How Animals Grieve (2 page)

The story I loved best from Jeane I call “the swimming pool rescue.” One day, in her kitchen, she heard alarmed calls from the backyard, and the chickens rushed up onto her deck. “They were knocking furiously
on
the sliding door with their beaks,” she remembers. “I ran outside immediately and they rushed off with me behind, trying to keep up. Straight to the pool we dashed. There I saw Cloudy, everyone’s favorite hen, flailing her wings in the swimming pool. I reached in and lifted her out.” Jeane is certain Cloudy’s life was saved only by the resourceful action of her flock.

The sequence of steps taken by these chickens is remarkable. They recognized that a companion was in trouble; they knew where to seek help from the human world and how to get a human’s attention; and in an embodied way, they directed that human immediately to the source of the trouble.

In its recounting of the smarts and social graces of “chickenkind,” the book
Chicken
by Annie Potts rocked my world. Potts describes how chickens can do a lot of things we humans prize—they can recognize up to a hundred distinct faces, and a whole object when shown only a part. She is best when focusing on individual chickens, such as the charismatic Mr. Henry Joy who, by force of his personality, became a beloved therapy animal in nursing homes.

Potts touches on grief by way of a story borrowed from the zoologist Maurice Burton. One hen, old and nearly blind, was assisted by a second who was young and in fine shape. The younger hen collected food for her companion and helped the older one settle into a nest at night. Then the old hen died. The younger one stopped eating and weakened. Within two weeks, she too had died. Chickens think and feel. They grieve.

But the statement I’ve just made—that chickens grieve—is written in shorthand. It’s more accurate to phrase it this way: Chickens, like chimpanzees, elephants, and goats, have a capacity for grief. Depending on their personalities and on the context, this capacity for grief may be expressed—just as is true for humans. It’s possible to live with chickens or goats or cats and not witness any dramatic expression of grief when a member of the flock or herd or household dies.

Is it any different for humans? In its Metropolitan Diary column for January 16, 2012, the
New York Times
published an account by Wendy Thaxter about a day she and her sister were tending a community garden in Manhattan. A woman, known to neither sister, approached with
a
paper bag containing the ashes of her father. The woman asked if the ashes could be scattered in the garden, handed them the bag, and left, saying, “Here, please take this. His name was Abe, and I’ve had more than enough of him.” We may laugh or gasp at her remark, but the point is, it’s no use trying to predict how an individual will react to losing a relative or some other person who has played a role in her life. People may not grieve when someone close to them dies. Or they may grieve in an interior way, invisible to others, or only when alone.

In writing about animal bereavement, I walk a line stretched taut between two poles. The first is this wish to recognize the emotional lives of other animals. The other is my need to honor human uniqueness. I am, after all, an anthropologist. Anthropologists have described many ways in which our own species is unique in how we grieve. Just as chimpanzees aren’t ants controlled by chemistry, we humans aren’t elaborated chimpanzees. Among animals, we alone fully anticipate the inevitability of death. We grasp that, one day, our minds will fade, our breathing stop—whether gently or with horrifying suddenness, we can’t know. We express in a thousand glorious or ragged ways our losses, losses of those we love.

When a child dies, a child who should have outlived us by decades, we may howl in sorrow, and some may labor to shape that howl into art. “Gut me,” writes Roger Rosenblatt in a book about the sudden death of his daughter, a mother to three young children. “Slice me down the earth’s meridian, from north to south. Lay my bones outside my skin.” No other animal expresses grief like this, or attends death with ceremonies as varied as the languages of the globe. Since our ancestors first scattered red ocher on bodies many thousands of years ago, since grave goods were first offered to the dead for their use in an afterlife, since we invented tombs and cremations and sitting shiva, since we began commemorating death on Facebook and Twitter—across the millennia, we’ve come together to ritualize our mourning. We act in ways no other animal acts in the face of death.

Goat grief, then, is not chicken grief. And chicken grief is not chimpanzee grief or elephant grief or human grief. The differences matter. But differences between species may be rivaled by differences among
individuals
of the same species. The great lesson of twentieth-century animal-behavior research was that there is no one way to be chimpanzee or goat or chicken, just as there is no one way to be human.

We are alike, humans and other animals, and we are different. Balanced between these poles, I find the commonalities more compelling. I think this is because, like us, animals grieve when they have loved. We may even construe animal grief as a strong indicator of animal love.

Is it outlandish to write of animal love? How could we ever recognize what love is to an ape, much less to a goat? To describe fully what it means for people to love requires more than measuring the hormonal spikes in a besotted person’s blood or charting the words, gestures, and glances shared by a new couple. Science can help measure love, but it can’t tell the full story. Surely this challenge to science deepens when dealing with creatures who think and feel without language, or at best, with languages that lack words and sentences as we know them?

Noted animal behaviorist and animal-welfare activist Marc Bekoff acknowledges that the topic of animal love may provoke skepticism—which he counters in an exciting way. We have always, Bekoff observes, since we became people, grappled with the difficulty of defining or understanding love. “And yet,” he writes, “though we don’t truly understand love, we do not deny its existence, nor do we deny its power. We experience or witness love every day, in a hundred different forms; indeed, grief is but the price of love. Since animals grieve, surely they must feel love too.”

Based on the science of animal emotion as explored by Bekoff, Goodall, Moss, and other scientists, I feel comfortable working from a platform of expectations about animal love that may also be seen as hypotheses to be tested in the future. Here’s the central idea: When an animal feels love for another, she will go out of her way to be near to, and positively interact with, the loved one, for reasons that may include but also go beyond such survival-based purposes as foraging, predator defense, mating, and reproduction.

In the framework that I want to use, this active choosing by one animal to be with another is a necessary condition—a basic foundation for love. But it is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, to claim that we have identified animal love. Another ingredient is also needed:
Should
the animals no longer be able to spend time together—the death of one partner being one possible reason—the animal who loves will suffer in some visible way. She may refuse to eat, lose weight, become ill, act out, grow listless, or exhibit body language that conveys sadness or depression.

For my definition to work, it has to distinguish, in most cases, between two types of situation. Consider a pair of wild chimpanzees, whom we will call Moja and Mbili, who travel together, rest together, and groom each other. They might do so because they feel some sort of robust positive emotion for each other and in each other’s company. Or there might not be much attendant emotion. Maybe Moja and Mbili just fell into the habit of associating with each other but would be equally content with another female companion if the need arose. How could scientists figure out which of these two interpretations—if either—is correct? (In either case, the alliance may be beneficial in terms of acquiring resources; remember, survival needs are not excluded by this definition of love, but they must be supplemented by something more.)

Through careful observation and, optimally, analysis of film that documents the pair’s interactions, we might be able to recognize love in, say, the intensity with which they seek each other out and embrace when they come together, or the care with which they groom one another.

But it would be a great mistake to too liberally apply the term “love” to animal relationships. Anthropomorphic excess may cause us to miss critical distinctions. And here is where our second, sufficient condition comes in. If Moja and Mbili feel love, one will show signs of grief when forced apart from the other, especially if the other dies.

Now, this two-part approach for evaluating grief in the animal world is not perfect. It may underestimate the extent of animal love, because the sufficient condition—separation or death—won’t always be observable. Conversely, it’s possible that an animal who doesn’t love a companion may still feel grief when that companion dies. Another problem is that we may be unable to distinguish different varieties of love. If Moja and Mbili are mother and daughter, would their love differ from the strong feelings that might be shared, for example, by two females who met after migrating into the same community from different natal groups?

Of
course, these distinctions may be hard to make even in humans. The love felt for one’s family, one’s friends, and one’s mate or life partner may differ, and so may the grief that emerges in response to the loss of these various loves. But are these emotional differences visible to those of us looking in from the outside (as we must do with animals)? Only sometimes.

The arena of animal emotion offers significant challenges for observers. My definitional scheme is one place to start. Above all, we must always keep in mind the possibility that some animal love or grief will look quite different from our own love or grief, or the emotion of other group-living primates like chimpanzees, whose actions may resonate with us more readily.

As you read the stories in this book and watch the video clips that I suggest in the “Readings and Visual Resources” section, keep in mind the “ideal definition” of grief that I have offered, and how it relates to love. Some of the animals profiled in these pages do cleanly meet the stated conditions for love and grief, but not all. In some cases, we glimpse tantalizing hints of grief and love; in other cases, the relevant reports are too opaque to allow any certainty about what the animals feel. At this point in humans’ quest to understand animal grief, however, even hints and opaque observations matter, because they will lead us to ask more insightful questions as we observe animals in the future.

After all the cautions and qualifications that I feel obliged as a scientist to offer, here’s my bottom line: When we find animal grief, we are likely to find animal love, and vice versa. It’s as if the two share emotional borders. Think of it as looking at one of those famous optical illusions. You stare at the drawing and at first it’s clearly a bunny, but as you continue to look there’s a visual shift, and suddenly it’s a duck.

You’ll find animal grief in these pages, in bunnies and ducks and a host of other species. But you’ll also find animal love.

1

KEENING FOR CARSON THE CAT

The home of my friends Karen and Ron Flowe in Gloucester, Virginia, is decorated merrily. Candles shine a welcome in each window. An all-white Christmas tree graces the entrance, and a multicolored tree sparkles upstairs. The special music, food, and holiday anticipations of December have long enchanted the household.

This year, though, the air is scented with sorrow. Willa, a Siamese cat, wanders from room to decorated room, pausing first at the ottoman in front of the fireplace. With a glance at the soft, warm cushion, she lets out a wail. Moving on to the master bedroom, she jumps to the head of the bed and pushes her face and body into a cozy cave-space behind the pillows. She looks, and looks; another wail escapes her. It’s sudden and terrible, not a noise one would expect from a cat.

Willa cannot still herself. The only thing that helps is when she’s folded into an embrace by Karen or Ron, or when she’s reclined in one of their laps. She is searching for her sister Carson, who died earlier in the month. For the first time in fourteen years, Willa is no longer a sibling, no longer the more outgoing and dominant half of an enduring partnership.

She’s Willa, alone. And she grieves.

Willa and Carson—named for famed writers Willa Cather and Carson McCullers—arrived in this literary Virginia household on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23. Willa had been the plump pick of the litter. Carson had been offered at half price. Runty, a bit, the seller acknowledged.

WILLA AND CARSON.
PHOTO BY KAREN S. FLOWE
.

Carson acted in some peculiar ways right from the first week. Showing unusual sensory acuity, she fluffed up at the smallest sounds or movements. During one windstorm, she climbed to Ron’s shoulder and pressed tightly against his neck. Sometimes, and strangely, she would progress across a room not in a linear path but by walking in circles. She did not meow, and even her purrs were faint; the Flowes concluded she was mute.