When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (14 page)

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 ring-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 heavers 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

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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 famihal 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 finguistic 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

HUES ELEPHANTS UEEP

have people sacrificing their Hves 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 relationship's and anthropologists, like everybody else, aren't comfortable asking people about that." Nor has the general academic mi-heu 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 Hawai-

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

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, sohtary 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 tundra. 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 fi-om 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 erstwhile dear.

My no longer cherished. Need we say it was not love

Just 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

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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, "Arej'o?/ 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 Hfe." The two birds immediately paired off and began rearing a series of baby cockatoos.

Zookeepers know to their despair that many species of animals

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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 reaUty." His vehement response shows how strong the fear of anthropomorphism can be even in people who work with animals, not\\'ithstanding 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 infidelitv'. For example, male prairie voles who have formed a pair with a female chase away other voles of either sex.