When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (12 page)

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

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them until she cHed. 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 dan-

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

gers 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 honess'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.

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What goes on in the mind ot an ibex doe or a Uoness 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 own 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 o.^'g collector J. W. Preston. He wrote, "When I approached the nest, the bird, which had walked some distance away, came running back . . .

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

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 cairn 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 per cent 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 returning 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 fi:Tiit trees when they are already partly depleted. The mother suckles the infant and then returns it to the father.

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

Smudge was ahnost 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 snirks 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 staUion 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 instances— the 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.

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP 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

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observer felt that he risked a great deal in his mother's defense. WTien 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 tJieir 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.