When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (17 page)

Depression and. Learned. Helplessness

In humans, extreme sadness is called depression. As used by psychiatrists and psychologists, depression is a catchall diagnosis, referring to melancholy springing from a number of sources. In the quest to vahdate the medical model of psychiatry, scientists have sought to produce clinically depressed animals in the laboratory^— to which end some experimenters have worked to pro\dde animals with spectacularly unhappy childhoods.

Among the most widely reported experiments in the history of animal behavior are those psychologist Harr\' Harlow performed on rhesus monkeys. The baby monkeys under his aegis who preferred soft, huggable dummy mothers to hard, wire surrogates,

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even when only the wire ones dispensed milk, are famous and have been used as evidence that psychological studies on animals—really forms of torture—can teach humans about their emotions. While the study suggests that the nurturant feelings in mothering can be even more important than its survival value, surely this gruesome experiment was gratuitously emotionally cruel as well as unnecessary to prove this point.

Other rhesus monkeys, at the age of six weeks, were placed alone in the "depression chamber," or vertical chamber, a stainless-steel trough intended to reproduce a psychological "well of despair." Forty-five days of solitary confinement in the chamber produced permanently impaired monkeys. Even when months had passed since their experience, the once-chambered monkeys were listless, incurious, and almost completely asocial, huddling in one spot and clasping themselves. No knowledge gained, no point proved, can justify such abuse.

Similarly, dogs, cats, and rats in the laboratory have been induced to feel the global pessimism known as "learned helplessness." In the classic experiment, dogs were strapped into a harness and given electric shocks at unpredictable intervals. The shock was inescapable—nothing they could do prevented or lessened it. Afterward they were placed in a divided chamber. When a tone sounded, the dogs needed to jump into the other side of the chamber to avoid being shocked. Most dogs learned this quickly, but two thirds of the dogs who had been given inescapable shocks just lay still and whined, making no attempt to escape. Their previous experience had apparently taught them despair. This effect wore off in a few days. Yet, if the dogs were subjected to inescapable shocks four times in a week, their "learned helplessness" was lasting. Psychologist Martin Seligman, the principal researcher in the study of learned helplessness (and author of the bestselling book Leaitied Optimism), argues that the shocked animal is frightened at first, but when it comes to believe that it is helpless, sinks into depression. In his explanation of how he came upon the notion of doing experiments on learned helplessness in animals Seligman cites the research of C. P. Richter during the fifties, "who reasoned that for a wild rat, being held in the hand of a predator like man,

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having whiskers trimmed, and being put in a vat of hot water from which escape is impossible produces a sense of helplessness in the rat."

Learned helplessness has been experimentally produced in humans, though not by means of shock. People given tasks at which they repeatedly fail quickly come to believe that they will fail at other tasks and do poorly at them, compared to those who have not been put through a sequence of failures. In the real world, battered women may be unable to leave their batterers, although the risks of leaving and the lack of anywhere to go may be as important as their perception that any action on their part to save themselves from continued abuse is pointless. The animal research really shows nothing about humans—the alleged purpose of such research— that one cannot learn by talking to battered women about their lives.

Having produced depressed dogs, Seligman wanted to cure them. He placed "helpless" dogs in the chamber and removed the partition to make it easy for them to cross and avoid shock, but the despondent dogs made no effort to get away and so did not discover escape was possible. Seligman got in the chamber and called them, and offered them food, but the dogs did not move. Eventually he was reduced to dragging the dogs back and forth on leashes. Some dogs were dragged back and forth two hundred times before they discovered that this time they could escape the electric shocks. According to Sehgman, their recovery from learned helplessness was lasting and complete. Their experience, however, must have had some lasting effect on them.

Many other experimenters have produced learned helplessness in the laboratory by various means, with sometimes fiendish results. One experimenter raised rhesus monkeys in solitude, in black-walled isolation cages, from infancy until six months, to induce "social helplessness." Then he taped each young monkey to a cruciform restraining device and placed it, for an hour a day, in a cage with other young monkeys. After initial withdrawal, the unrestrained monkeys poked and prodded the restrained monkeys, pulling their hair, gouged their eyes, and pried their mouths open. The restrained monkeys struggled, but could not escape. All they could

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do was cr\' out. After t\vo to tliree months ot this abuse, their behavior changed. They stopped struggHng, though they still cried out. And as the experimenter noted, "No advantage was taken of numerous opportunities to bite the oppressor which thrust fingers or sex organs against or into its mouth." These monkeys were lastingly traumatized and were terrified of otJier monkeys even when unrestrained. Like the other experiments, this one is distinguished by its cruelty.

Comparatively few depressed humans became so through being placed in solitary confinement for half their childhoods, or by being raised in solitary confinement and then tortured by peers. Oddly enough, the argument on the part of the scientists conducting these experiments has been that animals are so similar to us in their feelings that we can learn about human depression by studying animal depression. But this raises the important ethical question asked by many animal-rights groups: If animals suffer the way we do, which is the whole justification for the experiments, is it not sadistic to conduct them? Clearly the animals can be made deeply unhappy, but this fact could have been observed under naturally occurring conditions, without subjecting sensitive creatures to pointless cruelty.

Through all these griefs and torments, animals display sorrow through their movements, postures, and actions. Often animal vocalizations provide evidence of sadness. Wolves seem to have a special mourning howl or lonesome howl that differs from their usual convivial howling. Other animals are said to wail, moan, or cry. When Marchessa, an elderly female mountain gorilla, died, the silverback male of her group became subdued and was heard to whimper frequently, the only time such a sound had been heard from a silverback. These two wild gorillas may have spent as much as thirty years of their lives together. One observer wrote of orangutans, "In disappointinent the young specimen quite commonly whimpers or weeps, without, however, shedding tears."

No one knows for certain why humans weep. Newborn babies cry, but they do not usually shed tears until they are a few months old. Adults cry less, and some adults never shed tears. Tears have been classified into three kinds: continuous tears, which keep the

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eye moist; reflex tears, which flush foreign objects or irritating gases out of the eye; and emotional tears, the tears of grief, happiness, or rage. Emotional tears are different in that they contain a higher percentage of protein than other tears. Curiously, since Darwin's survey of the subject in 1872, weeping has been httle studied, but it has been speculated that emotional tears may have both physical and social or communicative functions.

Since it is possible for people to feel great unhappiness and not weep, it is also unclear why tears communicate so effectively. It may be that our reaction is instinctive, and perhaps part of the respect accorded to tears comes from the possibility that they are ours alone. It has been suggested that almost every human bodily secretion is considered disgusting (such as feces, urine, and mucus), and its ingestion is taboo with one exception: tears. This is the one body product that may be uniquely human and hence does not remind us of what we have in common with animals.

Perhaps it isn't only humans who are impressed by tears, however. The chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky, who regularly sought to comfort people who looked sad, was particularly tender when he saw tears, which he would wipe away. Since Nim was raised by humans, he may have learned the connection between tears and unhappiness.

It would be interesting to discover whether any animals who have not had the opportunity to learn about tears respond to tears as evidence of sadness in humans or even in other animals. This could be answered experimentally. If a chimpanzee reared with other chimps saw another who appeared to be shedding tears, would it react as Nim did? If a chimpanzee accustomed to humans saw a person cry for the first time, would it behave as though it was a sign of distress?

Tears keep the eyes of animals moist. Their eyes also water when irritated. Tears may spill from the eyes of an animal in pain. Tears have been seen in the eyes of animals as diverse as an injured horse and an eggbound grey parrot. Some animals are more tearful than others. Seals, who have no nasolachrymal ducts into which tears drain, are especially apt to have tears rolling down their faces. This is thought to help them cool down when they are on land.

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Charles Darwin, in researching I he Kvpfession of the Emotions in Man and Animals, looked for evidence diat animals did or did not shed emotional tears. He complained, "The Macacus maurus^ which formerly wept so copiously in the Zoological Gardens, would have been a fine case for observation; but the two monkeys now there, and which are believed to be of the same species, do not weep." He was not able to observe animals shedding emotional tears, and called weeping one of the "special expressions of man."

Darwin noted one exception: the Indian elephant. It was reported to him by Sir E. Tennant that some newly captured elephants in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), tied up and lying motionless on the ground, showed "no other indication of suffering than the tears which suffused their eyes and flowed incessandy." Another captured elephant, when bound, sank to the ground, "uttering choking cries, with tears trickling down his cheeks." A captured elephant is usually also separated from its family. Other elephant observers in Ceylon assured Darwin that they had not seen elephants weep, and that Ceylonese hunters said they had never seen elephants weep. Darwin put his trust in Tennant's observations, however, because they were confirmed by the elephant keeper at the London Zoo, who said he had several times seen an old female there shedding tears when her young companion was taken out.

In the years since Darwin, the balance of the evidence has been the same: most elephant watchers have never seen them weep —or have, rarely, seen them weep when injured—yet a few observers have claimed to have seen them weep when not injured. An elephant trainer with a small American circus told researcher William Frey that his elephant, Okha, does cry at times, but that he had no idea why. Okha sometimes shed a tear when being scolded, it is reported, and at least once wept while giving children rides. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has spent years working with African elephants, has seen elephants shed tears only when injured. Tears fell from the eyes of Claudia, a captive elephant, during a difficult labor with her first calf.

R. Gordon Cummings, an eighteenth-century hunter in South Africa, described killing the biggest male elephant he had ever

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seen. He first shot it in the shoulder so that it could not run away. The elephant limped over to a tree and leaned against it. Deciding to contemplate the elephant before kiUing it, Cummings paused to make coffee and then chose to experimentally determine which were an elephant's vulnerable spots. He walked up to it and fired bullets into various parts of the head. The elephant did not move except to touch the bullet wounds with the tip of his trunk. "Surprised and shocked to find that I was only tormenting and prolonging the sufferings of the noble beast, which bore his trials with such dignified composure," Cummings wrote, he decided to finish him off and shot him nine times behind the shoulder. "Large tears now trickled from his eyes, which he slowly shut and opened; his colossal frame quivered convulsively, and, falling on his side, he expired." This elephant must have been in great pain, however, and that alone would have been cause enough for him to shed tears. Other than humans, no animal runs torture experiments on other animals.

In his book Elephant Tramp, George Lewis, an itinerant elephant trainer, reported in 1955 that in the years he had worked with elephants he had seen only one weeping. This was a young, timid female named Sadie, who was being trained along with five others to do an act for the Robbins Brothers Circus. The elephants were being taught their acts quickly, since the show would start in three weeks, but Sadie had trouble learning what was wanted. One day, unable to understand what she was being told to do, she ran out of the ring. "We brought her back and began to punish her for being so stupid." (Based on information Lewis gives elsewhere, they probably punished her by hitting her on the side of the head with a large stick.) To their astonishment, Sadie, who was lying down, began to utter racking sobs, and tears poured from her eyes. The dumbfounded trainers knelt by Sadie, caressing her. Lewis says that he never punished her again, and that she learned the act and became a "good" circus elephant. His fellow elephant trainers, who had never witnessed such a thing, were skeptical. But reports are not confined to animal behaviorists. Victor Hugo wrote in his diary on January 2, 1871: "0« a ahhahiit Velephant du Jardin des

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Plantes. II u plciirc. On vii Ic ///a/igcr/^ ["The elephant in the Jardin des Plantes was slaughtered. He wept. He will be eaten."] That elephants weep emotional tears is widely believed in India, where elephants have been kept for many centuries. It is said that when the conqueror Tamerlane captured three thousand elephants in battle, snuft was put in their eyes so they would appear to be weeping at the loss. Douglas Chadwick was told of a young Indian elephant shedding tears when scolded for playing too boisterously and knocking someone down, and also of an elephant that ran away and, when found by its mahout, wept along with him. Observing young orphaned elephants in an Asian stable, Chadwick noticed that one was shedding tears. A mahout told him that the babies often cried when they were hungry and that it was almost feeding time. But after being fed, the baby still wept.