How Animals Grieve (18 page)

After Ody died, Pierce realized that, wrenching as it was, the moment of euthanasia wasn’t the most difficult:

For me, the anticipatory grief—the sense of impending loss—was by far the worst stage. I mourned for Ody long before he even came close to death. The moment of his death was sharp and painful—the kind of grief that makes you feel as if you’re drowning. But that didn’t last more than a few hours.

What I like best about Pierce’s writing is its honesty. She describes Ody as “one of my greatest loves and also my millstone, for fourteen long years.” Ody wasn’t always in poor health, but he was always a high-maintenance sort of dog—contrary and neurotic, in Pierce’s words. I understand the love, and I understand the millstone comment too.

In the den of my home, on the mantel, sit eight small cherrywood boxes. Five contain the ashes of family cats, two of family rabbits, and one, the biggest, the cremated remains of a dog we cared for after my brother-in-law died. On each box is affixed a small plaque with our chosen words of memory. For feisty Gray and White, originally a proud and
distant
big-tom feral cat who fell in love with indoor living after he became ill and we took him in, the plaque reads: “Alpha feral, who finally found the love he always deserved.” For quiet Michael, who lived only three years and also battled a number of complicated medical conditions, something pithier: “The sweetest boy.”

Some of our lost animals were high-maintenance. Some were contrary, and neurotic. We grieve for them all, who were our friends.

11

ANIMAL SUICIDE?

Bear farm: It’s a term that jolts. Chicken farm, cow farm, pig farm, even bison farm or llama farm, these places are familiar. Once past childhood’s innocence, we carry images of farm animals that aren’t always bucolic; that animals may be killed in ways far from humane is something we know. Sometimes an extra layer of information brings the situation into terrible focus; Annie Potts’ description in her book
Chicken
of what occurs in chicken slaughterhouses haunts me, too much so to repeat the details here. However we respond to such knowledge—whether we adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet, or select free-range meat from local farms, or eat meat from any available source-the farming of chickens, cows, and pigs is a familiar practice.

Bear farming is not; at least it wasn’t for me until quite recently, when one of Marc Bekoff’s blog posts caught my eye: “Bear Kills Son and Herself on a Chinese Bear Farm.” After a bit, my mind shifted from taking in the basic concept of a “bear farm” to considering the headline’s main point. Bear suicide? In August 2011, first Chinese and then some Western media published accounts of the incident to which Bekoff refers. The UK’s
Daily Mail
online, not known for journalistic circumspection, declared in its own headline, “The ultimate sacrifice: Mother bear kills her cub and then herself to save her from a life of torture.”

In order to reflect clearly upon this bear’s actions, and their possible relationship to bear grief, I need briefly to tackle a disturbing topic: what happens at a bear farm. More correctly, it’s called a bile farm. Across Asia, from China to Vietnam and South Korea, bears are held captive
because
their bile contains a compound that is considered medically valuable. This substance, called ursodeoxycholic acid or UDCA, is touted as useful in fighting liver disease, high fevers, and other ailments. Further, some companies put bear bile into products like gum, toothpaste, and face cream.

The biology of this situation is complicated, because it’s not only bears that produce the sought-after bile. Many animals, including humans, produce it as well, and a synthetic compound called ursodiol has been created and used to treat gallstones. Rather than signaling the end of bile farms, however, these alternatives have apparently pushed things in exactly the wrong direction. Else Poulsen writes in her book
Smiling Bears
that the appearance of alternatives not dependent on bear bile has backfired for bear welfare, as their artificial nature has lent cachet to the genuine article. The bile extracted from living bears has become an expensive trophy among a certain moneyed set.

Poulsen’s book offers a heartbreaking tutorial about what goes on at bear farms. (This is a paragraph to skip if you wish to avoid vivid descriptions of animal suffering.) In China, Asian black bears become nothing more than living bile machines. “Each bear,” Poulsen writes, “lies down, permanently, in a coffin-shaped, wire mesh crate for his entire life—years—able to move only one arm so that he can reach out for food.” “Permanently” is the searing word, and it comes up again in another of Poulsen’s passages: “Without proper anesthetic, drugged only half-unconscious, the bear is tied down by ropes, and a metal catheter, which eventually rusts, is permanently stuck through his abdomen into his gall bladder.” Over time, some bears simply lose their wits. Unable to free themselves, they bang their heads on the bars; the relief of death comes far too slowly.

Estimates vary for the number of bears held captive at bile farms across Asia, but the number seems certain to exceed ten thousand. One of these captives was the mother highlighted by Bekoff. The sequence of events seems to go like this: As a worker at the farm prepared to harvest his bile, the cub cried out in distress. Somehow, the mother broke free, grabbed her cub, and hugged him with such power that he died of strangulation. Then she ran headfirst into a wall, and died.

That
description, of course, is far from adequate. Important information is missing. What exactly was the worker doing? How did the mother break free? Just as significantly, I’ve stripped the mother of any intention, motivation, or emotion. That’s how I was taught to write about animal behavior in graduate school, but (as this book attests) that’s not how I write about animals anymore. Here’s an alternative version: The cub cried out in distress as a worker prepared to harvest his bile. The mother, distressed by her loved infant’s pain, broke free, and squeezed the life out of her baby so that he would no longer suffer. Overcome by her own emotional pain, she ran, purposefully, headfirst into a wall, killing herself.

Which account is the more accurate? In the first place, it’s hard to focus on such an analytical question when sorrow for these two bears, and thousands more, hits so hard. The underlying scientific questions are important, though: Could the mother bear have gone insane—an outcome some of Poulsen’s passages suggest is possible—and flung herself toward the wall without any sense of what she was doing? Can some animals make a conscious choice to kill themselves? A witness quoted in a newspaper report made the claim that the mother killed her cub “to save it from a life of hell.” Can some animals reason to the degree necessary to justify such an assertion? Can bears carry out what is in effect a mercy killing? We know that the flip side of love is sorrow, and the flip side of shared joy is solitary grief. Can sorrow go so deep that it causes an animal to bring about a loved one’s death in order to free him from physical suffering?

Unfortunately, details of the mother bear’s behavior are too sketchy to allow firm conclusions even about what exactly happened, and in any case, there’s no way from observation alone to figure out
why t
he mother bear did what she did. But let us not allow her and her cub to be filed away only as an unsolved mystery. Instead, let us use their fate—and the mother’s behavior, whatever her underlying intentions—to add new questions to the others we have asked about animal grief. Do animals kill themselves? And if they do, is grief ever the probable motivation?

In 1847—a dozen years before Charles Darwin published
On the Origin of Species
with its theory of evolution by natural selection—that question
was
alluded to in the pages of
Scientific American
. The animal under consideration was a gazelle in Malta, but in some ways the story parallels what we know about the mother bear in China. Here is the brief item, published over 160 years ago under the headline “Suicide by a Gazelle”:

A curious instance of affection in the animal, which ended fatally, took place last week, at the country residence of Baron Gauci, at Malta. A female gazelle having suddenly died from something it had eaten, the male stood over the dead body of his mate, butting every one who attempted to touch it, then, suddenly making a spring, struck his head against a wall, and fell dead at the side of his companion.

The female gazelle’s death came from natural causes, which sets her story apart from the bears’. But then there’s that strange coincidence: the male gazelle, just like the female bear, slammed himself into a wall. Did these two creatures act in such dramatic and fatal ways because their emotions were overwhelmed by loss (for the gazelle) and suffering (for the bear)? Revisiting in 2011 the brief note about the gazelles,
Scientific American
blogger Mary Karmelek found grief-crazed suicide to be an improbable explanation for the gazelle’s actions. She speculates about other explanations for his fatal behavior. Perhaps the male ate the same food that caused the female’s death, but in his case it led to neurological damage that caused him to run amok. Or maybe it was stotting gone awry. Stotting occurs when, in fleeing a predator, a gazelle leaps into the air so that all four legs are off the ground at once. “What seemed a suicide,” Karmelek writes, “may have been the male gazelle’s unfortunately timed response to perceived human predators.”

Bear suicide, gazelle suicide . . . there’s reasonable doubt in each case. Both times the animal acted quickly, on what has been interpreted as a spontaneous impulse to die. Rash behavior of this sort is a staple feature of the anecdotal accounts that pop up when one enters “animal suicide” as a search term into Google. The idea of animals killing themselves seems to be an attractive one, in a strange sense, perhaps because it’s one more way to recognize animal emotion and to feel a kinship with other creatures. Yet a good percentage of the time the “suicide” label is clearly inaccurate.

The
classic example of an animal suicide myth involves lemmings. We’ve all heard that cliché deployed to characterize someone’s behavior. Seeing a friend conform to some trend we find distasteful, we may admonish her to stop following the herd: “Don’t be such a lemming. Think for yourself!” Lemming conformity is rooted in the idea that these small rodents plunge en masse from cliffs, each following its predecessor over the edge to its death. There’s a two-part explanation for how all this fanciful notion got started, however, and it has nothing to do with suicide.

Part one involves the species’ natural behavior. Lemming populations tend to fluctuate to a degree that may be significant. When the population density shoots up, some lemmings may migrate to avoid the intense competition for resources in their home area. It is true that large numbers of lemmings move around in herdlike ways—they just don’t jump off cliffs. That second, crucial ingredient of the myth was supplied by Hollywood, as Australia’s
ABC Science
explains. In 1958 the Walt Disney studio released a movie called
Wild Wilderness
. In the making of the film, lemmings had been needed, but because none resided on location in Alberta, Canada, the filmmakers purchased some from Inuit children in the area.
ABC Science
reports, “The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river.” Thankfully, no such calculated exploitation of animals could happen in the present US film industry. That segment of the Disney film became famous in its day, however, and through it the lemming legend was born.

The lemming example is an interesting one for a discussion of animal intentionality, because the mass suicide (in the myth) is seen as mindless, collective behavior. The idea is not that each individual lemming wishes to die and acts accordingly—just the opposite. Most of the lemmings have no clue what the lead lemming is doing, and so all perish together. Inevitably, questions of definition arise, just as they have with animal love and grief. Should the term “animal suicide” be restricted to cases where an animal acted through conscious choice to end his or her life? In the cases of the mother bear and the male gazelle, this restriction
wouldn’t
help us much. In neither case do we know whether conscious choice was involved. But lemming “suicide” would be ruled out, and perhaps the definition might aid in excluding other candidate cases of animal suicide as well.

Near Dumbarton in Scotland, one can visit a place that locals have dubbed “the dog suicide bridge.” During the last half century or so, over six hundred dogs have fallen from the Overton Bridge to their deaths. With mentions of “suicidal dogs” and “kamikaze canines,” the media sensationalizes the situation by inferring that the dogs are purposefully jumping to their deaths. It strains credulity, though, to think that hundreds of dogs (one by one, not in a group as with the mythic lemmings) might choose to kill themselves at this place (or any other). So what is going on?

Probably the dogs’ perception is in some way involved. The dogs may smell a prey animal, which they begin to track while high atop the bridge. As photographs attest, the architecture is such that dogs walking across the bridge would be unaware of the large drop-off on either side; from a dog’s-eye perspective, only a low wall is visible. The leaping dogs are victims, it seems, of an unfortunate collision of architectural design and the biology of their own perception. No conscious intention for suicide need be invoked. The Scottish dogs are an open-and-shut case.

Still, might some sentient animals feel such emotional pain that they would act on an intention for suicide? The mammal-behavior expert and trainer Richard O’Barry swears that he saw a dolphin choose to kill herself, right in front of his eyes. The dolphin was Kathy, one of the cetacean stars of the 1960s television show
Flipper
that I loved as a child. According to O’Barry, Kathy locked eyes with him, sank to the bottom of her tank, and stopped breathing. “The [animal entertainment] industry doesn’t want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide,” he told
Time
magazine in 2010, “but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain. If life becomes so unbearable, they just don’t take the next breath. It’s suicide.”