitor leaped in and saved the
ape.

To help others, usually one must be able to realize that they need help.
This recognition might be instinctive, cognitive, or both.  One night in
an arctic bay where beluga whales gather, three belugas got trapped near
land by low tide.  A gravel bar that they had swum over at high tide now
barred their way.  The three belugas, one adult and two juveniles,
"screamed and groaned and trilled." The other belugas, free, swam back
and forth on their side of the gravel bar and answered.  A biologist
waded out to the gravel bar, which would ordinarily have caused the
whales to flee.  This time, in their excitement, they paid no attention.

The whales were unable to help their fellows, but whale watchers kept
the stranded belugas wet and they swam away on the next high tide.  This
is a story of raw emotion.  The trapped whales were frightened and
called for help.  The other whales were concerned and came to help or
possibly to show their concern.  Whales are able to ask for aid from
each other and to receive it in some situations.  Here, the whales
seemed to feel fear and empathy, even though the free whales could not
actually help the trapped ones. Biologists Kenneth Norris and Richard
Connor remark, "If .  .  .

stories of dolphins pushing humans ashore are true, they must be viewed
in the same context as humans pushing stranded dolphins back to sea."

Animals also have a capacity for dispassion, which tends to dismay
people.  They regularly do things that shock us, such as eat their dead
infants or allow their offspring to eat one another.  A lion who has
lost all but one of her litter will often abandon her remaining cub.  A
parent who has been vigorously defending its young from a predator may,
if the predator finally succeeds in catching the young one, walk away
with apparent indifferencealthough it could be despair.

Yet just as kindness and cruelty can coexist, so can compassion and
dispassion.  Incidents that suggest the presence of one do not cancel
out the other.

Compassion Across Species

As with any social emotion, a creature is most likely to display
compassion toward a member of its own species.  Some animals seem to
recognize relationships broader than "member of my species, such as
"fellow cat......  fellow bird," or "fellow cetacean." For many humans,
the greatest thrill an animal can give is to treat us as one of their
own.  A remarkable instance of fellow-feeling is displayed by orcas,
also called killer whales.  In contrast to great white sharks, there is
no known incident of an orca fatally attacking a human in the wild,
though these carnivores eat anything in the sea from large fish to giant
whales, to dolphins, seals, and birds, and even occasionally a polar
bear.  Though they could easily prey on people, they have consistently
refrained from doing so.  Given what they do eat, not eating humans
suggests real fellow-feeling.  Is this restraint compassion?  Does it
entail recognition of commonality?

If so, our species has not reciprocated in kind.

Despite our differences, dolphins often treat humans as peers on some
level.  Even wild dolphins are sometimes interested in playing with
humans.  The famous wild dolphins of Australia's Monkey Mia Beach have
been coming for years to play with people.  While it is traditional to
offer them fish, the dolphins often do not accept the fish, or accept
but do not eat them.  It seems logical enough that a creature that can
easily catch fresh fish might not be tempted by an hours-dead specimen.

What goes through the mind of a dolphin when it accepts a dead fish and
then lets it drift away?  Two reporters who visited Monkey Mia saw a
dolphin receive a fish from a tourist, then push it toward them.
Confused, they accepted it.  As the dolphin watched them, they felt
socially awkward and wondered whether they were supposed to eat the
thing, give it back, or do something else.  As they dithered, the
dolphin swam close, grabbed the fish back, and dived away, leaving them
feeling they had committed an unknown faux pas.

Another way an animal might treat a human as one of their own would be
to ask it for help.  The act of asking for helpsoliciting compassion-may
itself be said to indicate a capacity for

compassion in that species.  How could an animal ask for compassion to
be shown if it did not know what compassion was?  Why would it have an
innate ability to solicit something nonexistent in its species?  Nbke
Tomities tells of rescuing a wounded badger: "It explained her living
alone in the sett, and perhaps why, after getting our scent and somehow
sensing we were friendly, she had come close to us.  It was odd how many
sick wild creatures, including dying red deer in winter, came close to
us, as if knowing they would be protected."

In Hope Ryden's Lily Pond, she recounts how an elderly female beaver she
had been observing for several years, run down and with a paw injury,
unexpectedly approached her.  As Ryden sat on the banks of the pond with
her binoculars, the old beaver Lily swam over, hauled herself out of the
water, clambered up the bank, looked Ryden in the eye, and uttered the
wheedling sounds of a beaver kit.  Ryden's response was to begin
bringing aspen branches (much appreciated by beavers) to the pond to
supplement Lily's diet.  The aspen was accepted.  Though Ryden had
brought branches to the pond before, she had done so surreptitiously,
intending that the beavers not know she was the source.  Lily's grown
son Huckleberry was perhaps less compassionate, frequently trying to
steal aspen branches from his mother's grasp.

Cynthia Moss has written about a very ill wild elephant who walked up to
the window of her Land Rover and stood there, "lifting her eyelids from
time to time and looking in at me.  I do not know what she was doing,
but I sensed that she was somehow trying to communicate her distress to
me and I was very touched and disturbed." Barry Lopez, author of Of
Wolves and Men, tells of a hunter who caught a large black wolf in a
leghold trap.  When he came up to the trap, the hunter reported, the
wolf extended his trapped foot to the hunter and whined.

At times the appearance of a bid for compassion may be deceiving.  A
rabbit in extremis, as in the jaws of a coyote, utters a surprisingly
loud fear scream.  Other rabbits ignore the scream, neither speeding to
see what is the matter nor taking cover themselves.  The benefit of the
scream, it is believed, lies in attracting other predators to the scene,
and rabbit fear screams do attract

predators.  Apparently, in the ensuing fracas between predators, rabbits
sometimes escape.

An aspect of empathy that is not considered genetically objectionable is
that which results in cooperation, a situation in which both parties
win.  Thus if a lion understands that another lion is hunting a group of
wildebeest, and joins in or helps, and shares in the resulting kill,
this is considered cooperation, not altruism.  In fact, it seems that
when lions hunt cooperatively, they catch substantially more prey than
they do when they hunt singly.  If the lion helped another lion hunt,
and then did not share in the kill, and the other lion was not its
offspring or close relative, that would be considered altruism.

Compassion for One's Own

Unfortunately for the study of altruism toward kin and kin selection,
observers usually have a frustrating time figuring out who is related to
whom.  Most scientists, when they see one wild animal aid another, have
no way of knowing if the two are related or how closely.  Long-term
studies like those initiated by Jane Goodall at Gombe throw some light
on these matters.  Most ethology studies do not have access to as much
history.  Even at Gombe, observers may know who a chimps mother is, but
may only be able to guess who its father is.  When they do know how the
animals are related, they often don't know whether the animals
themselves are aware that the other is, for example, their sister or
uncle.  A handful of studies have shown that some animals sometimes seem
to favor their kin in surprising situations.  Infant pigtail macaques
preferred to play with other macaques who were their half siblings,
rather than unrelated macaques, even though they had never seen them
before.  Whether this is connected with altruistic behavior, incest
avoidance, or some other function is unknown.

Assumptions about which animals are kin can be mistaken. Among mountain
goats, young animals may be seen following nanny goats with younger
kids, as many animals follow their mothers for a year or two.  Thus
observers seeing a goat group comprising a nanny, a kid, a yearling, and
a two-year-old might often assume this to be a biological family.
However, it has been discovered that young mountain goats often follow
nannies other than their biological mothers.

Altruism toward kin has scientific respectability, since it can
contribute to the survival of a creature's genes.  Also respectable to
humans is reciprocal altruism, in which beings do favors for others in
the expectation of receiving favors in return.  That this does occur in
animals as well as humans has been shown.  Yet people as well as animals
often help those who are unlikely to help them in return.  Indeed,
society expects minor acts of this kind to be performed on a daily
basis, and when they are not, there is much indignation.

In the theoretical model of reciprocal altruism, the two animals trading
favors each derive an overall advantage.  An animal who does not return
favors is detected by the others and ceases to receive them.
Experimenters studying reciprocal altruism taped calls of vervet
monkeys-the calls they use when threatening another vervet and at the
same time soliciting assistance from other ververs-and later, hiding in
the bushes, played the calls of different individuals and noted how
ververs responded to these solicitations.  They found that ververs were
most apt to respond to the calls of unrelated monkeys if they had
recently groomed each other or shared other affinitive behavior.  In
contrast, they responded to the calls of close relatives whether or not
they had recently done favors for each other.  It has been suggested
that the necessity for social animals to monitor their indebtedness to
one another has contributed to the development of intelligence.

Gratitude

While an animal might be keeping an unemotional tally of who owes whom,
such behavior might also be mediated more emononally, involving not only
love, but gratitude and grudge holding. Unfortunately, gratitude is one
of the most slippery emotions to pin down, so much so that cynics
sometimes claim it does not exist

in people.  If A does something for B, and B is subsequently very nice
to A, it can be argued that B is grateful.  Some will argue, however,
that B hopes for more favors from A, or that B has just come to enjoy
A's company, or that B is acting the way society expects.  If B is a
dog, the same arguments could be applied.  Yet most people believe that
gratitude exists because they have felt grateful themselves.  Why should
not animals be able to feel gratitude also?

The human history of objectivity on this subject is not impressive.
Perhaps because of guilty consciences, this is one of the emotions
humans would most like animals to feel-toward us.  Joseph Wood Krutch
has told of a letter written to a British quarterly, The Countryman,
with news of a thankful butterfly.  The reader had seen a parasitic mite
clinging to a butterfly's eye and had delicately removed it.  The
butterfly uncoiled its tongue and licked his hand. The reader thought
this was a caress of thanks.  As other readers pointed out, butterflies
often lick human skin, presumably for the salt.  It seems unlikely that
a butterfly would interpret a lick as a grateful gesture: they do not
lick each other as dogs do.  The chance that an insect would thank a
primate with this gesture seems rather small.  Ornithologists are
sometimes told stories of wild birds indicating their gratitude for
favors humans have done them by singing.  This, too, seems improbable,
since there is no reason to suppose that birds know that people enjoy
birdsong, but the idea is deeply appealing.

In the Negey Desert, Salim, a Bedouin stone carver, trapped a caracal, a
lynxlike desert cat, who had been raiding his chicken house.  He
intended to kill it but relented, and after three days he let it go.  It
ran off, and by the next day had killed another chicken. In the ensuing
months, the caracal would often come near Salim's house in the evenings,
lie on the branch of an acacia and stare at Salim, who would sit on a
rock and look back.  Even after the cat had killed the last of the
chickens, it would come and stare at Salim.  Perhaps the caracal was
curious.  Perhaps it was hostile toward the person who had trapped and
held it captive.  Perhaps it was just maintaining their connection.
Perhaps it felt gratitude.

Parrot trainers sometimes try to modify the attitude of a hostile parrot
by arranging for the person it dislikes to rescue the parrot from a
frightening situation.  Mattie Sue Athan, a parrot behavior consultant,
has written about a situation in which such a rescue occurred
accidentally.  The parrot, a very hostile African grey living in a pet
store, had rebuffed the advances of several trainers.  When Athan
released it from its cage, the parrot bolted down the aisle to a ferret
cage.  The ferret grabbed the parrot's toe in a bloody bite and hung on
fiercely.  The parrot shrieked in pain and terror until Athan prized the
ferret off.  The bird at once became tame and friendly with her.  The
rescue method of winning a parrot's goodwill works fairly reliably and
is sometimes exploited by unscrupulous trainers in cruel ways.  As for
whether the rescued parrot feels gratitude toward its rescuer, or merely
trust and admiration-this is the same question asked of rescued humans.

Gratitude of one animal toward another, rather than toward humans, has
been documented.  In the Kenya bush one evening, Tatu, a young dwarf
mongoose, became separated from her family after an antelope, frightened
by a dust devil, hurded through the group.  At dusk mongooses retire
into a termite mound, but Tatu was on a mound fifty yards from her
family, afraid to cross the intervening ground.  She uttered "Where are
you?" calls and trotted back and forth on her mound.  Her family called
back repeatedly with louder and louder "Here I am" calls, but she dared
not cross.  By the time it was almost dark, Tatu was hoarse, and huddled
on top of the mound.  Her parents and another mongoose (probably her
sister) finally set off toward her, keeping under cover as much as
possible, while the rest of the band watched, scanning the earth and sky
for predators.  When the three arrived, Tatu flung herself upon them,
licking and grooming them.  When she had groomed all three (first her
mother, then her father, then the third mongoose), they went back to the
group.  Was Tatu grateful, or merely glad to see her family?  Her father
did something unusual when she started to groom him, rubbing his cheek
glands on her, which dwarf mongooses more typically do when preparing to
fight one another.  Conceivably this indicated anger, and Tatu wanted to
appease them.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas says predators may express gratitude toward
prey, giving the example of a group of lions who had killed a kudo.  One
lion took the kudo's face between his paws and tenderly and carefully
licked it as he would the face of another lion. As he did so, a cub
joined him and also washed the kudo's face.  In another instance a puma
was seen to lie down and softly pat a biohorn sheep he had just killed.
Such gratitude might not be appreciated by kudus or big-horns, but that
would make it no less real in the cat.

Revenge

The converse of gratitude is surely revenge.  Parrots are notorious for
holding grudges.  It is certain that an animal can take a strong dislike
to a human individual and treat it unusually aggressively.  To stay on
good terms with a parrot, it is best not to be the one who clips its
nails or trims its beak.  If one emotion is possible, why should not the
other be

Ola, a young false killer whale in an oceanarium, was accustomed to a
staff of human divers working in his tank.  One diver took to teasing
Ola surreptitiously.  Oceanarium management had their first inkling of
this one day when Ola placed his snout on the man's back, pushed him to
the floor of the tank, and held him there.  (He was wearing diving gear,
so he did not drown.)  Seeking to free the diver, trainers gave Ola
commands, tried to starde him with loud noises, and offered fish, to no
avail.  After five minutes Ola released the diver.  Subsequent
investigation brought out the teasing.

Gratitude and vengefulness-the tit-for-tat emotions-might prove to be
mediators of reciprocal altruism.  It is arguable from the evidence that
animals may possess the capacity for compassionate and generous feeling,
hence altruistic behavior in the usual sense, such that even if this
feeling evolved for genetic advantage, it produces behavior that need
not always be advantageous.  Some theorists have occasionally
acknowledged the possibility of nonadvantageous behavior that could
suggest other forces at work.  Thus Richard Dawkins, in discussing the
phenomenon of monkeys

adopting unrelated babies, remarks: "In most cases we should probably
regard adoption, however touching it may seem, as a misfiring of a
built-in rule.  This is because the generous female is doing her own
genes no good by caring for the orphan.  She is wasting time and energy
which she could be investing in the lives of her own kin, particularly
future children of her own.  It is presumably a mistake which happens
too seldom for natural selection to have 'bothered' to change the rule
by making the maternal instinct more selective." Consider the reaction
to this quotation if one did not know it referred to animals.  A
generous female animal making a mistake" hardly proves that
generosity-and altruismdo not exist among animals.  Yet its possibility
usually disappears, so that in the final pages of The Se#hh Gene,
Dawkins asserts:

It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for
genuine, disinterested altruism.  .  .  .  We can even

discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure,

disinterested altruism-something that has no place in nature,

something that has never existed before in the history of the

world.

A recent scientific report on food sharing in vampire bats noted that
"true altruism has never been documented in nonhuman animals, presumably
because such a one-way system is not evolutionarily stable." Yet the
results of the study are a little different.  Vampire bats share food
(the blood of other animals, usually horses) with other bats in their
sleeping areas.  This is vital to bat survival, since without food they
starve to death very quickly.  A small captive colony of bats was set up
to see whether they shared with kin, with friends (as in reciprocal
altruism), and with strangers.  Bats that had hunted successfully did
indeed share with relawes and with certain friends.  "Only once did it
occur between strangers," the report noted.  Rather than showing that
vampire bats never behave altruistically, this shows that they can be
altruistic, even if rarely.  The researcher's interpretation is that the
sharing bat strangers made a mistake.

Altruistic acts, when recorded, tend to be treated as rare exceptions
unworthy of note.  For some humans, many of whom are scientists, there
seems to be a powerful allure to the proclamation that all the world is
ruled by self-interest, proving that kindness, self-sacrifice, and
generosity are at best naive, at worst suicidal. Projecting this onto
animals may be one of the more major hidden examples of anthropomorphism
in science.  That some people may be this way does not make animals this
way.  Yet scientific hegemony appears at stake, in proclaiming that
animal compassion, something that everybody believes from experience, is
dead wrong. Proving that all behavior is ultimately selfish to the bone
gives some people special pleasure. Robert Frank, author of Passions
Within Reason, has pointed out, "The flint-eyed researcher fears no
greater humiliation than to have called some action altruistic, only to
have a more sophisticated colleague later demonstrate that it was
self-serving.  This fear surely helps account for the extraordinary
volume of ink behavioral scientists have spent trying to unearth selfish
motives for seemingly self-sacrificing acts." There can be no question
that, for want of a better term, the "politics" of what one selects to
study plays a constricting role in understanding behavior.

Humans are usually excluded from these calculan'ons, or are discussed
only after a seemingly watertight case has been built for universal
creature selfishness-whereupon sociobiologists suddenly announce either
that human behavior is dictated by much the same rules, or humans are a
unique exception to them.

Not all scientists fall into this snare; some have discussed the
possibility of a generalized capacity for altruism.  Richard Connor and
Kenneth Norris queried whether reciprocal altruism is found among
dolphins and concluded that it is, but also that the concept is
insufficient to explain altruistic dolphin behavior.  They postulate the
existence of generalized altruistic tendencies in dolphins: "Altruistic
acts are dispensed freely and not necessarily to animals that can or
will reciprocate.  They need not necessarily even be confined to the
species of the altruistic individual." In dolphin society, Connor and
Norris point out, individuals may be aware not only of the
favor-granting status of other individuals with regard to themselves,
but with regard to other dolphins in general.  They concur with
biologist Robert Trivers that such "multiparty situations" can

reward generalized altruistic behavior, since individuals may become
regarded by others as cheaters (or as generous).  "In this case
selection may favor an individual, A, dispensing altruism to another
individual, B, even when A knows that B will not recompense him fully,
or at all, in the future.  The eventual increase in A's inclusive
fitness will come from an increased tendency of those individuals who
learned of A's altruism to act altruistically toward him." Once having
argued that generosity is theoretically possible in animals, it can also
be argued that it is a real phenomenon in some species.

In the evolutionary approach, an animal is more likely to receive
compassion from a parent than a more distant relative; from a relative
than from a nonrelative; from an acquaintance than from a stranger; from
a conspecific than from a member of another species.  One would expect
even less sympathy from a species that does not guard its eggs.  Even if
this is true, compassion could be an overarching emotion that can and
does produce behavioral altruism, even in the sociobiological sense.

Attributing altruism to animals can be wrong, as in one interpretation
of the notorious dolphin slaughter at Iki Island, Japan, where fishermen
killed hundreds of dolphins to stop them from competing for fish.  This
killing took place each year for five years, during which the fishermen
had no difficulty in rounding up the dolphins for slaughter.  This was
puzzling to many observers who were trying to stop the killing, for it
was widely believed that dolphins were extremely intelligent-perhaps
more intelligent than humans.  One theory to explain this held that the
dolphins were being altruistic, allowing themselves to be trapped and
killed in the hope that worldwide horror at the spectacle (which
received international media coverage) would cause a revulsion of
feeling and lead to the protection of wild animals.  They were martyrs.
After five years, a group of the bottle-nosed dolphins, instead of
allowing themselves to be rounded up, darted under the boats surrounding
them and got away.  Perhaps they tired of martyrdom.

How many animals help others?  How far will an animal go to help
another?  How much will it risk?  How many people help others, against
what odds?  Yad Va Shem in Israel, commemorating the Holocaust, has an
Avenue of the Righteous for those non-Jews who

risked their lives to save Jews from extermination.  As new deeds of
bravery are discovered, trees in honor of the saviors are added. What
would such an orchard for animals look like?  Perhaps whales sing sagas
of great acts of loving sacrifice by whale cows of days gone by.

   Shame Blushing, and Hidden Secrets

Darwin argued that only humans blush.  In the years since, the selfaware
social emotions like shame, shyness, guilt, embarrassment, and
self-consciousness-all feelings revolving around how the self is
perceived by others-have usually been considered exclusively human.  Yet
there is evidence that many animals feel them, too, and shame may prove
to be a surprisingly basic emotion.

Asked whether wild chimpanzees ever appear ashamed or embarrassed, Jane
Goodall laughed.  "They do, actually.  In the wild you don't see that
very often.  The best story I know of clear embarrassment was young
Freud when he was about six years old.  He was showing off-really, you
could only describe it as showing off -in front of Uncle Figan, who was
the alpha male.  Figan was trying to groom Fit, the new baby was there,
and Freud was just prancing around and shaking branches and making a
real big nuisance of himself.  He went up into a tall plantain tree:
they have a rather weak trunk like a banana.  He was swaying it to and
fro, to and fro, and suddenly it snapped!-and he crashed onto the
ground. He just happened to land very close to me.  I was able to see
his face, and the first thing he did when he emerged from the grass was

to take a quick little glance at Figan and then he crept quietly away
and began feeding.  That was quite clearly a big comedown for him."

Shame is one of the most vividly remembered feelings.  Recalling
happiness or fear or anger, people do not usually experience the emotion
again at the time of recalling it.  But remembering an incident of
embarrassment or shame can often bring a flood of shame sweeping back.
Those who blush may blush again at a memory.  In human psychology and
psychotherapy, shame received little attention for years but has
recently begun to be considered important.  It has been called "the
master emotion," which societies use to enforce norms.  Guilt refers to
a particular event, but shame, which is more global, is said to refer to
the individual's entire being.  Thus a person might feel guilt about
going off their diet, and shame at being fat.  Guilt can also result
from a private event, while shame tends to require that others know or
observe or are imagined to judge.

Some argue-not especially vigorously, as they have met little
opposition-that only humans have self-conscious emotions.  It is said
that animals are intellectually incapable of self-consciousness
-although this is generally meant to show the low level of animal
intelli ence rather than a lack of emotion.

But while it may seem logical to conclude that such emotions cannot
exist without an intellectual comprehension of how one is viewed by
other creatures, this need not be the case.  There is no reason to
suppose that an animal couldn't feel shame without understanding why. As
Darwin noted, mental confusion is a prominent symptom of shame.  "I
can't think clearly in the moment of embarrassment, and I don't know
anybody else who can," psychiatrist Donald Nathanson has written.
Emotion can exist with or without understanding the reasons for it.  One
animal might be ashamed or embarrassed without being entirely conscious
of the reason; another might be ashamed or embarrassed and understand
the reason perfectly.

Self-consciousness denotes both emotional and intellectual states.
Emotionally, it can be an uncomfortable feeling of being observed (or
observing oneselfi-a form of embarrassment.  Intel

lectually, it is the reflective knowledge of one's own mind, existence,
and acts-a philosophical minefield.

Alirror studies with primates have been a focus of the debate over
whether animals have or can have self-awareness.  A chimpanzee allowed
to become familiar with mirrors appears to learn that the image is its
own.  If such apes are anesthetized, dabbed on the face with a dot of
paint, and given a mirror upon awakening, when they see the paint in
their reflection they will touch their face with their fingers, examine
their fingers, and then try to remove the paint.  Orangutans also learn
that the image in the mirror is of themselves; so far, monkeys have not
done so.  To some observers, this is evidence of self-consciousness.
Others have sought to prove that it is nothing of the sort.  John S.
Kennedy follows some critics in arguing that it is more parsimonious to
assume that the chimpanzee merely "forms a point-to-point association
between the movements of the mirror image and his own movements." This
tortuous explanation assigns mental powers to the chimpanzee that are at
least as complex as saying that it knows it is seeing itself in the
mirror.  Its appeal is simply that it denies the possibility of
selfconsciousness in a nonhuman being.

The chimpanzees Sherman and Austin, part of an ape language experiment
in Atlanta, are monitored by video cameras that they have learned to use
in a variety of ways.  After several months of exposure to their own
images on the video monitors, each ape appeared to suddenly realize that
the image was of himself.  They then used the monitor to observe
themselves make faces, eat, or swirl water around in their mouths.  Both
have learned to distinguish between a live image and a taped image of
themselves, by testing to see if their actions are duplicated on the
screen.  Sherman was using a hand mirror to guide his application of
Crayola makeup one day, tired of the mirror and gestured to have the
video camera aimed at his face instead.  He used the image to apply the
makeup and to locate and remove any that had stained his teeth. Austin
made valiant attempts one day to use the monitor to look down his throat
while simultaneously shining a flashlight into it.

The practice of saving face is another chimpanzee behavior that implies
consciousness of self.  At the zoo in Arnhem, the chim

panzee Yeroen was slightly injured in a fight with another chimp,
Nikkie.  To the astonishment of researchers, Yeroen spent the next week
limping dramaticallbut only in Nikkie's view.  A chimpanzee wishing to
make peace with another sometimes will not approach directly, but will
pretend to discover a nonexistent object and use the resulting gathering
of many chimps to make contact with the former adversary, a strategy
Frans de Waal thinks is used to save face.

In a diverse range of species, evidence that animals know when they are
being observed suggests self-awareness.  When a male baboon yawns, his
impressive canine teeth are ostentatiously displayed.  serving wild
baboons, biologist Craig Packer found that males with worn or broken
teeth yawn less than males with teeth in good condition-unless there are
no other males around, in which case they yawn just as often.
Chimpanzees have been known to avoid glancing at a food source they know
about but other chimps do not.  On several occasions, lions in the
Serengeti who had caught prey in high grass broke with the usual lion
habit of beginning to eat at once.  Instead the lion sat down and
glanced around for as much as five minutes, as if it had caught nothing.
When other nearby lions departed, the lion began to eat.  A mountain
goat who sees a predator will often walk away calmly and slowly and
then, the moment it is out of the predator's line of sight, take off,
running at full speed.  These animals act as if they were conscious of
others perceiving their behavior and want to affect that perception.
This level of self-consciousness might not permit a goat to look into a
mirror and think, "That's me," but might show selfconsciousness
nonetheless.  Self-awareness need not be all or nothing.

Shyness, Modesty, nd Emhar-rassment

Embarrassment and shyness, also considered self-aware emotions, seem to
be about being seen-in a bad light, or when one does not wish to be
seen.  Koko, the signing gorilla, has shown a rather touching form of
embarrassment.  Among her toys are a

number of puppets and dolls.  She was once seen signing "kiss" to her
alligator puppet.  On another occasion Koko signed "kiss" to her blue
gorilla doll and "bad bad" to her pink gorilla doll.  Then she signed
"chase tickle," slammed the dolls together, made them wrestle, and
signed "good gorilla good good." On each occasion, and other similar
occasions, the moment she saw that she was being wat ched, she stopped
playing.

Animals do not wear clothing to conceal parts of their bodies that
humans in many cultures consider vital for adults to conceal. They do
not hide many actions that correspond to actions people often prefer to
hide.  This does not necessarily mean that there is nothing they choose
to hide or keep private.  The courtship of one captive bird may be an
example.

Alex, the verbally accomplished African grey parrot, may be imprinted on
human beings.  According to Irene Pepperberg, he attempts to court
certain of her male students.  When courting, Alex may regurgitate food
and do a little ritualized dance.  "If he is courting one of my students
and I walk in, he immediately stops," says Pepperberg.  Perhaps Alex is
embarrassed.  If, on the other hand, he merely wants a little privacy,
why does he want it?  Perhaps he is trying to avoid competition.  Is he
shy?  Shyness is an emotion that seems to shade into fear, the fear of
being seen, and it may be that shame is also related to fear.

The essence of shame is the unpleasant feeling that one appears
badly-weak, stupid, dirty, helpless, or inadequate-and the dread of
appearing this way.  At first sight, shame need have no connection with
fear.  At one oceanarium (where the animals were never punished) a
botde-nosed porpoise, Wela, was trained to jump out of the water and
take a fish from a person's hand.  One day when this stunt was being
photographed, trainer Karen Pryor was distracted and forgot to drop the
fish as she usually did.  As a result, when Wela grabbed the fish, she
inadvertently bit Pryor's hand.  Wela, appearing "hideously
embarrassed," went to the hottorn of the tank, put her snout in a
corner, and would not come out until Pryor got in with her, petted her,
and coaxed her into calmness.

Wela's behavior is comparable to that of a dog who barks and

threatens someone coming into the house-and suddenly realizes that the
someone is its owner.  From a barking, bristling, menacing creature, the
dog suddenly deflates to a wriggling, whining, tailwagging pup.  It has
been argued that the comic reversal of behavlor in such a dog does not
mean he or she is embarrassed, only seeking to appease a dominant
animal-its owner-by showing submission.  Whether this is accurate or
not, it does not seem to describe Wela's behavior, which looks more like
embarrassment, a form of shame.  The chimpanzee Washoe was seen to make
a similar mistake, threatening an old friend (who had grown four or five
inches since they had last met) before she recognized who it was and
reacted with what would be called embarrassment if Washoe were human.
One might say that such behavior is merely ritual submission, but then
the same description could apply to an embarrassed human apology.

Dog trainers at Guide Dogs for the Blind say that old dogs who have lost
bladder or sphincter control seem to be embarrassed or ashamed.  One
otherwise healthy sixteen-year-old dog in this condition refused to go
indoors as she had always done.

One text on animal behavior evades acknowledging animal emotion by
insisting, "It is certainly acceptable to say our misbehaving dog is
acting as if embarrassed.  It would be entirely without foundation to
say it was embarrassed, even though we admit to the probable existence
of emotions in animals."

Blushing

The blush is a primary evidence of shame in people.  Charles Darwin, who
investigated blushing at great length, seems to have been surrounded by
people who blushed at the least provocation. He noted that it was
usually accompanied by other signs of shame such as averting the eyes,
the face, or the whole body.  He had difficulty explaining the value of
this phenomenon, and gave a rather Lamarckian explanation for it.
Humans, he said, care about their personal appearance and the opinion of
others.  When people feel attention, especially critical attention,
being directed at them,

this "excite[s] into activity that part of the sensorium which receives
the sensory nerves of the face; and this will react through the
vaso-motor system on the facial capillaries.  By frequent reiteration
through numberless generations, the process will have become so habitual
.  .  .  that even a suspicion of .  .  .  depreciation suffices to
relax the capillaries, without any conscious thought about our faces."

After questioning British missionaries stationed around the world on
this subject, Darwin concluded that people of all races blush, and that
it is not learned, since people who have been born blind also blush.
(His data contradicted those defenders of slavery who alleged that
Negroes did not blush because they were incapable of shame and hence not
tilly human.)  He called blushing "the most peculiar and the most human
of all expressions.  Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require
an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal
could blush."

It would have interested Darwin to know that animals other than monkeys
also exhibit reddening skin.  The ears of a Tasmanian devil (a small,
carnivorous marsupial) in the Frankfurt Zoo turned red "during a state
of excitement." Some birds blush, as can be seen on featherless areas of
skin.  Like the turkey, the spangled honeyeater and the smoky honeyeater
have unfeathered wattles that blush "when the bird is excited." Macaws
that have bare skin on their cheeks can be seen to blush.  They do so
when excited or enraged, and, according to parrot behaviorist Mattie Sue
Athan, they have also been seen to do so if they fall accidentally while
clambering down from a perch.  This certainly looks like embarrassment.
On the other hand the macaw might just be angry that it has fallen.
Perhaps it will turn out to be true that humans are the only animals to
blush self-consciously.  Humans are unusually devoid of fur, feathers,
and other coverings, after all, and so provide a large canvas for this
effect.

On the other hand, it may be that the function of blushing is not, or
not wholly, a visual one.  The phenomenon of blushing need not be
visible.  Many people feel tingling skin-and shamewithout visibly
reddening.  If people flushed, paled, and turned

green with the frequency found in fiction, society would be a much more
colorful place.  Perhaps many species of animals blush unnoticed.  No
one has checked to see if, under the fur, a raccoon tingles with
mortification or flushes with pride.  Whether macaws also blush on the
parts of their bodies covered by feathers or whether other parrots flush
beneath their feathers is unknown.  But even if they do not, it does not
necessarily follow that if animals do not blush, they do not feel shame.

The Advantages of Shame

If shame proves to be widespread in the animal kingdom, the evolutionary
approach would predict that it should confer some advantage.  just what
might be adaptive about global self-accusation is not immediately
apparent.

The self-conscious emotions seem to appear early in the lives of humans.
In one series of experiments, researchers gave small children toys
cunningly designed to fall apart and then videotaped their play.  When a
toy broke, some children cried; some looked for another toy; some
appeared ashamed or guilty.  Some children looked away, their bodies
"collapsed" in what is considered a typical shame response.  A child who
appeared tense and averted its gaze, but then tried to fix the toy, was
thought to be showing a guilt response.  Helen Block Lewis, an early
theorist in the field of shame and guilt, viewed human shame and guilt
as regulators of social interactions that combat narcissism and punish
transgressions of group mores.  Blushing signals to other group members
that the blusher recognizes such transgression and, therefore,
recognizes the group rules.

Psychiatrist Donald Nathanson does not consider shame a social emotion.
He cites an experiment in which three- to fourmonth-old infants could
control a display of flashing colored lights by turning their heads. The
babies apparently loved doing this and squealed with pleasure when the
lights went on.  When the experimentei's changed the apparatus so that
the babies' efforts were unsuccessful, the infants' heads and necks
slumped, their breathing

quickened, blood flow to their skin increased, and they turned their
faces away.  Nathanson and other theorists interpret this as a primitive
shame response that was independent of whether or not other people were
present, and hence argue that shame is not necessarily a social emotion.
(It is not clear how disappointment and frustration can be excluded as
possible explanations.)  In Nathanson's analysis, shame is "a biological
system by which the organism controls its affective output so that it
will not remain interested or content when it may not be safe to do so,
or so that it will not remain in affective resonance with an organism
that fails to match patterns stored in memory." He believes that it
evolved comparatively recently.

As for the advantages of global self-accusation, Nathanson argues: "If
you were going to design a system capable of learning

from experience and educating itself, you might as well build in the
capacity to magnify failure.  Shame augments our memory of failure and
protects us from whatever danger might occur, when, in a moment of need,
we might try something well beyond our capacity.),

Another possibility is that shame might keep animals from attracting the
attention of predators.  Humans feel ashamed not only of their actual or
perceived faults, but often of their differences from others, even when
those differences are neutral or even positive.  To be stared at can be
unnerving, even when the stare is an admiring one.  Often people are
uncomfortable when praised. To be singled out in any way can be acutely
embarrassing-and may also feel perilous.

Predators single out prey.  Some predators select prey on the basis of
physical condition, thus culling out sick and injured animals, as well
as young animals.  They may study herds of prey animals, chase some of
them, and make an all-out effort to catch only a few.  An examination of
the bone marrow of wildebeest killed by lions revealed that a large
percentage were in poor condition.  Hyenas hunting make random passes at
herds, or zigzag through, then stop and watch them run, switching their
attention from animal to animal, apparently looking for potential
weakness. One experimenter who was shooting wildebeest with anesthetic

darts in order to measure and tag them found that, if he was not
careful, these same animals would at once be killed by hyenas when he
released them.  Although they looked normal to humans, and seemed to be
able to run as fast as ever, the hyenas noted some difference.  He had
to herd the hyenas away with his vehicle until the wildebeest had more
time to recover.

Predators also notice other differences.  A researcher once marked some
wildebeest by painting their horns white.  Within a few months, almost
all of these animals had been killed by hyenas. Hans Kruuk has noted
instances in which hyenas pursued animals who were presumably in good
physical condition but were acting oddly and were then singled out by
hyenas.  At night, when dazzled by the headlights of a car, wildebeest
ran in an odd war-and were instantly pursued by hyenas.  Away from the
headlights, the wildebeest quickly got their bearings and escaped.

Kruuk also saw a herd of several hundred wildebeest in which only one
was rolling and showing territorial behavior.  These actions,
unremarkable in another context, instantly attracted a hyena's pursuit.
The wildebeest escaped easily.  That the wildebeest escaped in these
instances supports the idea that the hyenas were detecting difference
rather than weakness.

Schooling or flocking behavior can battle some predators in a very
simple way: by preventing them from focusing on individual prey.  When a
few members of a school of small silver fish were dyed blue, not only
were they more frequently attacked by predators, but so were the normal
silver fish next to them.  Faced by a cloud of identical fish, the
predator could not pick out an individual, but it was able to pick out
the blue one or the one next to the blue one.

Prey animals often seem aware of the assessment of predators. In Zaire,
Paul Leyhausen saw two uneasy-looking male kobs (large antelope) near a
river.  Presently he saw two lions lurking near the kobs, moving from
behind one bush to another.  The kob closest to the lions appeared to
grow calmer and began grazing, but the other began to run back and forth
in alarm.  It soon became clear from their movements, Leyhausen says,
that the lions were stalking the farther kob-and that both kobs knew
this well before the human

observer figured out that the lions were not going for the closest prey.

Prey animals also seem able to tell when predators are hunting and when
they are bent on other business entirely, and adjust their flight
distance accordingly.  A wish to conceal weakness and
difference-behavior resulting from fear or dislike of being scrutinized
-could lead animals to take actions to avoid predation.  They could
pretend not to be weak, minimize their difference, or hide from the view
of predators.

Predators are not the only creatures who might take advantage of an
animal's display of vulnerability or weakness.  Animals of the same
species are all too likely to be alert to signs of such weakness and to
exploit them.  When lions in the Serengeti were shot with anesthetic
darts, some of the other lions took the opportunity to attack them (and
were driven off by the researchers).  Thus, shame might motivate animals
to hide weakness from members of their herd or pack.  If a caribou
appears visibly weak or lame, it will be the first in the herd to be
attacked by wolves, but the wolf who appears weak or sick may lose
status in the pack.  This can have serious consequences in terms of
having offspring.

To survive, then, an animal must not only be fit, it must look fit.  The
sense of shame, painful to experience, may provide an emotional reason
to hide infirmity.

Sickness and injury are often concealed.  To the despair of animal
breeders and veterinarians, many captive animals will diligently conceal
all signs of sickness until they are too far gone to be saved.  Birds
are particularly adept at this, sometimes hiding all symptoms and
enduring secretly until the moment when they literally topple from their
perches.

Scottish red deer leave the herd when they become sick or are injured.
At one time it was suggested that they did this for the good of the
herd, but it seems probable that a lone deer is less likely to be
spotted by a predator than a herd of deer-and if a herd of deer is
spotted, then the sick or injured one is most likely to be the first
animal attacked.  If the deer recovers, it returns to the herd.  If
predators zero in on difference, not merely weakness, animals

might feel vulnerable or ashamed of things that attract the gaze of
others.

It might seem odd that shame could lead to blushing.  At first glance it
seems counterproductive for an animal to blush visibly or physically
show embarrassment: it does not look good, and isn't the objective to
look good or at least not to stand out?  The tingle of the blush could
conceivably signal the blusher to hide (or give them something to hide),
which serves the purpose of concealing the original weakness that the
blusher was embarrassed about. Most animals do not blush visibly, if at
all, so it may be that humans (some of us) do have a small claim to
distinction in being the most visible blushers, even if we do not prove
unique in feeling shame.

Pet owners often say that their cat or dog hates to be laughed at.
Elephant keepers have reported that elephants who are laughed at have
responded by filling their trunks with water and spraying those who are
mocking them.  It seems curious that animals that do not laugh might
recognize and resent laughter.  But perhaps laughter should be
considered the equivalent expression of something they do feel
themselves, and they are better translators than we are.

Guilt

Guilt-feeling remorse for a particular act-can be trickier to pin down
than shame.  An action that carries overtones of guilt usually does so
because our culture has informed us that it is wrong.  Guilt is easily
confounded with fear of discovery and subsequent disapproval or
punishment.  The chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky, as we saw, was taught the sign
for "sorry" and used it when he had "misbehaved," just as Alex the
parrot has said "I'm sorry" after biting his trainer.  The examples of
Nim's misdeeds that are citedbreaking a toy or jumping around too
much-do not seem to be things that a chimpanzee would naturally regard
as bad.  Like human children, he knew it was misbehavior only because he
had been taught so.  Sometimes Nim signed "sorry" before his teachers
noticed what he had done.  Whether Nim felt something other

than the desire to avert possible wrath is unclear.  On the other hand,
this is often unclear in humans, as well.

Washoe's adopted son Loulis was teasing Roger Fouts one day, "just being
a pill," and poked him harder than usual, cutting Fouts with his nail.
"I made a big deal of it, crying and so on. Later, whenever I showed him
that, to make him feel guilty, if you will, to use it to exploit that,
he would squeeze his eyes tight and turn away.  He would refuse to look
at me whenever I tried to show him or talk about this old, old scratch
that he had given me."

There are a variety of possible interpretations for this extraordinarily
familiar behavior, but guilt is very strongly suggested.

Dogs are the most familiar guilty animal for most people. Desmond Morris
has argued persuasively that dogs do feel remorse for their actions at
times.  When a dog that has committed some misdeed greets a human in an
unusually submissive manner before the person has any reason to guess
what has happened, Morris says, it cannot be getting cues from human
behavior.  "It has an understanding that it has done something 'wrong."'

Human shame has only recently been deemed a respectable field of study.
Donald Nathanson recounts how, early in his career, he organized a
symposium on shame.  When it was over a friend took him aside,
complimented him on the success of the symposium, and urged him not to
do any more work on shame, lest he get a reputation for it.  "It was in
that moment that I learned that the very idea of shame is embarrassing
to most people," Nathanson says.  These are emotions to be hidden.
Perhaps animals have been successful in hiding them from our gaze.

If social animals feel guilt and shame, other animals might learn to
take advantage of this.  When a young chimpanzee makes a fool of itself,
as Freud did in the incident recounted by Jane Goodall, it would seem
possible for other chimpanzees to ridicule the young animal, to draw the
attention of their companions to the situation, and to exaggerate their
reactions.  There does not seem to be any evidence that they do in fact
mock each other this way, and if so, in this they differ from human
animals.

 Beauty, the Bears, and the Setting Sun

One afternoon a student observing chimpanzees at the Gombe Reserve took
a break and climbed to the top of a ridge to watch the sun set over Lake
Tanganyika.  As the student, Geza Teleki, watched, he noticed first one
and then a second chimpanzee climbing up toward him.  The two adult
males were not together and saw each other only when they reached the
top of the ridge.  They did not see Teleki.  The apes greeted each other
with pants, clasping hands, and sat down together.  In silence Teleki
and the chimpanzees watched the sun set and twilight fall.

The sense of beauty is not usually defined as an emotion.  Yet it does
not seem to be a wholly intellectual experience.  Sometimes beauty makes
people happy, sometimes sad; perhaps the experience ispartly cognitive
and partly emotional.  Human beings have certainly always preferred to
reserve the appreciation of it exclusively for our own species.

The chimpanzees who watched the sundown with Geza Teleki were not
unique.  The primatologist Adriaan Kordandt recorded a wild chimpanzee
gazing for a till fifteen minutes at a particularly spectacular sunset
until darkness fell.  Some who have observed

bears in the wild speak of them sitting on their haunches at sunset,

gazing at it, seemingly lost in meditation.  From all appearances it

would seem that the bears are enjoying the sunset, taking pleasure

in the aesthetic experience.  Scientists laugh at the na:fvetd of this

interpretation.  How could a bear be capable of aesthetic apprecia non,
a contemplative state?  Some aesthetes also believe other

people are incapable of such a state, or such a refined one; many

nineteenth-century scientists claimed that "lower" races could not

enjoy the same aesthetic emotions that they (as members of

"higher" races) could.  One can doubtless go too far with this, his
tening, for example, to a bear exhaling and claiming that he is

sighing with melancholy awareness of the transience of things, oh
serving his world and thinking that one day he will no longer be

present to witness such beauty-an ursine Rilke.  Momentary

awareness of his own mortality is almost impossible to prove; a

sense of beauty is easier.

Why should any creature have a sense of beauty?  Some have

claimed that human artistic creativity is rooted in exploratory play.

Perhaps a sense of beauty rewards us for making our way through

the world and for turning our senses upon it.  Finding one's children
and other loved ones beautiful is valuable.  In a broader sense

we may have evolved to see the world around us as beautiful, to

enjoy gazing on it, listening to it, breathing it in, moving through

it, feeling and tasting it.  Perhaps it serves no useful purpose beyond

the satisfaction it inherently provides, a value in itself.

Before an animal can find beauty in some set of sensations,

sounds, or images, it must be possible for the animal to detect

these things physically, to sense them and to perceive them.  Animal
senses are poorly understood but seem to be tremendously

variable.

It is often said that animals, or some of them, are color-blind.

This strangely counterintuitive assertion has been widely repeated

as scientific fact for decades and has made its way into some text
books.  Despite numerous articles in the scientific and popular press

reporting color vision in animals (including dogs), the idea that

animals can see in color is still frequently described as a "myth."

Humans do have excellent color vision.  Along with many

other primates, we are classified by optical scientists as trichromats,
which means that we construct the range of colors we see from three
basic colors.  A person and an ape may see precisely the same colors
when looking at a setting sun.  Many mammals, including cats and dogs,
are dichromats, using two basic colors.  They see in color, though not
as diversely as people.  A few nocturnal animals, like rats, may be
color-blind.  Some birds use four or five basic colors; perhaps their
color vision is better than ours.  It has been known for decades that
some insects can see ultraviolet light; recently it has been discovered
that some birds, fish, and mammals can too.  At least one species of
bird, the Australian silvereye, can apparently "see"-that is, detect
with the eye-magnetic fields.

If animals were without color vision, of what benefit would be a
baboon's brightly colored face and rump, or a peacock's tail?  Yet even
among those who concede the peafowl's capacity to detect plumage colors,
there are some who argue that it is unlikely to appreciate those colors.
A recent natural history book for popular audiences has it:

What is it about the peacock's fan that puts the female in the

mood for mating: The iridescence?  The graceful shape?  The

spots that look like eyes?  The truth is, what wows humans

may not impress female peafowl at all.  Instead, the sheer size

of the fan may be the irresistible feature because of what it

says about the bird that carried it.  Namely, if a bird with a

large fan has survived to breeding age despite his unwieldy

handicap, he must be both strong and wily.  In the same way,

females may value colorful plumage not for its beauty, but

because the sheen shows that the bird is free from parasites.

Females that can spot these superior traits are rewarded by

passing on their genes to offspring that, like their "handicapped"
father, are more likely to survive and reproduce.

How seriously should this be taken?  The view that the peahen cannot, on
the one hand, be drawn to beauty, but can, on the other, think: "Shiny
feathers mean low parasite load-I'll mate with this one so my chicks can
benefit from his genes," is untenable.  If any

such claim for a peahen's ability to draw intellectual conclusions were
explicitly made, it would promptly be rejected.  Yet the assertion that
the peahen does not sense beauty is in line with assertions routinely
made in the field of animal behavior.

If the peahen is not thought of as a calculating gene-shopper, what can
an evolutionary approach suggest is going on?  If the proximate cause is
that she admires the peacock's tail because she finds it beautifi:(I-and
in humans it takes neither a powerful intellect nor extensive aesthetic
training to do this-then she may mate with him, which has the ultimate
result of selecting the male with the best genes.  While human beings
occasionally refer to others in terms of their genetic potential, this
is not what is typically thought to go through the mind of a person
smitten with either lust or love.

To return to the question of animal senses, acute hearing is usually
conceded to some animals.  Nonetheless it took Karl von Frisch, more
renowned for his discoveries about bee language, to show that fish hear,
in an article with the tide "A Dwarf Catfish Who Comes When You Whistle
to Him." Lately it has been discovered that the hearing of an unknown
number of species goes far beyond our own: elephants communicate
extensively in sounds too low for us to hear, and shrews, like bats,
practice echolocation by means of sounds too high for human ears.  In
the case of birds, the implications of this are not always realized.
Birds are about ten times better than humans at discriminating sounds
temporally. Thus, in an interval in which we hear one note, a bird can
hear ten notes.  When recordings of birdsongs are played at reduced
speed, it is found that they use this ability-in songs that often
contain sequences of notes that pass by too quickly for the human ear. A
blackbird's song that sounds like a rusty hinge to us may sound quite
different to the blackbird.  When people listen to or imitate birdsong,
they may be overlooking great complexity.

Pet birds often appear to enjoy human music.  They may prefer certain
kinds of music or react differently depending on what music is played.
Gerald Durrell has written of a pet pigeon who listened quietly to most
music and snuggled against the gramophone.  When marches were played, he
would stamp back and forth, cooing loudly; to waltzes, he would twist
and bow, cooing

softly.  Grey parrots sometimes flap their wings in delight when they
hear favorite songs.  Given the difference in auditory acuity, one
wonders whether much human music might not sound slow and sepulchral to
birds or whether they hear sounds from the instruments that the
musicians are unaware of making.

Numerous species of animals utter lengthy and complicated calls that
humans enjoy hearing.  It would be odd if humpback whales did not
appreciate their own songs or if wolves did not like the sound of their
howling.  For this to be true one must imagine that all the care with
which a humpback composes, performs, and alters its song has no positive
or negative import, only a communicative function toward which the whale
feels nothing and that whales listen to other whale songs only to
extract data from them. This view paints whales as far more cerebral
creatures than people, all mind and no heart.  Canid howling is not a
random procedure; as anyone who has howled with a dog knows, dogs adjust
their howling according to other sounds they hear.  Hope Ryden observed
a pair of howling coyotes who never howled on the same note.  When the
male's howl hit a note the female was on, she at once dropped her pitch;
when she howled on his note, the male instantly switched to falsetto.
Such duets are thought to convey the information to other coyotes that
there are two coyotes howling, not just one, thus indicating that a
territorial pair is present.  This seems likely, but does not mean that
the coyotes do not feel that the howling sounds better that way.  There
is no reason why the mechanism by which this advantageous behavior is
obtained could not be aesthetic appreciation of song.

Similarly, the calls of gibbons seem to serve a territorial function,
yet also might rise from or display an aesthetic sensibility. Gibbons
sing together daily.  In most but not all species, male and female calls
are different.  The duets of pairs, in which they exchange notes, may be
sung spontaneously or in response to the songs of other gibbons.  In
most gibbon species, males sing long solos and females utter ringing
"great calls." juveniles often join in.

Jim Nollman, whose avocation is playing music to and with wild animals,
went to Panama in 1983 to try to make music with

howler monkeys, who live in family groups and call extensively. Nollman
writes that a zoologist (whose study of the howlers spanned a decade)
predicted that they would not be interested in his playing, except
perhaps to utter a few howls as a territorial claim.  Finding a tree
with howlers in it, Nollman sat beneath it and played his shakuhachi
flute.  The entire family at first responded with loud howls.  Then one
monkey began to howl between the notes of the flute, in apparent
response.  After an hour, darkness ended the interchange.  In following
days, the family did not howl with the flutist's playing, but instead
descended to low branches and watched him intently, despite their
reputation for shyness. Whatever the howlers thought of Nollman's flute
music, it seems clear that they found it absorbing although they were
aware it was not produced by one of their own.  Perhaps they liked it.
Even if they disliked it, that might represent an aesthetic opinion.

Michael, a gorilla in a sign-language program, is fond of music, and
enjoys the singing of tenor Luciano Pavarotti so much that he has been
known to refuse an opportunity to go outdoors when a Pavarotti
performance is on television.  He likes to tap on pipes and strum on
strings from burlap bags.  Unfortunately, Michael is so strong that he
would have a hard time not destroying a musical instrument.

What role, if any, the pleasures of taste play in animal eating is
almost wholly unknown.  Siri, an Indian elephant confined in a small zoo
exhibit, was often seen to step delicately on an apple or orange, split
it open, and then rub the pieces into her hay.  Her keeper believed that
Siri did this to flavor the hay.  A wild elephant eats a wide variety of
plants, which presumably have differing tastes.  The diet of captivity
is far more monotonous.  Most animals, like us, seem to dislike bitter
flavors and enjoy sweet ones, a discrimination that has survival value
in some instances.  In such simple distinctions may lie the beginnings
of aesthetics.

Compared with many animals, humans apprehend little of the sensory realm
of smell.  We possess this ancient sense, but not keenly, and make
little conscious use of it.  Hunters teach themselves to compensate for
the superior sense of smell of many prey animals by approaching them
from downwind or by disguising the

human scent with others.  Given the powerful olfactory sense of so many
animals, it is possible they have aesthetic responses to stimuli people
do not detect.  An observer of coatimundis in Arizona reported that
these animals frequently sit up or lean back and sniff the air intently,
presumably gathering information.  He commented that one old female, the
Witch, would also sometimes arise during one of the group's intervals of
relaxation on a cliff ledge, go to the edge and sit for five minutes or
so, sniffing calmly, slowly, and deeply.  The thought that she might be
appreciating and not just assessing the world around her occurred to
observers, who could not resist comparing her to a concert-goer or
gallery visitor.

The frequent allegation that birds have no sense of smell is simply
wrong.  The olfactory bulbs in a bird's brain give them this sense.  Its
acuity varies widely: parrots and warblers seem to have poor senses of
smell, while those of albatrosses and kiwis are excellent.  Not
surprisingly, some vultures have been found to have an excellent sense
of smell, which they use to locate carrion.  It might be pleasing or
merely interesting to their aesthetic sense.

Many snakes have special heat-detecting organs.  An increasing number of
ocean creatures are found to have electromagnetic navigation senses.
There are some senses, such as the ability to detect magnetic fields,
that science has only recently become aware of; there may be more.  Any
sense may be subject to preference and any field of preferred and less
preferred points may be perceived as beautiful or ugly.  Some animals
may be admiring or even creating subsonic, infrared, or electromagnetic
beauty.

One scientist who gathered data about the visual preferences of immature
male rhesus monkeys in captivity found that they liked short-wavelength
light.  They preferred orange to red, yellow to orange, green to yellow,
and they liked blue better still.  They were more interested in pictures
of other animals than they were in pictures of monkeys, but preferred
pictures of monkeys to pictures of people.  They would rather look at
flowers than at a Mondrian painting (Composition, 1920), and pictures of
bananas interested them least of all.  They would rather watch a
continuous cartoon than a cartoon film loop, but they preferred the loop
to watching still pictures.  They preferred their films to be in focus,
and the

worse the focus was on a film, the less they cared to watch it.  These
preferences were categorized as "interest" and "pleasure." The
preference that seems the most likely to be purely aesthetic is the one
for colors, since there is no reason to suppose that a plain blue wall
is more interesting than a plain yellow one.  Nor are rhesus alone in
their taste for blue.  The German animal behaviorist Bernhard Rensch
also examined color and pattern preferences in primates and in other
animals.  The apes and monkeys generally preferred regular to irregular
and symmetric to asymmetric designs. Nor were their tastes immutable:
retested after an interval, some of them made different choices.  When
Rensch tested crows and jackdaws, they, too, selected regular designs,
but fish seemed more attracted by irregular designs.

Animals often select mates on the basis of their displays or songs.
Sometimes the criteria they use can be simply quantified: they select
the biggest or the loudest or the plumpest mate.  Female widowbirds are
attracted to male widowbirds with long tails, so when an ornithologist
glued extra tail feathers onto the end of the tails of some males, those
males became more popular.  They tend to favor animals with a symmetric
appearance, also a preference of some humans.  Sometimes, however, more
subtle aesthetic choices seem to be involved.

The beautiful and unusual bowerbirds and birds of paradise of New Guinea
are favored subjects of ornithological study.  The various species of
bowerbirds do not form pairs.  Instead, the female visits the display
sites, or bowers, of various males and the male performs courtship
displays, which may or may not induce the female to mate with him.  Some
male bowerbirds-generally those with the plainest plumage-construct very
elaborate bowers resembling alleys, tunnels, maypoles, yards, or tepees.
They embellish these with colored objects such as flowers, fruits,
insect parts, or human artifacts; and they may even paint parts of the
bower with charcoal and crushed berries, using a bark "brush."

Different populations of a bowerbird species prefer different colors
when choosing curios to decorate their bowers.  They often visit one
another's bowers and steal decorations.  When selecting adornments, the
satin bowerbird-a blue-eyed species-likes blue

items.  When the male bowerbird decorates his bower, and when (and io
the female bowerbird mates with the male whose bower she likes best,
they seem to be exhibiting taste.  When interfering biologists steal
adornments from certain bowers, females favor them less and those males
are able to mate less often.  Perhaps for various reasons correlated
with fitness, blue-loving bowerbirds have a reproductive competitive
advantage.  The evolutionary approach would suggest that the ultimate
cause of their artistic preferences may be to enable the male to show
how fit he is, how much time he has to devote to collecting decorations
and defending them from theft, and for the female to assess this.  The
proximate cause, however, is unlikely to be anything like this.  It is
unlikely that the female estimates how many bird-hours went into a
bower, and whether that indicates good genes.  The male does not decide
to decorate with blue objects because, let us say, they are rare, and he
knows that will indicate to females that he ranges over a wide area due
to his good genes.  It is more likeland it is a more parsimonious
theory-that both female and male bowerbirds like the look of blue.

Naturalist Bruce Beehler observed the bowers of the streaked bowerbird,
birds who are not born especially beautiful, but must create their own
beauty, hence their bowers.  These resemble tepees with center poles,
and on the base of the pole the bird constructs a tidy wall of moss
adorned with colored objects.  Each type of decoration is on a different
section of the wall and the effect is &(quite artistic and very
beautiful." Beehler notes: "Some biologists believe that the remarkable
construction of the male bowerbirds is evidence of an aesthetic sense.
Others prefer to believe that this spin-off of mating behavior is the
product of the remarkable sexual competition among males to mate with
females-a process that Charles Darwin named 'sexual selection."' These
two explanations are not opposed, but compatible.  Yet something
important is suggested by the comment that some biologists "prefer" to
believe in competition.  This is the question of what people like to
believe or think they ought to believe about animals.

The same issue arises with respect to birds of paradise, famous for the
gorgeous plumage of the males.  At a display site of the

lesser bird of paradise, many males gather.  All of the females who
visit may mate with just one male, and biologists have wondered why.
Beehler writes:

Some researchers believe that it is the product of acute female

discrimination and that the females are choosing the "prettiest" or
"sexiest" male.  I tend to believe that it is caused, in

part, by a despotic control of the lek [communal breeding

ground] mating hierarchy by the dominant bird.  The alpha

male, by periodic physical aggression and continual psycho logical
intimidation, is able to keep control over the subordinate males in the
lek.  The females are able to perceive this

hierarchy in the lek, just as humans can make the same perception about
dominance and subordination in a social situation.  Females will
naturally tend to mate with the alpha male,

because his genetic material will most likely give the female

the best chance of producing offspring with his qualities-the

qualities that may help her male offspring dominate a lek of

the next generation.

This analysis, with its focus on male aggression and its rewards, leaves
unexplained the huge golden tail feathers that the males vibrate in
their displays, found so beautiful by humans that the very existence of
some species has been threatened by hunting for export.  If females can
perceive something as complex as hierarchy, and mate according to it,
why is it impossible for them to enjoy and be attracted to shimmering
gold?

New Guinea human tribes have differing styles of ritual costime, which
almost invariably include feathers from various species of birds of
paradise, usually on the men's headdresses.  Bowerbirds often take human
artifacts such as brightly colored candy wrappers, cartridge cases, or
shiny keys to decorate their bowers.  One can imagine birds creeping
near human habitations to steal colored objects and humans creeping near
bird habitations to steal colored feathers.  When we do it, it is for
art.  When they do it, it is for competition.  Both may be true.  What
is disturbing and irrational is the decision to explain human behavior
in spiritual terms of a sense

of beauty, and animal behavior in mechanistic terms of demonstrating
fitness.  The object, yet again, seems to be to define humans as higher
and unique.

Artistic Creation

The issue of artistic creation in animals is fascinating, but little
work has been done in this area.  This is one of the many activities
that has been said to mark a boundary between humans and animals.
Various apes, particularly chimpanzees, have dray;n or painted in
captivity, as have capuchin monkeys.  Alpha, a chimp at the Yerkes
laboratory, loved to draw and would beg visitors for paper and pencil-in
preference to food-and then sit in a corner and draw.  Once, lacking
paper, she tried to draw on a dead leaf By giving her paper that had
geometric designs on it, it was found that her drawing was influenced by
what was already on the paper.  She filled in some figures, scribbled in
the missing parts of others, such as a circle with a wedge cut out, and
added marks that "balanced" other figures.  Her drawings were promptly
taken from her, because after she had drawn on both sides of a sheet of
paper, she would put it in her mouth.

Following this work, Desmond Morris had no difficulty in persuading
another chimpanzee, Congo, to draw and paint.  Interrupted before he had
finished a picture, Congo screamed with rage until allowed to complete
it.  Congo also changed his drawing depending on what was already on the
paper.  His favorite design or theme was a fan of radiating lines, which
he made in various ways, not by a single, stereotyped technique.
Gorillas such as Koko and Michael have also made many drawings.  In no
case have apes produced incontrovertibly representational drawings.  One
chimp, Moja, produced an unusually simple drawing with parallel
horizontal curves, and signed that it was a bird.  Asked to draw a
berry, she produced a compact drawing in one corner of her paper. Either
drawing is plausible but not irrefutable as a representation, but then
many humans create and value unrepresentational art.

In a later experiment Moja and Washoe were asked to draw

Fig 10-I.  Alpha, an 18-year-old caged

chimpanzee at the Yerkes laboratory, for

years regularly begged humans for pencil

and paper so that she could draw.  Once,

when she could not get paper, she drew

on a dead leaf If another chimpanzee

was in the cage when she was drawing,

Alpha would shoulder it away or turn

into a corner.  She made this drawing in

red and blue crayon on 8' x 11' white

paper, over a period of three minutes.

Alpha was never rewarded for drawing

and would ignore food if she saw a

chance to get pencil and paper.  [From

the Yournal of Comparative and PhvsioloL7i    cal Ptychology, published
by the Ainerigan

Psychological Association]

such items as a basketball, a boot, a banana, an apple, a cup, and a
brush, either from the actual objects or from color slides.  At later
sessions they were asked to draw the same items and the drawings were
examined for consistency.  Drawings of the boot were inconsistent, but
those of the cup and brush showed similarities.  None of these were
drawings that a human would be likely to identify as cups or brushes:
requests to draw the cup always produced a centrally placed solid
vertical fan of strokes, whereas the brush was denoted by vertical
strokes crossing horizontal strokes.  Drawings of flowers included
radial patterns and drawings of birds always included "a pointed
action," whether denoting a beak, the movement of flight, or something
else is unknown.  "The one that threw us with Moja was the basketball,
in that it just was a scribble across the page," Roger Fouts said.  But
after Moja drew it in the same wavertical zigzags on the lower part of
the paper-at intervals six weeks apart, researchers realized it might
represent not the appearance of the ball, but its motion.  Small
children sometimes produce kinesthetic drawings of this kind.

While the boredom of captivity may be a motivating factor for all such
animals, they appear to find the act of drawing or painting

rewarding in itself (As if to once again remind us that animals remain
individuals, some captive chimps absolutely refuse to draw or paint.) In
1980 a young Indian elephant named Siri (the same who rubbed fruit into
her hay) was assigned a new keeper, David Gucwa.  Noticing Siri making
scratches on the floor of her enclosure with a pebble-and then
"fingering" them with the tip of her trunk-Gucwa began providing Siri
with a pencil and drawing pad (which he held in his lap).  She responded
by producing dozens of drawings.  All could be classified as either
"abstract" or scribbles, but all are confined to the boundaries of the
paper and, to many observers, seem lyrical, energetic, and beautiful.
She was never rewarded with food for drawing, although she might have
found Gucwa's attention a reward in itself.

Gucwa and journalist James Ehmann sent copies of Siri's drawings to
scientists, most of whom declined to comment, and to artists, many of
whom were enthusiastic.  Artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, in
particular, looked at the drawings before reading the covering letter,
and were struck by their "flair and decisiveness and originality."
Learning the identity of the maker, Willem de Kooning remarked, "That's
a damned talented elephant." (Given her circumstances, Siri could hardly
be derivative.)  Copies of her drawings were shown to other zookeepers,
who said that was nothing new: their elephants scribbled on the ground
with sticks or stones all the time.  Why, then, had nobody written about
it before?

Siri's opportunity to draw on paper ended after two years due to
differences between Gucwa and the zoo director, and to her transfer to
another zoo during renovations.  She was never given paper with predrawn
designs on it to see how that would affect her drawing, but on several
occasions she made two drawings on one sheet of paper, and apparently
placed the second with reference to the first.  We do not know whether
Siri ever disliked any of her work-did she ever tear anything up?  Gucwa
always removed her drawings promptly so that she wouldn't smear them
with her damp trunk when she "fingered" them.  If other elephants also
like to draw, how would they react to one another's drawings?

Other elephants have made images on paper or canvas, but perhaps none
with so little direction as Siri.  Carol, an Indian ele

Fig.  IO-3A.  Drawing done by Siri, an Indian elephant, in pencil

on 9- x 12- paper.  She drew on a sketch pad that handler

David Gucwa held in his lap.  Gucwa titled this "I Remember

Swans," and included it with others sent to artists Elaine and

Willem de Kooning.  Before learning that an animal drew

them, they admired the flair and originality of the sketches

and, when he learned the artist's identity, Willem de Kooning

exclaimed, "That's a damned talented elephant."

phant at the San Diego Zoo, was taught to paint as a visitor attraction,
and is given commands by her trainer, who tells her when to pick up the
brush, supplies her with colors, rotates the canvas so the brush strokes
go in different directions, and rewards her with apples.  But just as
the existence of paint-by-numbers kits does not invalidate the existence
of artistic originality, Carol's dutiful paintings do not negate Siri's
apparently spontaneous urge to draw.

More recently, Ruby, an Asian elephant in the zoo at Phoenix, Arizona,
has been encouraged to paint.  Selected because she was the most
active-but not the only-doodler among the elephants, Ruby loves to paint
and becomes excited when she merely hears the word paint.  Blue and red
are by far her favorite colors.  Biologist Douglas Chadwick reports that
she may select other colors that correspond to an unfamiliar object
nearby, so that if an orange truck is parked in her view, she may pick
orange paint.  "A zoo

Fig.  IO-3B.  This drawing (pencil on 9' x

12" paper), tided "Iris" by Gucwa, was

also among those praised by the de

Koollings.  Before she was given the opportunity to use pencil and
paper, Siri

drew in the dust on the floor of her enclosure, scratching designs on
the concrete with sticks and pebbles.  She was

given no rewards for drawing.

visitor was once taken ill while watching Ruby paint, and paramedics
were called to the scene.  They wore blue suits.  It might have been a
coincidence that after they left, Ruby painted a blue blob surrounded by
a swirl of red." She still doodles in the dirt in her enclosure.  A
handler thinks the African elephants who share the yard with Ruby are
jealous of the attention she gets, because they have begun making highly
visible drawings on the walls, using the ends of logs.

A different kind of creativity was seen in rough-toothed dolphins.
Trainer Karen Pryor had run out of stunts for the dolphins to perform in
shows and decided to reward one of them, Malia, only for performing new
behaviors.  The trainers waited until Malia did something new, then
rewarded her by blowing a whistle and tossing her a fish.  Malia quickly
learned what was being reinforced that datail-slapping, backward
tail-walking-and performed that action.  In a few weeks they had run out
of new behaviors to reinforce.  After several frustrating days, Malia
suddenly began performing a dramatic array of wholly new activities,
some quite complex.  She swam on her back with her tail in the air, or
spun like a corkscrew, or jumped out of the water upside down, or made
lines on the floor of the tank with her dorsal fin.  She had learned
that her trainers-were not looking for certain actions, but for novelty.
Sometimes she was very excited when training sessions were about to
start, and her trainers could hardly stop themselves believing that
Malia "sat in her holding tank all night thinking up stuff and rushed
into the first show with an air of, 'Wait until you see this one!

Determined to make a scientific record of this remarkable behavior, the
trainers filmed the same process with a second dolphin, Hou.  A less
optimistic and excitable individual, Hou took longer to catch on, but at
the sixteenth training session suddenly performed a burst of novel
activities and continued to do new stunts in session after session.
Pryor reports that this experience changed Hou lastingly, "from a
docile, inactive animal to an active, observant animal full of
initiative." Hou also gave more anger signals, having apparently
acquired an artistic temperament.  Both dolphins began to produce novel
behaviors outside training sessions, including opening gates between
tanks, leaping over gates, and jumping out of the water and sliding
around on the concrete in order to rap trainers on the ankles.  While
some thought these results showed how intelligent dolphins are, Pryor
disagreed: she replicated the experiment with pigeons and ended up with
birds that spontaneously lay on their backs, stood with both feet on one
wing, or flew into the air two inches and hung there.  Such creativity
is unexpected in a species usually deemed intellectually unimpressive,
but may simply show that, given a chance to be creative, they are
smarter than we thought they were.

Culture and the Concept of Beauty

Human emotions occur in the context of culture, which is not to say that
they exist because of culture.  Our sense of what is beautiful is
significantly influenced by culture.  Different human cultures teach
somewhat different ideas of what is beautiful.  For

example, music that delights one group of people may strike members of
another culture-or subculture-as discordant, depressing, or ugli,v.
There is more to human perception of beauty than culture, but exactly
how much more is unclear.  Thus the idea that animals perceive and
create beauty leads to the question of whether their aesthetic
perception is in some way related to culture.

Culture and its transmission include much that is cognitive, which is
not the focus of this book, yet it should be noted that there are many
examples of animal culture.  In Japanese monkey troops, different troop
traditions have been noticed: some troops eat shellfish and some do not;
some eat the seed of the muku fruit and some throw it away; some
baby-sit for each other and some do not.  The most famous example of
cultural transmission comes from the story of Imo, the "monkey genius"
who invented several feeding techniques, such as throwing handfuls of
sandy grain into water so that the sand sank and the grain could be
scooped off the surface of the water and eaten.  Imo's methods were
gradually copied by more and more of the monkeys in her troop until they
all practiced them.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has written of prides of lions in the Kalahari
Desert in southern Africa that had a tradition (later lost) of
coexistence with humans.  In the 1950s, when Thomas first lived in the
Kalahari, lions treated humans-mostly Juwa and Gikwe Bushmen-with
resentful respect.  They reluctantly allowed humans to drive them away
from kills and did not attack humans. In the 1960s the Bushmen were
evicted from the area.  When Thomas returned in the 1980s, she found
that the lions behaved differently.  These lions, who no longer lived
among a human population, had lost their cultural traditions toward them
and seemed all too willing to examine the idea of humans as prey. Thomas
also writes that leopards in different areas used different hunting
methods for human prey.  In what may be described as a cultural shift, a
group of olive baboons in Kenya was observed to switch from occasional
meat-eating by adult males to a custom of hunting and eating prey by
males, females, and juveniles.  A curious example from captivity is
supplied by the chimpanzees at Arnhem Zoo.  A dominant male injured his
hand in a fight and had to support himself

with his wrist while walking, whereupon the young chimpanzees began
hobbling on their wrists too.

In the University of Washington group of signing chimpanzees where
Loulis grew up, the adult chimpanzees had been raised by Allen and
Beatrix Gardner, whom Loulis had never met.  One day the Gardners came
to visit, an event that was not announced to the chimps.  None of the
chimps had seen the Gardners for at least a year, and Washoe had not
seen them for eleven years.  The Gardners walked in.  When the chimps
saw them they simply sat and stared-highly unusual behavior.  They did
not give the usual friendly greetings-signs, touches, hugs-given to
people they know, nor did they display as they do at strangers, but
gazed as if dumbfounded.  Except Loulis, who began to display at these
unfamiliar people, erecting his hair, standing and swaying, banging on
walls.  Instantly, Washoe and Dar, who had been sitting on either side
of him, seized him.  Dar clapped a hand over Loulis's mouth. Washoe took
his arm and made him sit down, which he did with an astonished
expression.  Such treatment was new to him.  After a moment Washoe went
to the Gardners, signed their names, led Beatrix Gardner into another
room, and began to play a game with her that they had played together in
Washoe's childhood.  In this instance, a piece of cultural information
was transmitted to Loulis. The chimpanzees' signing abilities did not
extend to making the statement, "These are people we treat with
affection and respect," yet Loulis surely was given this message.

Culture has been described as yet another factor that makes humans
unique.  Examples of cultural transmission of behavior like those above
are dismissed as "just interesting oddities." They may be more than
that.  Cultural transmission may be more widespread among animals than
is commonly believed.  It has not been argued that any animal species
lives in a culture approaching the complexity of any human culture.
However, the contention that animals cannot possess a sense of beauty
because aesthetics are culturebound is wholly unproven and there is much
evidence to support the contrary.

just as any two people do not find all the same things beautiful, a
person and an animal might disagree.  But to dismiss the

possibility that an animal can sense beauty at all is narrow-minded.
Discussing birdsong, Joseph Wood Krutch wrote:

Suppose you had heard at the opera some justly famous prima

donna singing "Voi che sapete." .  .  .  You have assumed that

[she] genuinely loves music and experiences some emotion

related to that which Mozart's aria expresses.  .  .  .  But a scientist
of another kind-an economist-comes along and says,

"I have studied the evidence.  I find that .  .  .  the performer

really sings for so many thousand dollars per week.  In fact she

won't sing in public unless she is paid quite a large sum.  .  .  .

You may sing in the bath because you are happy and you like

to do it.  But so far, at least, as professional singers are concerned,
they sing for nothing but money." The fallacy-and it

is the fallacy in an appalling number of psychological, socio logical,
and economic "interpretations" of human behavior is, of course, the
fallacy of the "nothing but" .  .  .  there is

nothing in human experience or knowledge to make it seem

unlikely that the cardinal announcing from the branch of a

tree his claim on a certain territory is not also terribly glad to

be doing it, very joyous in his realization of his own vigor and

artistry.  .  .  .  Whoever listens to a bird song and says, "I do

not believe there is any joy in it," has not proved anything

about birds.  But he has revealed a good deal about himself.

Researchers studying elephants in Kenya camp in the middle of the east
African bush.  Sometimes at night the people sing and play guitars and
the elephants draw near to listen.  Perhaps they are merely curious, but
perhaps they take pleasure in the music.  Human curiosity should allow
us to ask whether elephants find beauty in music, just as the human
sense of beauty allows us to appreciate the image of these large beasts
moving slowly through the darkness listening to the songs.

While nonhuman animals show clear evidence of emotional lives, they
should not be considered emotionally identical to humans. This would be
true anthropomorphic error, inaccurate projection. We are all beings
together, but we are not the same-neither higher nor lower, just
distinct.

Much past discussion of animals and emotions has been directed primarily
at arguing that certain emotions are the property of humanity alone.  To
show that, on the contrary, some animals feel some emotions, still means
that the question must be asked anew in particular instances.  If hippos
can feel compassion, that does not mean that a particular hippo feels
compassion at a particular time.  Similarly, if buffalo are capable of
love, this does not necessarily mean that they can feel shame.  So it is
still possible that there are emotions people feel that no other animals
feel.  Leaving aside the unimpressive history of human attempts to claim
uniqueness, it should be conceded that many species do have attributes
that no others have.  Pelicans have unusual bills, elephants have
trunks, platypuses have poison spurs; perhaps human beings can claim
religious awe.

Religion and the Soul

People have immortal souls and animals do not, according to much of
Western religion.  Animal lovers resist this, citing animals' virtues
and affirming that they must have souls; heaven would be a paltry place
if there were no dogs in it.  The question of who has a soul and who
doesn't is far more problematic than the parallel question of emotions.
Science is of no help.  Yet the theological view may point to a
difference between the emotional lives of humans and those of other
animals.  Animals do not seem to need to believe in higher powers.
Animals have not been observed to have religious practices, while people
do.

Some traditional tribes in Madagascar say that when sifaka lemurs lie on
high branches in the morning, facing the sun, with their eyes closed,
they are worshiping the sun.  Some say that the sifakas are incarnations
of their own sun-worshiping ancestors.  Primatologist Alison Jolly
commented, "It is difficult to watch a sunning lemur without being
anthropomorphic, but to Western eyes it seems less like religious fervor
than like our indolent cult of Sunday at the beach." There is no reason
to suppose that sifakas themselves are lemuromorphic, that they invest
the sun with creature qualities (though we cannot prove that they do
not) and worship those qualities.  The explanation that they enjoy the
warmth seems sufficient to explain their behavior, but the traditional
explanation of the Malagasy people has the advantage of poetry.

Like art, religion is not an emotionless affair of pure intellect. Awe,
faith, righteousness, abasement, worship, seeking salvationall have
emotional components.  Some theorists describe awe as a form of shame.
Are the religious emotions ones that animals simply do not feel?  Or are
they emotions that exist in other parts of life that in humans may be
focused.  on the religious impulse?  Animal emotions may shed some
light.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas compares the behavior of a person
humbly kneeling to pray and a dog showing its belly-demonstrating
submission-to a person.  Her husband's dog, she notes, ritually shows
his belly first thing in the morning, like a morning devotion.  In the
end, Thomas concludes that the parallel is not exact, that dogs probably
do not think of

humans as gods, yet, "as we need God more than he needs us, dogs need us
more than we need them, and they know it." Further study of such
dynamics could shed considerable comparative light on human religious
rites.

Morality and a Sense of justice

The sense of justice has been called uniquely human.  Has it an
emotional component?  The human sense of justice is accompanied by many
emotions: anger and outrage at injustice, desire for revenge, and
compassion.  The stories of crow parliaments that hold trials and pass
judgment on their members are fantasy, but less organized manifestations
of what may be a sense of justice exist in many stories of righteously
indignant chimps, for example.  Nim Chimpsky learned when to expect
praise and when to expect censure, and accepted these artificial
standards.  If he broke a toy, punishment did not surprise him, and he
accepted it.  But if one of his teachers punished him for something the
others ignored, or if one failed to praise him for something the others
rewarded, Nim became sulky.

Perhaps Nim was merely upset because his world lacked predictability,
because his settled expectations were violated.  But this is a big part
of legal justice among humans.  The chimpanzees in the Arnhem colony
seem to react to a sense of unjust treatment of others.  In one instance
the chimpanzee Puist "kidnapped" a one-year-old infant from his mother,
and carried him up a tree, where he screamed with fright.  After the
mother recovered her child she attacked Puist, although Puist was larger
and more dominant.  The male Yeroen rushed up to them and stopped the
fight by seizing Puist and flinging her away.  This was unusual, because
Yeroen and Puist were allies, and on all other occasions Yeroen had
intervened on Puist's side.  Frans de Waal concludes that Yeroen agreed
with the mother chimp that she had cause for complaint.

In another incident, Puist appeared to be aggrieved on her own behalf,
backing up Luit in a dispute with a large male.  The male made a
threatening display at Puist, who stretched out her

hand in appeal to Luit.  Luit did not respond, and Puist instantly
rushed at him, barking and even hitting him, apparently because he had
violated the tradition of supporting one's supporters.  This kind of
solidarity is part of many human notions of fairness.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas gives an instance that may illustrate a sense
of justice or perhaps a sense of propriety that underlies rectitude. Her
husky, Maria, one day discovered that by rushing around a cage full of
mice and parakeets, lunging at the occupants, she could send them into a
hysterical frenzy.  The pug Bingo ran in, slammed his body into the much
bigger Maria, and when she lunged at the cage again, uttered a loud bark
and slammed against her once more.  Maria left the room. Thomas was
surprised because Bingo was smitten with Maria and usually did not
oppose her in any way.  Whether Bingo was motivated by compassion for
the mice and parakeets, by vicarious ownership of the mice and
parakeets, or by disapproval of Maria's obstreperousness, it seems
undeniable that he wanted to stop her aggression and make her behave
better toward the other animals.

servers of wild coatimundis in Arizona suggest that they have a system
of entitlement expressed through a variety of cub squeals.  When cuffed
by an older animal for lagging behind the troop, a cub would crouch
submissively and utter the "don't beat me" squeal, which seemed to
indicate no resistance.  On several occasions, when a subadult animal
committed the unusual act of trying to take food from a cub and cuffed
it, the cub would utter a different squeal-and an adult female would
come and drive the subadult away, apparently enforcing a tradition of
tolerance toward cubs.  This may be merely different cub feelings being
expressed in different situations of threat, but it is telling that
there is a difference.  Enforcing and cushioning hierarchy also plays a
part in human justice systems.

The Narrative Urge

The desire to tell stories is another characteristic of humanity.

People like to relate events, gossip, analyze.  Humans talk to animals
and to ourselves.  Does language itself create the narrative urge, or
would human beings have this need even without human language?

Animals who have been taught sign language have been said to display
little wish to narrate.  Herbert Terrace, who arranged for the
chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky to be taught sign, said that most of Nim's
utterances were imitations or fragments of things his teachers had just
signed, and argued that the same is true of other signing apes.  He also
argued that a large part of ape signing consists of requests for food,
toys, and affectionate gestures like tickling and hugging.  This, and
the scarcity of spontaneous verbal communication, would seem to indicate
little narrative urge.  On rare occasions, Nim would sign unasked the
names of things he saw.  Often he spontaneously signed the names of
things he recognized in pictures when leafing through books and
magazines.  Perhaps these are rudiments of a narrative urge, awaiting
encouragement and opportunity.

Nim's language lessons (as in most such experiments) were structured to
offer him the chance to earn food and other rewards, so it is not
surprising that he made many such requests.  It is also worth noting
that Nim's early teachers were not fluent signers. Most of them could
only improvise a few sentences on any given topic-they could not tell
Nim a story, relate the events of their day, or pass on interesting
gossip.  Nim began learningsign at five months, but he did not get a
fluent teacher (and then not for long) until he was three and a half
years old.  This is not unusual.  Signing apes have been raised and
taught largely by humans who use rather rudimentary sign language.  None
have been raised in an environment of fluent sign.  Suppose a child were
raised by people who spoke halting, recently learned pidgin.  Suppose
also that the child had no playmates or classmates with whom to speak.
Such a child might fall linguistically behind children whose parents
freely and literately spoke to each other and to others, as well as to
the children.  A child who never witnessed a story being told might not
tell stories, but this would not demonstrate the limits of human
storytelling ability.

Terrace mentions that when Nim met fluent signers, he was

transfixed.  He would stare spellbound for up to fifteen minutes (a long
time for a young chimpanzee) as they conversed.  In contrast, spoken
language interested him for only a few seconds.  Terrace notes that
when, at three and a half, Nim finally got a teacher fluent in
sign-apparently his fifty-fourth teacher-he was already passing into
adolescence.  Terrace thinks Nim's signing might have progressed more
quickly had he had more exposure to fluent signers at an early age.
Washoe, the first chimpanzee to be taught sign language, adopted a son,
Loulis, who has learned sign language not from human tutoring but from
Washoe and the other chimps in her colony.  Yet Washoe herself did not
learn sign from fluent signers.  It is possible that apes have not yet
been adequately challenged to acquire sign fluency.  If so, there has
not yet been a full test of their possible desire to narrate.

Signing chimpanzees other than Nim have been seen to sign to a
considerable extent in the rudiments of a narrative mode. They sign to
each other even when no humans are around (as revealed in remote
videotaping) and, like humans, "talk" to themselves.  Washoe has been
filmed perched in a tree, hiding from her human companions, and signing
"quiet" to herself.  They may describe their own activity to themselves,
signing "me up" and then running up a wall.  They have even been seen to
use imaginative speech when playing alone.  Moja, who knows the word
"purse" perfectly well, once put a purse on her foot and walked around
signing "That's a shoe." Thus begins the rudiments of metaphor.

There is a sense in which bees are entirely narrative, letting other
hive members know where the best flowers are and how to get there.  The
most revolutionary discovery of Karl von Frisch concerned the symbolic
communication employed by honeybees: a bee who has found flowers
performs a dance when she returns to the hive, which tells other bees
how far away the food is and in which direction.  Donald Griffin notes,
"In the scientific climate of opinion prevailing forty years ago it was
shocking and incredible to be told that a mere insect could communicate
to its companions the direction, distance and desirability of something
far away." But this is exactly what they did.

Chimpanzees Sherman and Austin were taught to communicate by lighting
symbols on a board.  Researcher Sue SavageRumbaugh notes that they can
use these symbols to make spontaneous comments about their impending
actions and about events going on around them, but that they do so
relatively seldom. "Their behavior suggests that it is difficult for
them to understand that others do not have access to the same
information that they do.  In the various paradigms used to encourage
communication between them, it was always necessary for them to
experience the roles of speaker and listener a number of times before
their behavior, as speaker, suggested that they knew that they had
information which the listener did not have," Rumbaugh writes.  While
Sherman and Austin learned about the possible ignorance of the histener
in individual situations, and do not seem to have generalized their
observations, it is not impossible that they might do so.  They were
taught to share food with one another in a most unchimpanzeelike manner
and came to enjoy this greatly, although it was apparently not easy for
them to learn.  Perhaps they could learn narration in a similar way.

It is possible that great apes will never show more language ability
than they have so far, that they have reached their linguistic limits.
It may well be that the urge to confide, to boast, to retell, and to
mythologize will remain a human trait, but too little is known to be
confident of this.  If, instead of devising laboratory conditions under
which apes can learn to communicate with humans in our language or some
variant of it, humans were to go quietly into the forest and listen to
what is already being communicated, more would be learned.  Some of the
most vocal animals are very little understood.  Some species of whale
are clamorous, incessantly uttering a wide variety of squeaks, grunts,
trills, bellows, chirps, groans, yaps, and whistles as well as
echolocatory clicks and pings.  Perhaps these mean only "Here I am.
Where are you?" An alternative view is given by Jim Nollman, who
commented on the finding of whale scientist Dr.  Roger Payne that
humpback whales may repeat their entire song from one year to the next,
"with slight but clearly discernible differences.  Here was a very clear
instance of an oral tradition.  It implies that humpbacks possess at
least the

rudiments of learned culture." Perhaps they are telling the history of
the species.

The search for emotions that humans feel and other animals do not is an
old one.  To reverse this and look for emotions that animals have and we
do not violates the usual assumption that humans are the perfected
endpoint of evolution and the luckiest recipients of nature's gifts. But
it is impossible not to acknowledge the many things some animals have
that we do not.  Some we are proud of not having: tails, fur, horns.
Some we shrug off- a keen sense of smell.  Others we envy: wings.

Exclusively Animal Emotions

Some animals have senses humans do not possess, capacities only recently
discovered.  Other animal senses may remain to be discovered.  By
extension, could there be feelings animals have that humans do not, and
if so, how would we know?  It will take scientific humility and
philosophical creativity to provide even the beginning of an answer.

A mother lion observed by George Schaller had left her three small cubs
under a fallen tree.  While she was away, two lions from another pride
killed the cubs.  One male ate part of one of the cubs. The second
carried a cub away, holding it as he would a food item, not as a cub. He
stopped from time to time to lick it and later nestled it between his
paws.  Ten hours later, he still had not eaten it.  When the mother
returned and found what had happened, she sniffed the last dead cub,
licked it, and then sat down and ate it, except for the head and front
paws.

This mother lion was acting like a lion, not like a person.  But in
understanding what lions do, what she felt is part of the picture. Maybe
she felt closer to her dead offspring,",hell it was part of her body
once again.  Maybe she hates waste, or cleans up all messes her cubs
make, as part of her love.  Maybe this is a lion funeral rite. Or maybe
it is something only a lion can feel.

Elephants display a behavior called "mating pandemonium."

When a female elephant in estrus mates, she utters a loud call, in

registers too low for the human ear.  When they hear the call, her
relatives come racing to the scene, trumpeting loudly, appearing
agitated or excited, and pandemonium ensues.  Other male elephants may
also be attracted.  Unrelated groups ignore the call or leave the area.
As observer Joyce Poole has remarked, "Biologically, you could say that
mating pandemonium serves to attract still more males to the .  .  .
female, increasing the chances that a still more dominant bull will come
and drive off the one guarding her and end up being the one to actually
fertilize her.  I happen to think mating pandemonium is more than that,
but whether it has to do with social territories, some type of emotional
support for the female in heat, or something else altogether, I couldn't
say." What are the emotions of the female's relatives, the ones creating
the pandemonium?  The answer is unclear.  They might be feeling a mix of
many emotions, known and unknown.

After thirty years of working with chimpanzees, Roger Fouts doubts that
they have emotions that humans do not also have. Indeed, if new and
unknown emotions were to be discovered, they would most likely be found
in animals less like us than the great apes.  One spring evening, George
Schaller watched a female wild giant panda in China, Zhen-Zhen, eat and
then-although she saw him watching her-lean back on some bamboo,
uttering "bleating honks," and fall asleep.  Eler seeming indifference
surprised Schaller:

On meeting a gorilla or a tiger, I can sense the relationship

that binds us by the emotions they express, for curiosity,

friendliness, annoyance, apprehension, anger, fear are all re vealed by
face and body.  In contrast, Zhen and I are together,

yet hopelessly separated by an immense space.  Her feelings

remain impenetrable, her behavior inscrutable.  Intellectual in sights
enrich emotional experiences.  But with Zhen I am in

danger of coming away empty-handed from a mountain of

treasure.

This is not to say that pandas are unknowable.  Schaller believes that
he could learn to understand.  "To comprehend her, I

would need to transform myself into a panda, unconscious of myself,
concentrating on her actions and spirit for many years, until finally I
might gain fresh insights." He fears pandas may not last long enough as
a species for humans to come to understand them.

Unconscious Emotions

Even if animals have emotions, some argue, they do not feel them as
human beings do, because they cannot be aware of them, bring them into
consciousness and express them to themselves. Perhaps an elephant can be
sad, the argument goes, but if it cannot say, even to itself, "I am
sad," then it cannot be sad in the same way that a person is-who can
describe sadness, predict sadness, lose an argument with sadness.  If
this is true, then it is language that has given humans their tremendous
attachment and vulnerability to their feelings.  It is rash, at this
point in knowledge, to be at all certain that an emotion that cannot be
expressed in language, far less in language we can recognize, cannot be
felt as keenly.

Humans believe they suffer from emotions they are not consciously aware
of and that are unarticulated.  This does not mean that these emotions
have no significance or cannot really be felt.  It could equally well be
argued that language sets emotion at a distance, that the very act of
saying "I am sad," with all the connotations that the words have, pushes
the feeling away a little, perhaps making it less scaring and less
personal.  Herbert Terrace describes what might be an actual example of
language pushing feeling away in an animal:

Certain usages of Nim's signs were quite unexpected.  At least

two of them (bite and ang7y) appeared to function as substitutes for the
physical expression of those actions and emotions.  Nim learned the
signs bite and angry from a picture

book showing Zero Mostel biting a hand and exhibiting an

angry face.  During September 1976, Amy began what she

thought would be a normal transfer to Laura.  For some reason, Nim
didn't want to leave Amy and tried to drive Laura

away.  When Laura persisted in trying to pick him up, Nim

acted as if he was about to bite.  His mouth was pulled back

over his bare teeth, and he approached Laura with his hair

raised.  Instead of biting, however, he repeatedly made the bite

sign near her face with a fierce expression on his face.  After

making this sign, he appeared to relax and showed no further

interest in attacking Laura.  A few minutes later he transferred

to Laura without any sign of aggression.  On other occasions,

Nim was observed to sign both bite and angry as a warning.

To the extent that language pushes feelings away, the world of emotion,
a world from which humans sometimes feel estranged, may be one some
animals live in more fully.

Emotional Intensity

Whether some animals feel emotions less or more intensely than humans
may depend on which emotion is involved.  Animals doubtless feel pity
for one another, sometimes even passing beyond the species barrier, but
it seems unlikely, though not impossible, that they experience it as
elaborately or as intensely as humans do. For example, it is doubtful
that the dolphins care as much about humans slaughtering one another as
some humans care about the slaughter of dolphins by other humans.  But
this may only be because they do not have the same access to information
that humans do.  Perhaps they know and have rules of noninterference in
human matters.  Perhaps they truly are indifferent, or take a longer
view.

There are some emotions, on the other hand, that humans may experience
less intensely than some animals.  Many people have had the feeling, for
example, that some animals seem more capable of joy.  One of the
explanations for the popularity of watching and listening to birds is
the pleasure of hearing birdsongs, which seem to them joyful.  As Julian
Huxley, describing the courtship of herons winding their long necks
together, wrote: "Of this I can only say that it seemed to bring such a
pitch of emotion that I could have wished to be a lieron that I might
experience it."

The intensity of emotion in other animals has been a perennial source of
human envy.  Joseph Wood Krutch writes: "It is difficult to see how one
can deny that the dog, apparently beside himself at the prospect of a
walk with his master, is experiencing a joy the intensity of which it is
beyond our power to imagine much less to share.  In the same way his
dejection can at least appear to be no less bottomless.  Perhaps the
kind of thought of which we are capable dims both at the same time that
it makes us less victims of either.  Was any man, one wonders, ever as
dejected as a lost dog?

Perhaps certain of the animals can be both more joyful and more utterly
desolate than any man ever was."

To examine questions like these it is vital to treat animals as members
of their own species.  Treating them as either machines or people
denigrates them.  Acknowledgment of their emotional lives is the first
step; understanding that their emotional lives are their own and not
ours is the second.  At the same time, if humans have no peers as
cognitive beings and creatures of elaborate cultures, as emotional
beings we are anything but alone.  Is there a reason why we should try
to comprehend the world of animal emotions, which exists on some
intangible plane between the measurable worlds of oxytocin levels in a
cat's bloodstream and the cat's purring?  Why not refrain from
hypothesizing the cat's happiness?  The answer is that emotions are in a
real sense where we live, what we care about. Human life cannot be
understood without emotions.  To leave questions of animal emotion as
forever unapproachable and imponderable is arbitrary intellectual
helplessness.

Across the Species Barrier

In January of 1989 hikers in the Michigan woods found a black bear with
two cubs, recently out of hibernation, curled under a tree.  They began
taking photographs, and when the bear seemed insufficiently lively for
their artistic purposes they shouted and prodded her with sticks.  She
ran away, leaving behind her twelveweek-old cubs.

Rangers tracked the mother and decided she was not coming

back.  Wildlife biologist Lynn Rogers, in Minnesota's Superior National
Forest, agreed to try to get the cubs adopted.  Carrying Gerry, the
female cub, Rogers and a photographer snowshoed into the woods and
located Terri, a wild bear with two cubs, who was habituated to human
presence.  Rogers produced the squalling cub. "I tossed it to her and
immediately she wanted it," he recalls.  The cub ran from the strange
bear, back to the humans.  To the photographer's horror, she climbed his
leg like a tree.  As he stood frozen, Terri walked over, took the cub in
her mouth, peeled her off his leg, and carried her back to the den.

The adoption of Gerry's brother by another bear was also successful.
Terri was a good mother, and Gerry rambled the north woods, learning to
forage-breaking into ant hills, traveling forty miles to a hazelnut
stand, grazing on aquatic vegetation-and sleeping under a pine.  She
grew up to use part of Terri's tern'tory and to have cubs of her own.

During a period when Rogers was at odds with government agencies,
officials accused Gerry of attacking humans.  She was captured, with one
cub.  Caged, Gerry moaned constantly.  "She just was crying all the
time," Rogers says.  "Then when we caught the other cubs and put them in
the cage with her, she was fine from that moment." Officials planned to
ship Gerry to a game farm where she would be used to breed cubs for
sale, and where her toes would be clipped off for safety reasons.
Appalled, Rogers managed to arrange for her to go to a small zoo, where
she lives in a severalacre enclosure.  When her cubs were old enough,
they were released in a North Carolina forest.

"That bear was so trustworthy, even with cubs," Rogers mourns.  "I could
scoop her up in my arms .  .  .  and she'd just relax and look around."
As for Terri, she ranged into unprotected forest and was shot by a
hunter.  In this story the sources of tragedy have nothing to do with
bears and everything to do with mistakes that only humans make.  The
emotional lives of these bears are not inaccessible to us.  To deny the
terror of the abandoned bear cub; the welcoming affection of the
adoptive mother, Terri; Gerry's despair when two of her cubs were
missing, is to defy credibility.

Curiosity about the feelings of animals, which science so often

tries to train out of its students, may actually be reciprocated by
animals.  When observing wild lions, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
discovered that the lions were returning human scrutiny.  During the day
the scientists watched the lions sleep.  At night, tracks revealed that
four lions came to the fence and peered at the sleeping scientists.  As
the people examined the seatsof the lions, the lions dug up the human
latrine and inspected its contents, sometimes adding their own.  Wild
chimpanzees who have overcome their fear of humans show considerable
curiosity about human behavior, though none seems to have gone so far as
to make a career out of it.

In the end, when we wonder whether to ascribe an emotion to an animal,
the question to ask is not, "Can we prove that another being feels this
or any emotions?" but rather, "Is there any reason to suppose that this
species of animal does not feel this emotion?"

If not, then we can ask whether the individual animal feels that
particular emotion in this particular instance.  If we see an elephant
standing with another, dying elephant, the appropriate response is not
to say that we have no way to measure sorrow and must therefore never
speak of sadness in elephants.  Instead we can observe the behavior of
the elephant-its calls, body language, and actions -and ask whether it
does seem to evidence unhappiness.  The animal's personal story is
relevant to this inquiry-were these animals strangers?  Acquainted?
Family?  Even if animals do not (as far as we know) tell stories, they
surely live them every bit as much as humans do.

Scientific humility suggests that complete understanding of other
animals may be impossible.  But we will come far closer if we do not
begin by insisting that we already know more than we do about what
characteristics they do not have.  To learn about other animals, they
must be taken on their own terms, and these terms include their
feelings.

What are the implications of finding that animals lead emotional lives?
Must we change our relationships with them?  Have we obligations to
them?  Is testing products for humans on animals defensible?  Is
experimentation on animals ethical?  Can we confine them for our
edification?  Kill them to cover, sustain, and adorn ourselves?  Should
we cease eating animals who have complex social lives, are capable of
passionate relations with one another and desperately love their
children?

Humans often behave as if something like us were more worthy of respect
than something not like us.  Racism canpartly be described, if not
explained, in this way.  Men treat other men better than they treat
women, based in part on their view that women are not like them.  Many
of these so-called differences are disguises for whatever a dominant
power can impose.

The basic idea seems to be that if something does not feel pain in the
way a human being feels pain, it is permissible to hurt it. Even though
this is not necessarily true, the illusion of differences is maintained
out of fear that seeing similarity will create an obligation to accord
respect and perhaps even equality.  This appears to

be the case especially when it comes to suffering, pain, sorrow,
sadness.  We do not want to cause these things in others because we know
what it feels like to experience them ourselves.  No one defends
suffering as such.  But animal experimentation?  The arguments revolve
around utility, pitting the greater good against the lesser suffering.
Implicit, usually, is the greater importance of those who stand to gain
(for example, the scientists employed by cosmetic or pharmaceutical
companies to do experiments on rabbits) compared with the lesser
importance of those who are sacrificed to their benefit.

An animal experimenter will almost inevitably deny that animals suffer
in the same way humans do.  Otherwise he would implicitly admit to
cruelty.  Experimental suffering is not randomly imposed without consent
on human beings and defended as ethical on the grounds that it would
bestow enormous benefit to others.

(At least not any longer.)  Animals suffer.  Can we, should we, measure
their suffering, compare it to our own?  If it is like ours, how can it
continue?  As Rousseau wrote in Discourse on the O?igin of Inequality in
1755: "It seems that, if I am obliged not to injure any being like
myself, it is not so much because he is a reasonable being, as because
he is a sensible being." Moreover, why should the suffering have to be
like ours to be unjustifiable to inflict?  It has been argued that
humans experience pain more acutely because we remember and anticipate
it; in Rousseau's term we are "reasonable." Yet it is not apparent that
animals cannot do both.

But even if they cannot remember or anticipate pain, there is no reason
to suppose that they suffer any less than humans dothey are
"sensible"-while there is some reason to suppose that some may suffer
more.  British philosopher Brigid Brophy, for example, points out that
"pain is likely to fill the sheep's whole capacity for experience in a
way it seldom does in us, whose intellect and imagination can create
breaks for us in the immediacy of our sensations." But isn't the fact
that they suffer at all enough?  Speaking of the connection between
suffering and selfless love in animals, Darwin wrote: "In the agony of
death a dog has been known to caress his master, and every one has heard
of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the
operator; this man,

unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our
knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to
the last hour of his life." As to animals, he spoke from observation. As
to humans, he was optimistic.

It is often said that if slaughterhouses were made of glass, most people
would be vegetarians.  If the general public knew what went on inside
animal experimentation laboratories, they would be abolished.  However,
the parallel is not exact.  Slaughterhouses are invisible because the
public does not want to see them.  Everyone knows what goes on inside
them; they simply do not want to be confronted with it.  Most people do
not know how animals are used in experiments.  Slaughterhouses allow
visitors.  Laboratories where animal experiments are performed are
notoriously secretive, offlimits to visitors.  Perhaps those who conduct
the experiments know they would be stopped if what they did was known
even by other scientists.  Perhaps they are ashamed.  Dr.  Robert White,
director of the Neurological and Brain Research Laboratory at
Cleveland's Metropolitan General Hospital, is a leading figure in brain
transplant research.  In an influential article entitled "A Defense of
Vivisection" he describes his own research: "In 1964, we were successful
for the first time in medical history in totally isolating the subhuman
primate brain outside of its body and sustaining it in a viable state by
connecting it with the vascular system of another monkey or with a
mechanical perfusion circuit that incorporated engineering units
designed to perform the functions of the heart, lungs and kidneys while
simultaneously circulating blood to and from the brain.  We were
overjoyed since scientists had attempted to construct such a model
surgically for the last one hundred years without success.  As late as
the 1930s Dr.  Alexis Carrel, the Nobel laureate, with the collaboration
of Colonel Charles Lindbergh, had been able to support the viability of
almost all body organs in an isolated state.  .  .  .  Parenthetically,
it should be mentioned that Dr.  Carrel had his problems with the
antivivisecnonists of his time."

One animal experimentation group ran a paid advertisement in a
newspaper, one that they saw as amusing, appealing for donations: "Send
a mouse to college." The language disguises the purpose of mice in the
university.  The experimenters dare not say: "Grow a tumor on a mouse."
Nor do they dare to say: "Send a cat or a dog to college," since people
do not like to think of their pets as the subjects of experiments.  Rats
and mice are not generally regarded as pets, but as pests; they have few
defenders.  Yet the pain a rat or a mouse feels is every bit as real as
that of any pet.  In laboratories they suffer, as anybody who has heard
them moan, cry, whimper, and even scream knows.  Scientists dissimulate
about this by insisting that they are merely vocalizing.  Descartes
lives on.

Perhaps these sounds fail to reach scientists because they are not
immediately recognizable as a form of communication.  In examining the
human view of differences between humans and animals it is clear that
humans assign primary significance to speech. Our glorious uniqueness,
many philosophers have claimed, lies in our ability to speak to one
another.  It thus came as a shock to learn that a simple African grey
parrot not only "parroted" human speech, but spoke, communicated-the
words used meant something.  When animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg
turned to leave her parrot, Alex, in a veterinarian's office for lung
surgery, Alex called out, "Come here.  I love you.  I'm sorry.  I want
to go back."

He thought he had done something bad and was being abandoned as
punishment.  Imagine what would happen if an animal addressed us on its
imminent murder.  If, in a slaughterhouse, a pig cried out: "Please
don't kill me." If, as a hunter looked into the eyes of a deer, it
suddenly broke into speech: "I want to live, please don't shoot, my
children need me." Would the hunter pull the trigger?

Or if a cat in a laboratory were to cry out: "Please, no more torture,"
would the scientist be able to continue?  Such speech did not stop
concentration camp inmates from being murdered during the Holocaust;
there, humans, it was said, were lice and rats.

No one assumes the pig wants to die.  It would avoid slaughter if it
could.  It feels the desire to live and the pain of its sorrow in being
killed just as humans do; the only difference is that it cannot say so
in words.  The crying of the pigs being slaughtered is horrible.  People
report that they sound like human screams.  The pigs are communicating
their terrible fear.  Recently a steer on the way to the slaughterhouse
was reported to have bolted when it was

close enough to hear the anguished cries of the animals.  It fled
through the town like a prisoner condemned to death.  Its sudden lunge
for freedom gave everyone pause, even the driver of the death caravan.
Was it right to send an animal to slaughter who so desperately wished to
live?  Perhaps just this one could be saved. Then what about the others?
Do they feel the same way?  If resistance is to be respected, does lack
of resistance confer a right to kill?  We do know what the cow wants:
the cow wants to live.  The cow does not wish to sacrifice itself for
any reason.  That a cow will willingly offer itself as food is a fable.

When humans refuse to inflict pain 6n other humans, surely it is because
they assume they feek It is not because another person can think, nor
because they can reason, nor even because they can speak that we respect
their physical boundaries, but because they feel.  They feel pain,
humiliation, sorrow, and other emon'ons, perhaps even some we do not yet
recognize.  We do not want to cause suffering.  If, as I believe,
animals feel pain and sorrow and all the other emotions, these feelings
cannot be ignored in our behavior toward them.  A bear is not going to
compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but then neither is our next door
neighbor.  We do not for this reason conclude that we have the freedom
to experiment upon him, hunt him for sport, or eat him for food.

Modern philosophers seem somewhat more willing than biologists to
consider animal emotions, and they have also become engaged in issues of
animal rights.  Philosophers like Mary Midgley and Brigid Brophy in
England, Peter Singer in Australia, and Tom Regan and Bernard Rollin in
the United States, all take a strong position that animals are capable
of complex emotions.  In an influenteal passage Jeremy Bentham in 1789
connected sentient feelings with rights this way:

The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may

acquire those rights which never could have been withholden

from them but by the hand of tyranny.  The French have already
discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason

why a human being should be abandoned without redress to

the caprice of a tormenter.  It may come one day to be recognized, that
the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or

the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for
abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate.  What

else is it that should trace the insuperable line?  Is it the faculty

of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse?  But a full grown
horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as

well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a

week, or even a month, old.  But suppose the case were other wise, what
would it avail?  The question is not, Can they reason?  nor, Can they
talk?  but, Can they suffer?

Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, explicitly based on Bentham's
nineteenth-century utilitarianism, argues that creatures that can feel
pain deserve to be shielded from that pain, especially from scientific
experimentation and hurtful farming methods.  The argument is that
sentience-the capacity to have conscious experiences -demands equal
consideration to the interests of all creatures. However, although this
provides one moral ground, this position does not explicitly accord
animals rights.

Tom Regan in The Casefor Animal Rights goes further, arguing explicitly
for protecting the rights of animals who are "capable of being the
subject of a life." Every animal used in every experiment in every
laboratory has its own life story.  It has felt strong emotions, loved
and hated and been devoted to others of its own kind. It is a subject,
and is therefore violated by being treated as an object.  Have we the
right to tear this being away from its fellows and all that gives its
life meaning and put it in a sterile, hostile, aseptic environment to be
tortured, maimed, and ultimately destroyed in the name of anything, far
less of service to our species?

Or lacking the right, do we only have the power?

What is learned from these experiments is not always of benefit to
humans.  It was recently reported in a German psychiatric journal that a
researcher gave Largactil, a neuroleptic tranquilizer, to a spider, and
succeeded either in diminishing the size and complexity of its web, or
in stopping the spider from spinning a web at all.  This article was
held up as evidence of the great value of animal research in psychology.
It meant, said the researcher, that antipsy

chotic drugs can be given to schizophrenics to stop them from spinning
webs, that is, from creating fantasies in their heads.  But why should
spiders, or humans for that matter, not spin webs if so inclined?  Who
bestowed upon us the right to intervene and interfere and ultimately
destroy the delicate product of a creature's innermost being?  Whether
such practices ultimately enhance humanity is also questionable.  The
microbiologist Catherine Roberts condemns Harry Harlow's "odious"
experiments on rhesus monkeys (discussed in Chapter 5) pointing out that
they "degrade the humanness of those who designed and perpetrated them."
Dr. Roberts also had a comment to make about Dr.  White's experiments on
brain transplantation.  She said: "The details of his experiments are so
horrifying that they seem to reach the limits of scientific depravity."

It may be hard to imagine the sensual universe of another species, but
it is not impossible.  Our dog's intense sniffing suggests she is
picking up and responding to something beyond our ken. Her ability to
take in information hidden from us is impressive; the resulting sudden
shifts of mood are honored.  We know we are in the presence of something
different from us but worthy of our respect.  One of the most common
emotions humans feel in the presence of another species is awe.  The
ability of a hawk to soar, of a seal to race through the waves is
marvelous, humbling.

It is clear that animals form lasting friendships, are frightened of
being hunted, have a horror of dismemberment, wish they were back in the
safety of their den, despair for their mates, look out for and protect
their children whom they love.  As Tom Regan would say, they are the
subject of lives, as we are.  Though animals do not write
autobiographies, as we understand them, their biographies can be
written.  They are individuals and members of groups, with elaborate
histories that take place in a concrete world, and involve a large
number of complex emotional states.  Theyfeel throughout their lives,
just as we do.

Jane Goodall points out that "chimpanzees differ genetically from Homo
sapiens by only about I percent, and that while they lack speech, they
nevertheless behave similarly to humans, can feel pain, share our
emotions and have sophisticated intellectual abilities." She pleads that
we stop enslaving, imprisoning, incarcerating, and torturing them, and
instead protect them from exploitanon.

,,If I learned anything from my time among the elephants," writes the
scientist Douglas Chadwick:

it is the extent to which we are kin.  The warmth of their

families makes me feel warm.  Their capacity for delight gives

me joy.  Their ability to team and understand things is a continuing
revelation for me.  If a person can't see these qualities

when looking at elephants, it can only be because he or she

doesn't want to.

Humans have long recognized that animals have the potential to connect
emotionally with humans.  One of the oldest and most popular Indian
tales is about the life-and-death bond between a Brahmin and a mongoose.
Here it is as found in the great Ocean of Story, written about A.D.
1070, a Kashmiri collection: "A Brahmin by the name of Devasharman lived
in a certain village.  He had a wife of equally high birth, named
Yajnadatta.  She became pregnant, and in time gave birth to a son.  The
Brahmin, though poor, felt he had obtained a great gem.  After she had
given birth to the child, the Brahmin's wife went to the river to bathe.
Devasharman remained in the house, taking care of his infant son.
Meanwhile a maid came from the women's apartments of the palace to
summon the Brahmin, who lived on presents received by performing
religious ceremonies.  .  .  .  To guard the child, he left a mongoose,
which he had raised in his house since it was born.  As soon as the
Brahmin left, a snake suddenly slithered toward the child.  The
mongoose, seeing it, killed it out of love for his master.

In the distance, the mongoose saw Devasharman re turning.  Happy to see
him, he ran towards him, stained with

the blood of the snake.  But when Devasharman saw the blood,

he thought: "Surely he has killed my little boy," and in his

delusion he killed the mongoose with a stone.  When he went

into the house he saw the snake killed by the mongoose and

his boy alive and safe.  He felt a deep inner sorrow.  When his

wife returned and learned what had happened, she reproached

him, saying: "Why did you not think before killing this mongoose which
had been your friend?"

This is what Jan Harold Brunvand (The Choking Doberman) calls an "urban
legend." He writes about the age-old folk fable of helpful animals: "A
classic European manifestation of this legend is the Welsh 'Llewellyn
and Gellert,' in which the faithful hunting hound Gellert is found
bloodied and gasping in the hall of Prince Llewellyn's home.  The dog is
presumed to have killed the baby it was left to guard, whose overturned
crib is seen through the open doorway.  The dog is slain, but the baby
is found unharmed; and the hidden intruder that Gellert had defended the
infant from-a huge wolf-is found inside the house dead from the dog's
defensive efforts." He notes: "Although revered by many in Wales as an
ancient national legend-or even as histothe story of Llewellyn and
Gellert is, as Welsh historian Prys Morgan phrased it, 'of course all
moonshine, or more exactly, a clever adaptation of a well-known
international folktale."

"

We cannot know whether the events really happened.  The story is not so
highly improbable.  Mongooses are often kept as pets in India, and
mongooses do in fact prey upon snakes, including cobras and other highly
venomous species.  But whether or not based on fact, such accounts exert
a powerful hold on the imaginations of many different cultures: versions
are found in Mongolian, Arabic, Syriac, German, an English ballad of
William R.  Spencer's, and others.  They clearly speak to a sense of
animal loyalty and clarity, of human arrogance and guilt, an awareness
of the precariousness of human judgments.  Can we be trusted to honor
the deep bond that a dog or mongoose can form with us?  The "legend," if
that is what it is, speaks better for animals than humans.

Perhaps the most famous account testifying at least to the hope, and
possibly the fact, of a bond of gratitude, friendship, and compassion
between a person and an animal is the ancient account of Androcles and
the lion.  An early recorded version in Latin appears in the Attic
Nights ofaulus Gellius in the second century.  The

account is prefaced with a claim to authenticity: "The account of Apion,
a learned man who was surnamed Plistonices, of the mutual recognition,
due to old acquaintance, that he had seen at Rome between a man and a
lion. .  .  .  This incident, which he describes in the fifth book of
his Wonders ofegypt, he declares that he neither heard nor read, but saw
himself with his own eyes in the city of Rome." Gellius then quotes
Apion:

In the Great Circus a battle with wild beasts on a grand scale

was being exhibited to the people.  Of that spectacle, since I

chanced to be in Rome, I was an eyewitness.  There were many

savage wild beasts, brutes remarkable for their huge size, and

all of uncommon appearance or unusual ferocity.  But beyond

all others did the vast size of the lions excite wonder, and one

of these in particular surpassed all the rest because of the hue

size of his body.  .  .  .  There was brought in .  .  .  the slave of

an ex-consul; the slave's name was Androcles.  When that lion

saw him from a distance he stopped short as if in amazement,

and then approached the man slowly and quietly, as if he

recognized him.  Then, wagging his tail in a mild and caressing

way, after the manner and fashion of fawning dogs, he came

close to the man, who was now half dead from fright, and

gently licked his feet and hands.  .  .  .  Then you might have

seen man and lion exchange joyful greetings, as if they had

recognized each other.

The emperor Caligula wanted to know why the lion had spared the man.
Androcles related how he had run away from his master into the lonely
desert and hidden in a remote cave.  A lion came into the cave with a
bleeding paw, groaning and moaning in pain.  The lion, Androcles is
reported to have said, "approached me mildly and gently, and lifting up
his foot, was evidently showing it to me and holding it out as if to ask
for help." Androcles took out a huge splinter and cared for the foot.
"Relieved by that attention and treatment of mine, the lion, putting his
paw in my hand, lay down and went to sleep." For three years they shared
the cave, the lion hunting for both.  Then Androcles was recaptured,
returned to

Rome, and condemned to death in the arena.  Upon hearing this story,
Caligula, after a vote by the people, freed lion and man. They walked
the streets together "and everyone who met them anywhere exclaimed:
'This is the lion that was a man's friend, this is the man who was
physician to a lion."'

Is this fiction, testimony to an ancient longing in the human heart to
love and be loved by another animal as one longs to love and be loved by
another person?  It is not so far removed from Joy Adamson's account of
the lion Elsa, whom she raised and then released; for years afterward
Elsa returned from the wild to visit with her children and her mate.

Reciprocity on the level of Androcles and the lion, this dream of
equality, may be closed to us for now.  But whether or not it can be
realized, we do owe animals something.  Freedom from exploitation and
abuse by humankind should be the inalienable right of every living
being.  Animals are not there for us to drill holes into, clamp down,
dissect, pull apart, render helpless, and subject to agonizing
experiments.  John Lilly, one of the first to work scientifically with
dolphins, was recently quoted as saying that he no longer works with
dolphins because he "didn't want to run a concentration camp for highly
developed beings." Animals are, like us, endangered species on an
endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and
ourselves.  They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making.  We owe
them, at the very least, to refrain from harming them further.  If no
more, we could leave them be.

When animals are no longer colonized and appropriated by us, we can
reach out to our evolutionary cousins.  Perhaps then the ancient hope
for a deeper emotional connection across the species barrier, for
closeness and participation in a realm of feelings now beyond our
imagination, will be realized.