When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (10 page)

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 avicul-turalist 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 neophobia 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.

FEAR, HOPE, AND THE TERRORS OF DREAMS

In each case the young cat was terrified by its first gHmpses 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," cHnging 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 Airaid

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

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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 Seligman 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 famiHarity 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.

Nameless Fears

Everyone has experienced fear without an apparent object— the sense that an unknown misfortune impends. At other times, the fear is in response to the sense that we are on unfamiliar ground, Hke 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 yoimg calves, who are rounded up for sale. The elephant calves run around, scream, and search for their mothers. One year a wildlife

FEAR, HOPE, AND THE TERRORS OF DREAMS

guide 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 ior Otners

Humans not only fear for themselves, but may fear for others. This feeling borders on empathy, something people are much less hkely 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

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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 two 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 Chad-wick, 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. Chad-wick 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

FEAR, HOPE, AND THE TERRORS OF DRE4MS

chimpanzees to "a bold man" and "a timid man." The chimpanzee Lia avoided the bold man, but the chimpanzee Mimi fought him. One day the "bold man" bent Mimi'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 trying to hold Mimi 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 fearful; 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.

Tne Spectrum oi 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 wildebeest cornered 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 es-

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cape. She tried to jump out ot the enclosure, hooked a horn at C>hadwick, 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.

B

rave as a Lion

Bravery, sometimes considered an emotion, is related to fear-fulness. 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 proceeding against 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

FK4R, HOPE, AND THE TERRORS OF DREAMS

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 carried it 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 backw ard 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 modem 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 Danvin 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. B?-ave7j and courage are not words scientists are eager to see applied to a monkey by the founder of evolutionary theory.