When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (20 page)

Wolves breed in captivity, but it seems unlikely that a wolf who is constantly being stared at from nearby, a wolf with no place to hide, a wolf who cannot see the moon, can be a contented wolf.

A CAPACITY FOR JOY

It may be that a wolf cannot be happy while making a good exhibit. A raccoon may be less likely to have this problem. It may have other problems, however, no less distorting of its nature. A happy animal needs to feel safe most of the time. If it is a social animal it needs company. It needs something that it can accomplish. A dish of food three times a day may be nutritionally equal to four hours of foraging, but it is not emotionally equal.

When Indah, an orangutan, escaped from her enclosure at the San Diego Zoo in June 1993 and clambered up onto the viewing deck, she neither headed for the hills nor attacked people. She chose to go through a garbage can, put a bag on her head, taste what she found, and dump an ashtray, surrounded by an interested audience. In other words, she indulged both her curiosity about what happens on the other side of the viewing deck and her need to act on her world in her own way. This seems to indicate that in her enclosure Indah was bored. She was not fulfilled. She had things she wanted to do that she was kept from doing. In zoos, visitor after visitor remarks on the apparent boredom of so many of the animals. Many people express a sense of unease, an understanding of how they would feel under such circumstances.

An animal also needs room to wander over a range appropriate to its species. For some small animals who cherish the vicinity of a burrow or nest, an ordinary zoo cage, if appropriately complex, might be big enough. No cage is big enough for a polar bear or a cougar. Whether an animal without freedom to choose its own environment, no matter how small, can be happy is a question that needs to be asked. Is not freedom of choice basic to the meaning of happiness? It is not surprising that a favored task for captive animals to be taught is the miming of happiness. Dolphins, confined in tiny spaces, deprived of most companionship, denied the use of many of their capacities, are trained to burst into the air in a shower of spray, to dance across the surface of the water and to leap in apparent joy. The joy may even be real, but it does not reflect the overall reality of the captive animals' life.

HUES ELEPHAmS IfEEP Play

Joy often expresses itself in play, which many animals indulge in all their lives. Play, which seems to be both a sign and a source of joy, has been increasingly studied in recent years, following a long period when the subject was considered in professional circles to be less than respectable. The longtime lack of study, according to Robert Fagen of the University of Pennsylvania, was a blacklash against the work of Karl Groos, who, at the end of the nineteenth century, argued for a link between play and aesthetics, depicting play as a simplified form of artistic endeavor. Fagen notes that "the study of animal play has never quite overcome its embarrassment at Groos's attempt to unite animal psychology with aesthetics." Biologists continue to be dismayed by the lay public's interest in possible links between animal play and human creativity.

Fagen is unintimidated, and at the end of his book on play in animals, he writes:

In the play of animals we find a pure aesthetic that frankly defies science. Why kittens or puppies chase and vigorously paw at each other in reciprocal fashion without inflicting injury, repeating this behavior almost to the point of physical exhaustion, is not known. Yet this behavior fascinates, indeed enchants.

Some researchers also feel that the study of play has been neglected because play behavior has been inadequately defined. Various definitions have been propounded, more or less ponderous. Frustration is apparent in ethologist Robert Hinde's definition: "Play is a general term for activities which seem to the observer to make no immediate contribution to survival." That is, play is something done simply for the joy of doing it.

Unwieldy definitions of play (some mere lists of play behaviors) are probably better than none, however. Marc Bekoff, professor of biology at the University of Colorado, has noted a tendency among ethologists and behavioral scientists either to make definitions of difficult concepts so narrow as to be useless or to say that a

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concept that is difficult to define must therefore be impossible to study. "For example, some have claimed that social play is not a valid category of behavior because it is so difficult to define. While suggesting that we do away with social play by stipulatively defining it out of existence (or by defining social play as what it is not), few if any viable alternatives were offered; thus we were left with nothing!"

Play is important to animals, and, although it carries risks, since animals can be injured or killed while playing, a variety of evolutionary functions for it have been proposed. Perhaps it is a form of practice, of learning to perform tasks, theorists suggest; or perhaps it exercises developing social, neurological, or physical capacities. Cynthia Moss may have spoken for many biologists when, watching African elephants play in the rain—running, twirling, flapping ears and trunks, spraying water at each other, flailing branches, uttering loud play trumpets—she wrote in her notes, "How can one do a serious study of animals that behave this way!"

Hans Kruuk, studying spotted hyenas, complained that play "is an anthropomorphic term, negatively defined; I have merely used it as a label for some activities which in our own species would be named that way." As an example of such activities Kruuk cited four adult hyenas swimming in a river, jumping in and out, splashing and pushing one another underwater. Kruuk adds that the hyenas made a substantial detour to reach the pool.

Elephants, both Indian and African, are particularly playful. A traveling circus once pitched its tents next to a schoolyard with a set of swings. The older elephants were chained, but Norma, a young elephant, was left loose. When Norma saw children swinging she was greatly intrigued. Before long she went over, waved the children away with her trunk, backed up to a swing, and attempted to sit on it. She was notably unsuccessful, even using her tail to hold the swing in place. Finally she flung the swing about irritably and returned to her companions. The children began to swing again, and Norma had to try again. Despite trying periodically for an hour, she was never able to swing.

Norma may have been looking for entertainment because she was bored. There seems no reason to doubt that animals can be

bored. Nim C^hiinpsky often appeared to his sign language instructors to be bored and would demand to be taken to the toilet or to go to bed when his teachers felt strongly that he was just looking for a change from his lessons, like any schoolchild.

The life of many herbivores strikes many humans as intrinsically boring. Grazing animals eat the same foods all day long every day. This would certainly bore omnivores like us, but maybe buffalo have a higher tolerance for monotony. Maybe each blade of grass seems vastly different from the blade before. Perhaps their life is a rich tapestry of excitement and intrigue, but at a sensory level too far removed from ours to be apparent. In any case, to assume that a wild buffalo is bored with its life because it would bore some humans is true anthropomorphism.

Alaskan buffalo have been seen playing on ice. One at a time, starting from a ridge above a frozen lake, the buffalo charged down to the shore and plunged onto the ice, bracing their legs so that they spun across the ice, with their tails in the air. As each buffalo skidded to a halt, it let out a loud bellow, "a kind oi gwaaa sound" —and then awkwardly picked its way back to shore to make another run.

Animals can play in complete solitude. Bears are playful throughout their lives and will slide on snowbanks like otters— headfirst, feet first, on the stomach, on the back, while somersaulting. Two grizzly bears in the Rockies were seen to wrestle for possession of a log. The bear who triumphed lay on its back and juggled the log on its feet while roaring w\.xh delight. A quieter grizzly floated in a mountain lake on a hot day. It ducked its muzzle beneath the water to blow bubbles—and then reached out to pop them with its long claws. Tiger cubs and leopards love to jump off branches into water and will do so repeatedly. Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) in the San Diego Zoo play solitary games of bhndman's bluff. The bonobo covers its eyes with a leaf or bag or simply puts its fingers or arm over its eyes, and then staggers about the climbing frame.

At one time the gold leaf on the domes of the Kremlin was being scratched off by hooded crows. The crows were not indulging their fabled penchant for theft. They had simply found that it

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was enormous fun to slide down those onion domes, and their claws did significant damage. Eventually they were driven away by a combination of recorded crow distress calls and regular patrols by tame falcons.

Animals may also play with objects. This can be seen even in some animals that are not known to play with other animals. A captive Komodo dragon in a British zoo played with a shovel, pushing it noisily about the enclosure. A meter-long wild alligator in Georgia spent forty-five minutes playing with the drops of water falling ft^om a pipe into a pond, stalking the pipe, snapping at the drops, letting them fall on his snout and then snapping at them in midair. Captive gorillas and chimpanzees enjoy playing with dolls and spend time in other imaginative play, as when Koko the gorilla pretends to brush her teeth with a toy banana, or when the chimpanzee Loulis, playing alone, puts a board on his head, signing "That's a hat."

In other animals, object play quickly becomes social play. A captive dolphin at an oceanarium played with a feather, carrying it to an intake pipe, letting it be swept off by the current, and then chasing it. Another dolphin joined in and they are said to have taken turns. In another game three or four dolphins vied for possession of a feather, and wild dolphins play similar keep-away games with various objects. Beluga whales carry stones or seaweed on their heads and the other whales at once try to knock them off. Lions, both adults and cubs, may try to wrest pieces of bark or twigs from each other.

Teasing is a form of play, at least for the one doing the teasing. Some animals tease conspecifics; they may also tease members of other species. A captive dolphin teased a turtle by tossing it out of the water and rolling it along the bottom of the tank. Another dolphin teased a fish that lived in a rock crevice in the tank by putting bits of squid near the hole; when the fish came out to get the squid, the dolphin would snatch it away. Many people who visit captive dolphins see them mercilessly tease sea lions and seals with whom they share pools. Ravens tease peregrines by flying closer and closer past them, croaking, until the falcon lunges after them. Swans, with their large dignity, are often the target of teasing. In

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the water, little grebes have been seen to tweak swans' tails and then dive. On land, carrion crows may pull their tails repeatedly, leaping back each time the swan turns on them.

Foxes tease less nimble hyenas by coming close, circling, then sprinting away until the hyena can no longer ignore it and lunges for the fox. Several cases of hyenas actually catching and killing such a fox have been reported. Maybe the fox is gaining information about the hyena's powers, useful when the fox snatches bites from the hyena's kills. iMaybe the fox is accustoming the hyena to its presence, also useful when pillaging kills. This gives a practical explanation for why such behavior persists, but it does not explain what the fox feels. Why should the fox not feel the mischievousness that has been imputed to the species over the centuries?

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Other forms of play seem to be enjoyable for all involved. Young animals and sometimes adults commonly wrestle, mock-fight, and chase one another. Sifaka lemurs lie on their backs with the soles of their hind feet pressed together and "bicycle." A favorite game of young animals of many species, from wolves to red deer, is King of the Castle, where one player occupies a high place and defends it against the onslaughts of the others. Troops of sifaka and ring-tailed lemurs often tease by barring the other troop's passage, with animals jumping in front of each other, over each other, around each other. Unlike genuine territorial disputes, the two troops mingle and bound in all directions rather than aiming for a particular goal.

To what extent animals playing games recognize implicit rules is not clear. In a few instances trainers have successfully taught formalized games to animals. A simplified version of cricket was taught to elephants of the Bertram Mills' Circus after several months of training. Elephants understand throwing objects, but batting and fielding took time to learn. It is said that after some months the elephants began to "enter into the spirit of the game" and subsequently played with great enthusiasm.

A CAPACnr FOR yoY

At an oceanarium, several dolphins were trained in the skills of water polo. First they learned to put a ball through a goal, each team having a different goal. Then the trainers tried to teach them to compete by keeping the other team from scoring. After three training sessions the dolphins caught on, all too well. Uninterested in strictures against foul play, the dolphins zestfully attacked one another in such an unsporting fashion that the training was discontinued and they were never again given competitive games. There is no indication that the dolphins thereafter tried to play polo on their own.

Interspecies Play

Animals sometimes find playmates across the barrier of species. In captivity, species that would be unlikely to meet in the wild are often brought together. Thus a leopard and a dog may play together, or a cat and a gorilla. One family that kept red kangaroos in their backyard with their dogs found the animals quite friendly toward each other, although there were difficulties. The dogs liked to chase and be chased by their friends, barking. The kangaroos preferred to wrestle and box, pastimes the dogs did not care for. Somehow they managed to play together.