When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (15 page)

Female African elephants in estnis sometimes form consort-ships with males, but it is not clear whether they simply prefer a certain male and desire only his company, or whether by staying with one male—who vigorously attacks other males that come near —they gain protection from the pursuit of other males. According to Cynthia Moss, consort behavior is something that female elephants learn, as young females who do not form a consortship may be "chased and harassed" by many males.

«^7/£V ELEPHANTS IVEEP

In Other species females may not be as vulnerable. Rhinos in the Serengeti, despite their reputation as loners, sometimes do seem to form pair bonds during estrus. One observer saw the male of one pair wander off, whereupon another male appeared and sought to mate, only to be chased off by the female. The male she had paired with then wandered back and they immediately mated. This seems to show that it was not simple lack of interest in mating that caused the female to reject the second male, but a more selective personal principle—perhaps affection—at work. In the light of such observations, it seems possible that among the songbirds whose infidelity has been so carefully studied, those birds who remain faithful to their mates might be exhibiting fidelity based on feehngs, rather than lack of other opportunities.

The devotion that members of pairs lavish on one another also gives evidence of love. Some birds are famous examples of fidehty. Geese, swans, and mandarin ducks are all symbols of marital devotion; field biologists tell us this image is accurate. Coyotes, who are considered symbolic of trickery, would make equally good symbols of devotion, since they form lasting pairs. Observations of captive coyotes indicate that they begin to form pair attachments before they are sexually active. Coyote pairs observed by Hope Ryden curled up together, hunted mice together, greeted each other with elaborate displays of wagging and licking, and performed howling duets. Ryden describes two coyotes mating after howHng together. Afterward the female tapped the male with her paw and licked his face. Then they curled up together to sleep. This looks a lot like romantic love. Whatever distinctions can be made between the love of two people and the love of two animals, the essence frequently seems the same.

Lovingness may have evolved because animals that had it have been more successful—that is, left more children—than animals that did not. But lovingness is flexible. Instinct may urge the animal to love but does not say who it will love, though it may drop heavy hints. Lovingness instructs an animal to protect and care for its yoimg but does not identify the young. Humans are not so different.

An animal raised by another species will often want a member

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

of that species as its mate when it grows up. A bird, if it is of a species that forms pair bonds, may have the capacity to love a mate. It may also have very specific instincts to court the mate in certain ways. When Tex, a female whooping crane hand-reared by humans, was ready to mate, she rejected male cranes. Instead she was attracted to "Caucasian men of average height with dark hair." Since whooping cranes are so close to extinction, it was considered vital to bring Tex into breeding condition so that she could be artificially inseminated. To do this. International Crane Foundation director George Archibald, a dark-haired Caucasian man, spent many weeks courting Tex. "My duties involved endless hours of 'just being there,' several minutes of dancing early in the morning and again in the evening, long walks in quest of earthworms, nest building, and defending our territory against humans. ..." The effort was successful and eventually resulted in a crane chick. If the whooping crane dance and nest building are fixed action patterns, the lovingness seems to be a more diffuse impulse. The crane has made an error through no fault of her own. If Tex had been raised by cranes, she would have fallen in love with one, as most cranes do. If George Archibald had been raised by cranes, with whom would he have fallen in love?

Tibby, an otter described in Gavin Maxwell's Raven, Seek Thy Brother, was raised by a man who lived on an island off the coast of Scotland, and who got around on crutches. When he became seriously ill, he brought Tibby to Maxwell and asked him to care for her. He died not long thereafter and never returned for her. Tibby did not care for life in the enclosure Maxwell provided, and made a habit of escaping and visiting the nearest village. There she found a man who used crutches and decided to live with him. She tried to build a nest under his house, but he chased her away. A short time later, Tibby disappeared. One day Maxwell received a call from a person who had been alarmed by an otter that had acted strangely, even trying to follow him indoors. Maxwell wrote, "Acting on a sudden inspiration I asked, 'You don't by any chance use crutches, do you?' 'Yes,' he replied, with astonishment in his voice, 'but how in the world could you know that?' " Tibby may have been imprinted on humans who used crutches or she may just have been

fond of such people because they reminded her of the affectionate man who had vanished from her Hfe.

While people generally believe other people can and do feel love, we are sometimes skeptical that one particular human loves another, no matter what they say. Parents who do not love their children exist; some children hate their parents, and some husbands and wives or brothers and sisters do not love each other. Yet we continue to believe—to know in our hearts—that there are parents, children, spouses, and siblings who do feel love. It makes sense to use the same standard for animals.

Why has the idea of love among animals been so neglected? Why are we reduced to the rather tedious explanations offered by the evolutionary approach? This is the approach taught in universities, where its wider impHcations go almost unnoticed. It suggests that the more elaborate the parental tasks an animal performs, the more advantageous it is to have an overarching emotion like love driving them. If parental behavior consists of nothing more than refraining from eating the children, no great emotional drama is necessary. But to feed them, wash them, and risk your life for them —or (perhaps even harder) to let them chew on you, to let them snatch your dinner, and to put up with their noise—you had better love them deeply, at least for the time being. Yet, in the biological analysis, love, however it feels, is principally a device by which subsequent generations are produced. Rather than the reason it exists, this could just be one function it serves. "Scientific" statements about love have captured remarkably Httle of its essence. Love between two women, between a man and his father, between people and the animals they live with, and love from animal to animal is rarely illuminated by science and more often the subject of wonder and delight in personal statements, poems, novels, and letters. Freeing ourselves from the tyranny of a purely biological explanation might widen the horizon. Love among animals might appear as mysterious and baffling as human love has over the centuries.

90

Grier, Sadness, andtne Bones or Elepnants

In the Rocky Mountains, biologist Marcy Cottrell Houle was observing the eyrie of two peregrine falcons, Arthur and Jenny, as both parents busily fed their five nestlings. One morning only the male falcon visited the nest. Jenny did not appear at all, and Arthur's behavior changed markedly. When he arrived with food, he waited by the eyrie for as much as an hour before flying off to hunt again, something he had never done before. He called out again and again and listened for his mate's answer, or looked into the nest uttering an enquiring "echup." Houle struggled not to interpret his behavior as expectation and disappointment. Jenny did not appear the next day or the next. Late on the third day, perched by the eyrie, Arthur uttered an unfamiliar sound, "a cry like the screeching moan of a wounded animal, the cry of a creature in suffering." The shocked Houle wrote, "The sadness in the outcry was unmistakable; having heard it, I will never doubt that an animal can suffer emotions that we humans think belong to our species alone."

After the cry, Arthur sat motionless on the rock and did not stir for a whole day. On the fifth day after Jenny's disappearance,

HHI1\ ELEPH.l.VI'S li-EEP

Arthur went on a frenzy ot hunting, bringing food to his nestHngs from daw n to dusk, without pausing to rest. Before Jenny's disappearance, his efforts had been less frenetic; Houle notes that she never again saw a falcon work so incessantly. When biologists climbed to the nest a week after Jenny's disappearance, they found that three of the nestlings had starved to death, but two had survived and were thriving under their father's care. Houle later learned that Jenny had probably been shot. The two surviving nestlings fledged successfully.

It is impossible to predict how deeply affected we will be when somebody close to us dies. Sometimes people show no external reaction, but their lives are shattered. They may feel nothing consciously, or even feel relief, when they are inwardly devastated and may never recover. The external signs of grief tell something, but they may not tell everything. Introspection may tell something, too, but may be misleading. Faced with human sadness in its depths, scientific curiosity should be tempered with humility: no one, certainly not the somatically oriented psychiatrist (offering pills for misery), can speak with any authority about its source, duration, or pathology. Even greater humility is required before the permutations of nonhuman grief and sadness.

When nonscientists speak of animal sadness, the most common evidence they give is the behavior of one of a pair when its mate dies, or the behavior of a pet when its owner dies or leaves. This kind of grief receives notice and respect, yet there are many other griefs that pass unremarked—the cow separated from its calf or the dog deliberately abandoned. Then there are all the griefs humans never see: unheard cries in the forest, herds in the remote hills whose losses are unknown.

Mourning Lost Love

Wild animals have been observed mourning for a mate. According to naturahst Georg Steller, the now-extinct sea cow named after him was a monogamous species, with families consisting usually of a female, a male, and two young of different ages: "one

GRIEF, SADNESS, AND THE BONES OF ELEPHANTS

grown offspring, and a little, tender one." Steller, a ship's naturalist, saw that when the crew of the ship killed a female whose body washed up on the beach, the male returned to her body for two consecutive days, "as if he were inquiring about her."

As the fate of the three dead peregrine nestlings shows, it can be disastrous for a wild animal to display grief There is no survival value in not eating, or moping and grieving. While love can be readily reduced to evolutionary function (for those so inclined), grief over the loss of a loved one—another expression of love— often threatens survival. Grief thus calls for explanation on its own terms.

The sorrow of bereavement is easily observed in captive or pet animals. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas gives a moving account of Maria and Misha, two huskies who had formed a pair bond, when Misha's owners gave him away.

Both he and Maria knew that something was terribly wrong when his owners came for him the last time, so that Maria struggled to follow him out the door. When she was prevented, she rushed to the window seat and, with her back to the room, watched Misha get into the car. She stayed in the window for weeks thereafter, sitting backward on the seat with her face to the window and her tail to the room, watching and waiting for Misha. At last she must have realized that he wasn't going to come. Something happened to her at that point. She lost her radiance and became depressed. She moved more slowly, was less responsive, and got angry rather easily at things that before she would have overlooked. . . . Maria never recovered from her loss, and although she never forfeited her place as alpha female, she showed no interest in forming a permanent bond with another male. . . .

Maria knew that Misha was gone from her. Her behavior is reminiscent of human grief at permanent separation and loss of a loved one. Wolves and coyotes, to whom dogs are very closely related, do form pairs. The conditions in which dogs are kept are very different from those in which wild canids live. Probably dog

HUES' ELEPHA.VrS HEEP

behavior is more flexible than has been realized, more strongly dictated by the conditions humans provide for them. While both female and male dogs have come to symbolize promiscuity to many humans, this behavior has been created by the way humans breed and maintain dogs; it is not intrinsic to their nature. One has to wonder how much so-called "natural" human sexuality is equally produced by social arrangements and expectations.

Some animals who do not form pairs in the wild are housed in pairs in captivity and grow deeply attached to one another. Often the mate is the only companion the animal has. Ackman and Alle, two circus horses, were stabled together. No particular attachment between them was noticed until Ackman's unexpected death. Alle "whinnied continually." She scarcely ate or slept. In an effort to distract her, she was moved, given new companions, and offered special foods. She was examined and medicated, in case she was ill. Within two months she had wasted to death.

Two Pacific "kiko" dolphins in a marine park in Hawaii, Kiko and Hoku, were devoted to each other for years, often making a point to touch one another with a fin while swimming around in their tank. When Kiko suddenly died, Hoku refused to eat. he swam slowly in circles, with his eyes clenched shut "as if he did not want to look on a world that did not contain Kiko," as trainer Karen Pryor wrote. He was given a new companion, Kolohi, who swam beside him and caressed him. Eventually he opened his eyes and ate once more. Although he became attached to Kolohi, observers felt that he never became as fond of her as he had been of Kiko. While the interpretation that Hoku did not want to see a world without Kiko remains speculative, it is clear that Hoku was grieving.

Researchers who had caught a dolphin on a fishhook and put her in a holding tank soon despaired for her life. Pauline, as they named her, could not even keep herself upright and had to be supported constantly. On the third day of her captivity, a male dolphin was captured and placed in the same tank. This raised her spirits; the male helped her swim, at times nudging her to the surface. Pauline appeared to make a complete recovery but suddenly died two months later from an abscess caused by the fish-