When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (16 page)

GRIEF, SADNESS, AND THE BONES OF ELEPHANTS

hook, whereupon the male refused to eat and died three days later. An autopsy revealed a perforated gastric ulcer, surely aggravated by his mournful fasting.

It would be the end of most species if every bereaved animal died of grief. Such cases must be extreme and unusual. Dying of grief is not the only proof of love and affection in animals, but these incidents do illuminate an emotional range and emotional possibilities. Animals in the wild also grieve for companions other than mates. Lions do not form pairs, yet a lion has been known to remain by the body of another lion that had been shot and killed, licking its fur. As is so often the case, elephants offer examples that are uncannily similar to human feeHngs. Cynthia Moss, a researcher who has studied wild African elephants for years, describes mother elephants who appear in perfect health but become lethargic for many days after a calf dies and trail behind the rest of the family.

An observer once came across a band of African elephants surrounding a dying matriarch as she swayed and fell. The other elephants clustered around her and tried mightily to get her up. A young male tried to raise her with his tusks, put food into her mouth, and even tried sexually mounting her, all in vain. The other elephants stroked her with their trunks; one calf knelt and tried to suckle. At last the group moved off, but one female and her calf stayed behind. The female stood with her back to the dead matriarch, now and then reaching back to touch her with one foot. The other elephants called to her. Finally, she walked slowly away.

Cynthia Moss describes the behavior of an elephant herd circling a dead companion "disconsolately several times, and if it is still motionless they come to an uncertain halt. They then face outward, their trunks hanging limply down to the ground. After a while they may prod and circle again, and then again stand, facing outward." Finally—perhaps when it is clear the elephant is dead— "they may tear out branches and grass clumps from the surrounding vegetation and drop these on and around the carcass." The standing outward suggests that the elephants may find the sight painful; maybe they want to stay close but find it intrusive to watch

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such suffering; perhaps it has a ritual meaning we do not yet comprehend.

It was once thought that elephants went to special elephant graveyards to die. WTiile this has been disproved, Moss speculates that elephants do have a concept of death. They are strongly interested in elephant bones, not at all in the bones of other species. Their reaction to elephant bones is so predictable that cinematog-raphers have no difficulty filming elephants examining bones. Smelling them, turning them over, running their trunks over the bones, the elephants pick them up, feel them, and sometimes carry them off for a distance before dropping them. They show the greatest interest in skulls and tusks. Moss speculates that they are trying to recognize the individual.

Once Moss brought the jawbone of a dead elephant—an adult female—into her camp to determine its exact age. A few weeks after this elephant's death, her family happened to pass through the camp area. They made a detour to be with and examine the jaw. Long after the others had moved on, the elephant's seven-year-old calf stayed behind, touching the jaw and turning it over with his feet and trunk. One can only agree with Moss's conclusion that the calf was somehow reminded of his mother—perhaps remembering the contours of her face. He felt her there. It seems certain that the calf's memor\' is at work here. Whether he experienced a feeling of melanchoHc nostalgia, sorrow, perhaps joy in remembering his mother, or was moved by some emotional experience we might not be able to identify, it would be difficult to deny that feelings were involved.

Based on their behavior, the feelings of the Gombe chimpanzees who witnessed one of their number fall to his death seem similarly complex. Three small groups of chimpanzees, mostly males, but including a female in estrus, had come together when Rix, an adult male, somehow fell into a rocky gully and broke his neck. The reaction was immediate pandemonium—apes screaming, charging, displaying, embracing, copulating, throwing stones, barking, and whimpering seemingly at random. Eventually they grew quieter. For several hours the chimps gathered around the corpse. They came close and peered at Rix's body silendy, climbed

GRIEF, SADNESS, AND THE BONES OF ELEPHANTS

on branches to get a different vantage point. They never touched him. One male adolescent, Godi, seemed particularly intent, whimpering and groaning repeatedly as he gazed at Rix. Godi became highly agitated when several large males drew very close to the body. After several hours the chimpanzees drifted away. Before leaving, Godi leaned over Rix and stared at him intently before hurrying after his companions.

During this episode the chimpanzees repeatedly uttered "wraah" calls, common when chimps are disturbed by strange humans or by Cape buffalo, but also when they sight a dead chimp or baboon. On one occasion chimps wraahtdi for four hours after witnessing the death of a baboon injured in a fight with other baboons.

A chimpanzee at the Arnhem Zoo, rather confusingly named Gorilla, had several babies who died despite her tender care. Each time an infant died she would become visibly depressed. Gorilla would sit huddled in a comer for weeks on end, ignoring the other chimpanzees. At times she would burst out screaming. This story had a happy sequel: Gorilla became a successful mother when she was given the care of Roosje, a ten-week-old baby chimpanzee, whom she was taught to bottle-feed.

Loneliness

Loneliness appears to affect animals who live in social or family groups. It is probably one factor causing death in many captive animals. For captive beavers, for example, the presence or absence of a companion is an important factor in survival. One wildlife biologist noted that yearling beavers, "if they do not get companionship, may simply sit where they are put down until they die." Loneliness, a frequent result of confinement and domesticity, is often observed in captive animals. A lonely wild beaver could presumably set off in search of other beavers.

Animals seek each other out more than biologists once assumed, perhaps in an effort to avoid feelings of sadness, loneliness, and sorrow. In some species, males who have been "kicked out of

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the nest" by their mothers form bachelor herds. Male African elephants gather in groups in "bull areas." Many animals are rather sweepingly described as solitary, but careful field studies of animals famous tor their solitary natures—tigers, leopards, rhinoceros, and bears—often reveal that they spend more time associating with each other than was previously thought. The European wildcat and the fishing cat are said to be solitary species in which the female and male mate and then separate, and the female raises the kittens alone. In zoos, however, the female and male may be caged in pairs, with interesting results. Usually the male is taken out before kittens are born, in case he should harm them. In the Cracow Zoo this precaution was omitted, and instead of attacking the kittens the male wildcat carried his meat to the entrance of the den and made coaxing sounds. Similarly, in the Magdeburg Zoo the father wildcat guarded the den day and night and, though normally peaceful, attacked the keeper if he came too near. The father brought food to the den, and when the kittens were old enough to come out and play, he hissed and threatened any zoo-goers who startled his kittens. Fishing cats at the Frankfurt Zoo also led a surprisingly warm family life. The male not only brought food, but often curled up in the nest box with the rest of the family. He was such a conscientious parent that if he was out of the nest box and the female also came out, he became anxious and went in the nest box with the kittens.

Possibly these species are less solitary than has been thought, or perhaps this is another demonstration of the flexibility of animal behavior. Paul Leyhausen, who observed these cats, speculates that while males in the wild may have nothing to do with their mates and kittens, in captivity they may be "subjected to stimuli which awaken normally dormant behavior patterns." If so, we are entitled to wonder whether a male fishing cat, wandering by a southeast Asian stream or through a forest, ever gets a twinge from those normally dormant patterns, and feels lonely.

GRIEF, SADNESS, AND THE BONES OF ELEPHANTS Imprisonment

Even when captive animals are not confined in solitude, their imprisonment may make them sad. It is often said of zoo animals that the way to tell if they are happy is to ask whether the young play and the adults breed. Most zookeepers would not accept this standard of happiness for themselves. As Jane Goodall noted, "Even in concentration camps, babies were born, and there is no good reason to believe that it is different for chimpanzees."

Captivity is undoubtedly more painful to some animals than others. Lions seem to have less difficulty with the notion of lying in the sun all day than do tigers, for example. Yet even lions can be seen in many zoos pacing restiessly back and forth in the stereotyped motions seen in so many captive animals. The concept of funktionslust, the enjoyment of one's abilities, also suggests its opposite, the feeling of frustration and misery that overtakes an animal when its capacities cannot be expressed. If an animal enjoys using its natural abilities, it is also possible that the animal misses using them. Although a gradual trend in zoo construction and design is to make the cages better resemble the natural habitat, most zoo animals, particularly the large ones, have little or no opportunity to use their abilities. Eagles have no room to fly, cheetahs have no room to ran, goats have but a single boulder to climb.

There is no reason to suppose that zoo life is not a source of sadness to most animals imprisoned there, hke displaced persons in wartime. It would be comforting to believe that they are happy there, delighted to receive medical care and grateful to be sure of their next meal. Unfortunately, in the main, there is no evidence to suppose that they are. Most take every possible opportunity to escape. Most will not breed. Probably they want to go home. Some captive animals die of grief when taken from the wild. Sometimes these deaths appear to be from disease, perhaps because an animal under great stress becomes vulnerable to illness. Others are quite obviously deaths from despair—near-suicides. Wild animals may refuse to eat, killing themselves in the only way open to them. We do not know if they are aware that they will die if they do not eat, but it is clear that they are extremely unhappy. In 1913 Jasper Von

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Oertzen described the death of a young gorilla imported to Europe: "Hum-Hum had lost all joy in living. She succeeded in living to reach Hamburg, and from there, the Animal Park at Stellingen, with all her caretakers, but her energy did not return again. With signs of the greatest sadness of soul Hum-Hum mourned over the happy past. One could find no fatal illness; it was as always with these costly animals: 'She died of a broken heart.' "

Marine mammals have a high death rate in captivity, a fact not always apparent to visitors at marine parks and oceanariums. A pilot whale celebrity at one oceanarium was actually thirteen different pilot whales, each successive one being introduced to visitors by the same name, as if it were the same animal. It takes Httle reflection to see the great difference in a marine mammal's hfe when kept in an oceanarium. Orcas grow to twenty-three feet long, weigh up to 9,000 pounds, and roam a hundred miles a day. No cage, and certainly not the swimming pools where they are confined in all oceanariums, could possibly provide satisfaction, let alone joy. They are believed to have a life expectancy as long as our own. Yet at Sea World, in San Diego, the oceanarium with the best track record for keeping orcas afive, they last an average of eleven years.

If a person's life span were shortened this much, would one still speak of happiness? Asked whether their animals were happy, a number of marine mammal trainers all said yes: they ate, engaged in sexual intercourse (it is extremely rare for an orca to give birth in captivity), and were almost never sick. This could mean that they were not depressed, but does it mean they were happy? The fact that people ask this question again and again indicates a malaise, perhaps profound guilt at subjecting these lively sea travelers to unnatural confinement.

Which animals suffer the most in captivity can be unpredictable. Harbor seals often thrive in oceanariums and zoos. Hawaiian monk seals almost invariably die—sometimes they refuse to eat, sometimes they succumb to illness. One way or another, one observer noted, they have generally "just moped to death."

The issue of the effects of captivity is most painful when one considers animals that can live nowhere but in captivity because

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GRIEF, SADNESS, AND THE BONES OF ELEPHANTS

their habitat is gone—as is the case for an increasing number of species—or because they are physically incapacitated. When fewer than a dozen California condors were left in the wild, arguments raged about whether to capture the remaining birds for captive breeding or to let the species perish freely, without undergoing the ignominy of captivity. The condor is a soaring bird that can easily fly fifty miles in a day, a life that can hardly be simulated in a cage. In the end the birds were captured, and so for a time there were no California condors in the wild. Since then, captive-bred birds have been released in an attempt to reestablish the species.

The fact that animals can be sad must first be acknowledged before it can be studied and understood. Zookeepers ask whether animals are healthy, and whether they are likely to breed, but rarely ask, "VVTiat would make this animal happyV Nor have the studies by animal behaviorists been of much help. The Oxford Dictionary of Animal Behavior notes: "It seems reasonable to allow that animals may be distressed by being unable to feed and drink, to move their limbs, to sleep, and to have social interaction with their fellows, but the difficulty of defining distress in an objective and convincing way has been a stumbhng-block in the formation of animal welfare legislation even in covmtries where there is widespread pubhc interest in the way that animals are treated."