When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (25 page)

WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP

Another form of altruism in the sense of selfless caring for others is exemplified in animals who feed or share their food with another animal, thus giving up a very tangible survival asset. As lion watchers have pointed out, old lionesses who no longer bear young and have worn or missing teeth can survive for years because the younger lions share their kills with them.

Although biologist and fox watcher David Macdonald has written that "Thou shalt not share thy food" appears to be one of the commandments of red fox behavior, he has also seen foxes bringing food to adult foxes when they are injured. One fox, Wide Eyes, was injured by a mowing machine. (Macdonald took her to a vet, who found that her injuries were fatal.) The next day her sister Big Ears brought food to the spot where Wide Eyes had been injured, uttered the whimper that summons cubs to eat (though Big Ears had no cubs), and left the food on the bloody spot where her sister had lain. Another time, a dog fox got a thorn in his paw, which became infected. The dominant vixen in his group brought him food, and he recovered.

Compassion for Illness and Injury

Tatu, a dwarf mongoose whose accidental separation from her family is described later in this chapter, injured her forepaw badly in a fight with another group of mongooses. She could no longer catch prey by pouncing with both paws. As she favored the paw and its nails grew long, making it even more unusable, she traveled slowly and lost weight. The other mongooses spent more time with Tatu, grooming her when she stopped grooming herself. They never brought her food. However, according to observer Anne Rasa, they began foraging next to Tatu at an increased rate. When they caught something, she would ask for it and they would often relinquish their food to her. As a younger, female mongoose, Tatu was "higher-ranking," so it wasn't surprising that they gave up food to her, only that they chose to forage near her so that this happened. At first, Rasa notes, she thought it was coincidence, but she soon became convinced that it was a deliberate choice on the

COMPASSION, RESCUE, AND THE ALTRUISM DEBATE

part of the other mongooses. Although Tatu was getting almost half her food in this way, it did not prevent her eventual death. When she died, in a termite mound, the group stopped traveling, and only moved on when her body began to decompose.

In a case of compassion for less dramatic illness, a woman who was working with Koko, the signing gorilla, had indigestion one day, and asked Koko what she should do for a "sick stomach." Koko, who was given extra orange juice whenever she was ill, signed "stomach you orange." When the woman burped, Koko signed "stomach you there drink orange," with "there" referring to the refrigerator where the orange juice was kept. The woman drank some juice, told Koko she felt better, and offered her some juice. Only then did Koko indicate interest in juice for herself. Ten days later, when the same woman visited again, and gave Koko some juice, Koko offered it to her and had to be assured that the visitor felt fine before she would drink the juice herself.

Male elephants have been seen carrying young branches to an old bull elephant lying on the ground, too sick to forage for his own food.

Sick or injured animals may be helped in other ways besides feeding. As noted below, dolphins and whales will often support another member of their species and carry it to the surface if it is having trouble breathing. This is exactly what a mother dolphin does with her newborn, and what "midwife" dolphins do with a dolphin giving birth.

Animals have also been known to risk themselves for unrelated members of their species. An adult pilot whale swimming in the Pacific Ocean was shot and instantly killed by people on a ship. Its body was drifting toward the ship when two more pilot whales appeared, one on each side of the dead whale, pressed their noses on top of its head and dived with it. They managed to get it far enough away so that they were not seen again. This is particularly noteworthy because pressing down in this manner is not known to be a stereotypical cetacean behavior. Dolphins and whales have also been seen helping injured companions away from human attackers, and pushing and biting against lines fastened to nets or harpoons when others are captured.

//7/£V ELEPH-iNTS H'EEP

Shooting lions with anesthetizing darts can provoke diverse behaviors, some altruistic, some not. The lions may attack neighboring lions as if they suspect them of having caused the pain. WTien the darted animals pass out, other lions may attack them. Sometimes they look up into a tree above them as if something has fallen on them, other times they charge the car in which the person firing is seated. They may run away for a short distance, and sometimes they climb a tree. Often they pull the dart out with their teeth, while on some occasions, other lions pull the darts out for them.

Cynthia Moss reported the case of a young female elephant with a badly crippled hind leg, broken when she was a small calf. This animal could not possibly have survived had her mother and other members of her group not made allowances for her, such as avoiding difficult terrain and always waiting for her to catch up. Gorillas, too, travel slowly to allow injured companions to keep pace. It is hard to beheve that this is not a deliberate, conscious decision.

Ralph Dennard, a soft-spoken man with a military bearing, has spent nearly twenty years training hearing dogs to assist deaf people. These energetic signal dogs run to alert their owners when they hear a doorbell, telephone, timer, alarm clock, or smoke alarm. Dennard believes that dogs feel some emotions, such as fear, love, grief, and curiosity, but doubts that they feel compassion.

One family got a signal dog from Dennard to assist the father of the family. Gilly, a Border collie, joined them a few months before the birth of their second child, and they worried that she might be jealous and hostile toward the new baby. On the baby's first night home, Gilly woke the mother from a deep sleep and ran urgendy back and forth between the bed and the baby's cot. The mother went to the cot and found that the one-day-old baby was silent and blue. He had choked on mucus and stopped breathing. His mother was able to clear his airway and start his breathing again. Later Gilly developed the habit of notifying the mother whenever the baby cried.

In another incident, a hearing dog woke a woman when a visiting cat jumped on the stove, accidentally filling the kitchen

COMPASSION, RESCUE, AND THE ALTRUISM DEBATE

with gas. "Why did the dog respond to that? We don't know," said Dennard, pointing out that there was no sound—no ring or buzzer —to signal the dog to respond. Clearly, a dog might object to the smell of gas and want a human to do something about it. But in the case of the baby, what troubled the dog? The baby may have made choking sounds, but the dog had not been trained to do anything with regard to the baby. It seems clear that the dog knew the baby needed help, and wanted to summon that help. In humans, this is what it is to feel compassion.

Another signal dog, Chelsea, also showed concern for infants. Traveling with her owners on an airplane, Chelsea repeatedly tried to get them to go to the aid of a crying baby. Eventually, after a number of flights, they managed to convince Chelsea to leave crying infants to their parents' care.

An affecting account of sympathetic behavior tells of Toto, a captive chimpanzee whose owner. Cherry Kearton, fell ill with malaria. According to Kearton's account, written in 1925, Toto sat by him all day. WTien instructed, he would bring quinine and a glass. When Kearton asked for a book, Toto would put his finger on one book after another (there were fewer than a dozen) until Kearton indicated that Toto was touching the desired book, whereupon Toto would bring it to him. Several times during convalescence, Kearton fell asleep on his bed fully dressed, and Toto removed his boots. "It may be that some who read this book will say that friendship between an ape and a man is absurd, and that Toto, being 'only an animal,' cannot really have felt the feelings that I attribute to him," Kearton wrote. "They would not say it if they had felt his tenderness and seen his care as I felt and saw it at that time."

An ill, injured, or unhappy animal may also be offered comfort, as in the grooming of the injured Tatu described earlier in this chapter. An adult wild chimpanzee. Little Bee, was seen by researchers to climb down from a tree to bring mabungo fruit to her mother, who was too old and tired to climb the tree herself. It has already been noted that Nim, a chimp who was taught sign language, was very tender with people who wept. He was also responsive to other signs of grief. Indeed, his foster mother declared that

UVEN ELEPKANTS KEEP

during a time when her father was in the hospital, dying of cancer, Nim was more direct and more comforting in his response to her sorrow than was any other member of her family. Nim's thirty-sixth word was soii-y, which he used when a companion was upset.

Compassion can occur by omission also. In one grim and inexcusable experiment, fifteen rhesus monkeys were trained to pull either of two chains to get food. After a while a new aspect was introduced: if they pulled one of the chains a monkey in an adjacent compartment would receive a powerful electric shock. Two thirds of the monkeys preferred to pull the chain that gave them food without shocking the other monkey. Two other monkeys, after seeing shock administered, refused to pull either chain. Monkeys were less likely to shock other monkeys if they knew those monkeys, and were less likely to shock other monkeys if they had been shocked themselves.

The behavior of these resisters contrasts sharply with the experiment described earlier, in which rhesus monkeys who had been reared in isolation were taped to a cruciform restraining device and put in a cage with "normal" cage-bred rhesus. The unrestrained monkeys eventually began performing various sadistic operations on the restrained monkeys. While they did touch and bite the tape, the experimenter concluded that they were not trying to free the restrained monkey, because they manipulated the tape less often than they did when there was no monkey in the restraining device. While one could argue about the restrained monkeys' lack of abihty to solicit compassion, or the ability of a monkey to understand the concept of untaping another monkey, lack of compassion in one situation with one group of monkeys does not invalidate the presence of compassion under other conditions by other individuals.

Tne Altruism Detate

Altruism in animals has been passionately debated over the years, with a sizable school holding that its existence is impossible. Altruism in this scientific debate is not the same as altruism in

COMPASSION, RESCUE, AND THE ALTRUISM DEBATE

everyday life. It means behavior that benefits another but reduces the altruist's ability to survive. For example, Richard Dawkins has written, "Altruism, for our purposes, may be defined as self-destructive behavior performed for the benefit of others." How could natural selection—the process by which only the fittest survive, passing on their genetic endowment successfully—ever favor an animal that wasted its energy or risked its life committing unselfish acts? It is argued that this could only benefit the animal—or rather, the animal's genes—if the one it helps is a relative. Extensive mathematical calculations have been made to show just how closely related an animal must be for it to be genetically worthwhile to help it. Altruism toward a close relative thus does not count as altruism under these rules.

Early in The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins specifies that he uses the term altruism to refer to behavior rather than "the psychology of motives." But behavior and motivation are not so easily separated, and to do so is to dodge an important issue. The socio-biological debate about altruism is deeply confused by the redefinition of this everyday word. If compassion for kin exists as an emotion, rather than exclusively as an adaptive behavior, then compassion for nonkin also becomes possible.

An example of chimpanzee compassion for nonkin—a person who was not suffering so very terribly—occurred when a group of the Gombe chimps were being followed by researcher Geza Teleki. He discovered that he had forgotten his lunch, and tried to knock some fruit down with a stick while the chimpanzees fed in some trees nearby. After ten minutes of unsuccessful efforts, an adolescent male chimpanzee. Sniff, collected some fhiit, climbed down from the tree, and gave it to Teleki. This is altruism by any definition, since the human and the chimp were not related.

Sniff's mother died some years later, and Sniff adopted his fourteen-month-old sister, sharing food with her, taking her into his sleeping nest, and carrying her everywhere he went. Still un-weaned, she could not survive without mother's milk, however, and she died after three weeks. A sociobiologist would not count Sniff's behavior as altruism, since she shared some of Sniff's genes. Yet in the usual sense of the word, a similar compassion, differing in its

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Strength, ina\' be said to have motivated his adoption of his sister and his gift of fruit to a hungry human.

Some acts that may appear altruistic to the ordinary person— running risks to protect one's offspring, for example—are not considered altruism in science. Reproductive success guarantees the replication of genes; if an animal does not protect its offspring, it is less likely to pass its genes along. Altruism is also discounted if aid is directed toward kin other than children. It has been shown that some animals who do not get a chance to reproduce can still ensure that their genes will be passed along by helping siblings, nieces, nephews, parents, and other relatives, since they share some genes with those relatives. Their individual fitness may not be improved, but their inclusive fitness, based on the number of their genes that survive in subsequent generations, will be increased. The more genes one has in common, the more advantageous it is, in evolutionary terms, to help a relative. This kin selection has been used to explain the existence of alloparenting, in which an animal helps to raise children not its own. A wolf who remains with his or her parents and helps raise their next litter is an alloparent. Perhaps there is no territory available for this young wolf to start its own family, so its best chance of passing its genes along lies in helping to raise its siblings, with whom it has an average of 50 percent of its genes in common. Or perhaps it is just a caring wolf, helping out the family.