When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (21 page)

Interspecies play, while not routine, is also found in the wild. Dwarf mongooses in Kenya have been seen attempting to play with ground squirrels, Hzards, and birds. Here again, the different styles of play can form a barrier, M'Bih, a young mongoose rebuffed by her mongoose playmates, ran over to a large lizard, hopping and uttering play calls, and began tossing dead leaves about. When this produced no reaction, she danced around the lizard, tapping it and pretending to nibble at the Uzard's back, forefoot, and face. The hzard closed its eyes and did not respond, and M'Bili gave up.

Another mongoose, Moja, tried to play with an African ground squirrel as he would play with another mongoose, Moja was playing with another mongoose when the squirrel hopped into their midst and, standing on its hind legs, stopped to gnaw on a nut. Moja raced over giving the "play call," rose on his hind legs,

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put his forepaws on the squirrel's shoulders, and started to "waltz" around with the squirrel. A playful mongoose follows this by pretending to snap at the other animal's head and neck, which Moja did, but the squirrel didn't respond, simply standing passively and letting itself be waltzed around. Ihen Moja pounced on the squirrel's tail and bit it, whereupon the squirrel hopped away and Moja attacked a twig instead.

Tatu, another young mongoose, had better luck with a white-headed buffalo weaverbird. Tatu chased the bird, making jumps up into the air at it. Instead of departing, the bird flew no more than a foot off the ground, repeatedly skimmed over Tatu's head, and landed on twigs close to her. Tatu was the first to tire of this game. In a still more successful match, wild river otter cubs and beaver kits have been seen playing together. Adult beavers and otters were present and paid no attention as two cubs and two kits nosed, nudged, and chased each other, both on a stream bank and in the water. The play continued until the otter parents moved their family along. Young mangabey and red-tailed monkeys, whose troops often forage together in the Tanzanian rain forest, also play-wrestle together. Interspecies play, a commonality in nature, has a special charm for humans. If two species of animals can reach out joyfully across the gap between them, it seems that humans, too, might reach across and share their joy.

Sometimes the gap between species can be very wide. Douglas Chadwick describes an old bull elephant drinking at springs in Africa. Near one pool he met a tiny blacksmith plover. Ferociously the bird lifted its wings and shrieked a threat. The huge animal departed. "While leaving, though, the old bull pranced a Httle bit, shaking his head, as if laughing to himself." Chadwick concedes that this description can be called anthropomorphic, that some would insist on saying that the elephant "was merely exhibiting displacement behavior, releasing a bit of tension built up in response to the bird's threat. But what is the difference between this and many occasions that cause us to shrug and shake our heads, laughing to ourselves? In fact, that is exacdy what I did when blacksmith plovers stalked forward yelling at me." To refuse to see the commonality between person and elephant is to deliberately

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widen the gap. Another gap may come between the elephant and the bird. The elephant seems to have been amused by this encounter, but there is no reason to guess that the plover saw the joke.

Sometimes the gap may be too wide. In Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson's authoritative work on ants, we find a section titled "Ants Do Not Play" in which they refute the notion, put forward by several observers, that ants may be seen to play. The wrestling ants observed by Huber and by Stumper were not playing but in earnest, Holldobler and Wilson argue: the contestants were members of different colonies fighting to master each other. "In short, these activities have a simple explanation having nothing to do with play. We know of no behavior in ants or any other social insects that can be construed as play or social practice behavior approaching the mammalian type." Yet nineteenth-century natu-raHst Henry Water Bates's description of Eciton ants in Brazil does not sound like fighting.

I fi-equently saw them very leisurely employed in a way that looked like recreation. When this happened, the place was always a sunny nook in the forest. . . . Instead of pressing forward eagerly, and plundering right and left, they seemed to have been all smitten with a sudden fit of laziness. Some were walking slowly about, others were brushing their antennae with their fore feet; but the drollest sight was their cleaning one another. Here and there an ant was seen stretching forth first one leg and then another, to be brushed and washed by one or more of its comrades, who performed the task by passing the limb between the jaws and the tongue, finishing by giving the antennae a friendly wipe. . . . The actions of those ants looked like simple indulgence in idle amusement. Have these little creatures, then, an excess of energy beyond what is required for labors absolutely necessary to the welfare of their species, and do they thus expend it in mere sportive-ness, like young lambs or kittens, or in idle whims like rational beings? It is probable that these hours of relaxation and cleaning are indispensable to the effective performance of their

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harder labors; but while looking at them, the conclusion that the ants were engaged merely in play was irresistible.

Perhaps Bates is right, and some ants do play. When people think of playing with animals, we tend to think of playing with dogs or cats. It is hard to imagine playing with an ant, but this is no reason to decide that ants cannot play with one another.

There is something compelling in the recognition that other creatures enjoy play as much as we do. Jacques Cousteau wrote of whales as "sociable, affectionate, devoted, gentle, captivating, high-spirited creatures. The entire ocean is their empire—and their playground. Theirs is a 'leisure society' that predates ours by some forty million years. They spend less than a tenth of their lives looking for food and feeding. The rest of the time they spend swimming, frolicking in the waves, conversing with each other, wooing the opposite sex, and rearing their young—an inoffensive agenda if ever there was one!"

Scientists and laypeople alike have long been fascinated by the social play of canids—wolves, dogs, coyotes—because it so clearly involves a shared understanding of language and of social bonds. The play bow—when a canid lowers its forelegs to the ground and waves its tail—is a way of saying: "Everything that follows is just a game. Are you ready to play?" Dogs will attempt to play with another animal, cats, for example, but are usually disappointed in their lack of fluency in or indifference to this canid metalanguage. This gives special poignance to the play between a dog and its human friend, as if dogs recognize that they have found a companion to whom they can teach the rules. Nor do they seem unhappy at trying to figure out human rules for the games we wish to play with them. The concentrated posture a dog assumes over a stick he is waiting for his human friend to move is obviously meant to be slightly humorous: that is part of the game. Playing these games is almost like looking through a window into the dog's mind. We see what he intends. And the dog, too, gets a clear glimpse into our minds and knows what we want. Play, laughter, and friendship burst across the species barrier.

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Rage, Dominance, and Cruelty in Peace and ^^r

In the fifteenth century, when giraffes were known in Europe as camelopards, Cosimo de' Medici shut a giraffe in a pen with Hons, bloodhounds, and fighting bulls to see which species was the most savage. As Pope Pius II looked on, the Hons and dogs dozed, the bulls quietly chewed their cuds, and the giraffe huddled against the fence, shaking in fear. These leaders of men were disappointed at the absence of bloodshed, and wondered why the animals were not more savage.

History texts, today's newspapers, and our own lives testify to the fact that humans are moved by anger and hostility with regularity, despite wishes to control or at least disguise these emotions. In contrast, people are often eager to point out aggression among animals, and identify it as "animal," "brutal," or "savage." While aggression among animals is a favored topic for ethologists to study, the word angei- is unlikely to appear in their work.

Animals do seem to get angry; they certainly do commit aggressive acts against each other, fight for turf, and hurt and kill one another. They may not do this in exactly the ways people expect, however.

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Like de' Medici and Pius II, scientists have had their expectations about animal aggression confounded. Ethologists seeking to chart dominance hierarchies in groups of wild animals are sometimes frustrated when they cannot find who is dominant. They seem to suppose that with luck or labor, the true ranking among the animals will emerge. It does not always occur to them that the relations may not be hierarchical. It is as if animals at a waterhole must be arranged as neatly as academics at a granting agency.

Some people nurture the hope that animals—and if not all animals, then some cherished species—are not aggressive except in self-defense. In the society of wolves, the company of dolphins, or the murmuring of doves, only harmony is imagined. If the lion does not lie down with the lamb, perhaps at least the lambs lie down together. A look at the evidence, however, shows that while lambs may lie down together, they may very well rise to butt heads. Doves, dolphins, and wolves can treat each other very roughly. This is not to say that their whole social life is marked by conflict, only that the hope for a saintly species to become our guru of peace, love, and benevolence is unlikely to be fulfilled. Perhaps it is the expectation that is unreasonable.

Aggression spans a range from unprovoked attack to self-defense. When an animal pushes another away from food or refuses to be pushed, growls at an animal that comes near its young, or chases away a rival, it is behaving aggressively. From the viewpoint of survival, such behavior often has comparative advantages. The aggressive animal gets more to eat, keeps its offspring safer, has a better chance to mate, or faces less competition, all of which may enable it to leave more descendants. Anger and other emotions related to aggression may produce such behavior.

Of all the forms of physical force in the animal world, those most apt to be forgiven by critical humans are self-defense and defense of young. A wolf attacking a deer may be called savage and ravening, and the deer's defense may be called brave and heroic. The tigress or the bear defending her cubs is an archetype of justifiable rage. Animals like the red kangaroo, who may toss the larger of her joeys out of her pouch if she is too closely pursued, are

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viewed with great disfavor. Such an incident is no one's favorite animal story.

Waging War

One of the gravest charges against the human race is that only humans make war. The German writer Hans Magnus Enzens-berger began his recent book on European civil war by saying, "Animals fight, but they do not wage war." We are supposed to be shamed by the fact that animals do not make war. Yet some animals do. Ant wars are the best known, but insects are sufficiently dissimilar to us that people seldom take that to heart. In recent years it has become clear that animals as closely related to us as chimpanzees can go to war. The famous chimps of Gombe attack other bands with no provocation and with deadly intent, not only patrolling their borders but making raids. They may kill and eat one another.

One account, which includes both terrorist behavior and a sudden recognition of commonality, is particularly evocative of human warfare. When a group of chimpanzees from Gombe's Kasakela group found a strange female and her infant in a tree, they barked threateningly. After a few blows had been aimed at her, there was a pause, during which some of the chimps fed in the same tree. She approached one of the males submissively and touched him, but he made no response. When she tried to leave, several of the males blocked her way. She approached another male, Satan, submissively and again touched him. His response, in an apparently xenophobic gesture, was to pick some leaves and use them to scrub the spot she had touched. Immediately several chimpanzees attacked her and grabbed her infant. For eight minutes she fought unsuccessfully for her baby, and finally escaped, badly injured. One of the Kasakela apes smashed the infant against trees and rocks and tossed her down. She was not dead, and Satan picked her up gently, groomed her, and put her down. Over the next few hours, three different males, including Satan, carried the infant tenderly, supporting and grooming her, before she was abandoned

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to die of her wounds. It is hard to know what to make of this strange story. Is it possible to attribute regret, a sense that they had gone too far, to these chimpanzees? Did they feel first hatred, then compassion, as warring humans sometimes do? In other encounters between bands, infants have been killed and eaten. This incident suggests mixed feeUngs, in which the infant went from being "enemy" to "baby."

Bands of dwarf mongooses also join battle, apparently over territory. Many are injured, and some die. One battle began with the appearance in one group's territory of a second group. Each band gathered, twittered, groomed, and marked each other with scent. Then the resident group advanced as a body and was met by the other group. The "armies" advanced and retreated, then suddenly began sinking their teeth into one another. At one point both bands retreated as if in truce, then swept back into batde. Eventually the invaders withdrew. None of the resident mongooses was killed, though toes had been bitten off, ears chewed to stumps, a tail broken. One was injured so badly that she could no longer feed herself and later died. In their next clash this same group lost.

These mass conflicts seem to be over territory. One group invades another's territory and battle is joined. Hans Kruuk observed fighting between spotted hyenas, which occurred when members of one clan killed prey in the other clan's range. Such quarrels were usually won by the residents, after prolonged threats and chasing, but sometimes the conflict escalated, and hyenas were injured or killed. Once, to Kruuk's horror, a hyena whose clan had killed a wildebeest on another clan's range was fatally injured. His attackers bit off his ears, feet, and testicles, and left him bleeding, paralyzed and pardy eaten.