When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (27 page)

In the theoretical model of reciprocal altruism, the two animals trading favors each derive an overall advantage. An animal who does not return favors is detected by the others and ceases to receive them. Experimenters studying reciprocal altruism taped calls of vervet monkeys—the calls they use when threatening another vervet and at the same time soliciting assistance from other vervets—and later, hiding in the bushes, played the calls of different individuals and noted how vervets responded to these soHcita-tions. They found that vervets were most apt to respond to the calls of unrelated monkeys if they had recently groomed each other or shared other affinitive behavior. In contrast, they responded to the calls of close relatives whether or not they had recendy done favors for each other. It has been suggested that the necessity for social animals to monitor their indebtedness to one another has contributed to the development of inteUigence.

Gratitude

While an animal might be keeping an unemotional tally of who owes whom, such behavior might also be mediated more emotionally, involving not only love, but gratitude and grudge holding. Unfortunately, gratitude is one of the most slippery emotions to pin down, so much so that cynics sometimes claim it does not exist

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in people. If A does something for B, and B is subsequendy very nice to A, it can be argued that B is grateful. Some will argue, however, that B hopes for more favors from A, or that B has just come to enjoy A's company, or that B is acting the way society expects. If B is a dog, the same arguments could be applied. Yet most people believe that gratitude exists because they have felt grateful themselves. Why should not animals be able to feel gratitude also?

The human history of objectivity on this subject is not impressive. Perhaps because of guilty consciences, this is one of the emotions humans would most like animals to feel—toward us. Joseph Wood Krutch has told of a letter written to a British quarterly, The Countryman, with news of a thankful butterfly. The reader had seen a parasitic mite clinging to a butterfly's eye and had delicately removed it. The butterfly uncoiled its tongue and licked his hand. The reader thought this was a caress of thanks. As other readers pointed out, butterflies often lick human skin, presumably for the salt. It seems unlikely that a butterfly would interpret a lick as a grateful gesture: they do not lick each other as dogs do. The chance that an insect would thank a primate with this gesture seems rather small. Ornithologists are sometimes told stories of wild birds indicating their gratitude for favors humans have done them by singing. This, too, seems improbable, since there is no reason to suppose that birds know that people enjoy birdsong, but the idea is deeply appealing.

In the Negev Desert, Salim, a Bedouin stone carver, trapped a caracal, a lynxlike desert cat, who had been raiding his chicken house. He intended to kill it but relented, and after three days he let it go. It ran off, and by the next day had killed another chicken. In the ensuing months, the caracal would often come near Salim's house in the evenings, lie on the branch of an acacia and stare at Salim, who would sit on a rock and look back. Even after the cat had killed the last of the chickens, it would come and stare at Sahm. Perhaps the caracal was curious. Perhaps it was hostile toward the person who had trapped and held it captive. Perhaps it was just maintaining their connection. Perhaps it felt gratitude.

Parrot trainers sometimes try to modify the attitude of a hos-

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tile parrot by arranging for the person it dislikes to rescue the parrot from a frightening situation. Mattie Sue Athan, a parrot behavior consultant, has written about a situation in which such a rescue occurred accidentally. The parrot, a very hostile African grey living in a pet store, had rebuffed the advances of several trainers. When Athan released it from its cage, the parrot bolted down the aisle to a ferret cage. The ferret grabbed the parrot's toe in a bloody bite and hung on fiercely. The parrot shrieked in pain and terror until Athan prized the ferret off. The bird at once became tame and friendly with her. The rescue method of winning a parrot's goodwill works fairly reliably and is sometimes exploited by unscrupulous trainers in cruel ways. As for whether the rescued parrot feels gratitude toward its rescuer, or merely trust and admiration—this is the same question asked of rescued humans.

Gratitude of one animal toward another, rather than toward humans, has been documented. In the Kenya bush one evening, Tatu, a young dwarf mongoose, became separated from her family after an antelope, frightened by a dust devil, hurtled through the group. At dusk mongooses retire into a termite mound, but Tatu was on a mound fifty yards from her family, afraid to cross the intervening ground. She uttered "Where are you?" calls and trotted back and forth on her mound. Her family called back repeatedly with louder and louder "Here I am" calls, but she dared not cross. By the time it was almost dark, Tatu was hoarse, and huddled on top of the mound. Her parents and another mongoose (probably her sister) finally set off toward her, keeping under cover as much as possible, while the rest of the band watched, scanning the earth and sky for predators. When the three arrived, Tatu flung herself upon them, ficking and grooming them. When she had groomed all three (first her mother, then her father, then the third mongoose), they went back to the group. Was Tatu grateful, or merely glad to see her family? Her father did something unusual when she started to groom him, rubbing his cheek glands on her, which dwarf mongooses more typically do when preparing to fight one another. Conceivably this indicated anger, and Tatu wanted to appease them.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas says predators may express grati-

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rude toward prey, giving the example of a group of lions who had killed a kiulii. One lion took the kudu's face between his paws and tenderly and carefully licked it as he would the face of another lion. As he did so, a cub joined him and also washed the kudu's face. In another instance a puma was seen to lie down and softly pat a bighorn sheep he had just killed. Such gratitude might not be appreciated by kudus or bighorns, but that would make it no less real in the cat.

Revenue

The converse of gratitude is surely revenge. Parrots are notorious for holding grudges. It is certain that an animal can take a strong dislike to a human individual and treat it unusually aggressively. To stay on good terms with a parrot, it is best not to be the one who clips its nails or trims its beak. If one emotion is possible, why should not the other be?

Ola, a young false killer whale in an oceanarium, was accustomed to a staff of human divers working in his tank. One diver took to teasing Ola surreptitiously. Oceanarium management had their first inkling of this one day when Ola placed his snout on the man's back, pushed him to the floor of the tank, and held him there. (He was wearing diving gear, so he did not drown.) Seeking to free the diver, trainers gave Ola commands, tried to startle him with loud noises, and offered fish, to no avail. After five minutes Ola released the diver. Subsequent investigation brought out the teasing.

Gratitude and vengefulness—the tit-for-tat emotions—might prove to be mediators of reciprocal altruism. It is arguable from the evidence that animals may possess the capacity for compassionate and generous feeling, hence altruistic behavior in the usual sense, such that even if this feeling evolved for genetic advantage, it produces behavior that need not always be advantageous. Some theorists have occasionally acknowledged the possibility of nonadvanta-geous behavior that could suggest other forces at work. Thus Richard Dawkins, in discussing the phenomenon of monkeys

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adopting unrelated babies, remarks: "In most cases we should probably regard adoption, however touching it may seem, as a misfiring of a built-in rule. This is because the generous female is doing her own genes no good by caring for the orphan. She is wasting time and energy which she could be investing in the lives of her own kin, particularly future children of her own. It is presumably a mistake which happens too seldom for natural selection to have 'bothered' to change the rule by making the maternal instinct more selective." Consider the reaction to this quotation if one did not know it referred to animals. A generous female animal "making a mistake" hardly proves that generosity—and altruism— do not exist among animals. Yet its possibility usually disappears, so that in the final pages of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins asserts:

It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested altruism. . . . We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the history of the world.

A recent scientific report on food sharing in vampire bats noted that "true altruism has never been documented in nonhu-man animals, presumably because such a one-way system is not evolutionarily stable." Yet the results of the study are a littie different. Vampire bats share food (the blood of other animals, usually horses) with other bats in their sleeping areas. This is vital to bat survival, since without food they starve to death very quickly. A small captive colony of bats was set up to see whether they shared with kin, with friends (as in reciprocal altruism), and with strangers. Bats that had hunted successfully did indeed share with relatives and with certain friends. "Only once did it occur between strangers," the report noted. Rather than showing that vampire bats never behave altruistically, this shows that they can be altruistic, even if rarely. The researcher's interpretation is that the sharing bat strangers made a mistake.

Altruistic acts, when recorded, tend to be treated as rare ex-

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ceptions unworthy of note. For some humans, many of whom are scientists, there seems to be a powerful allure to the proclamation that all the world is ruled by self-interest, proving that kindness, self-sacrifice, and generosity are at best naive, at worst suicidal. Projecting this onto animals may be one of the more major hidden examples of anthropomorphism in science. That some people may be this way does not make animals this way. Yet scientific hegemony appears at stake, in proclaiming that animal compassion, something that everybody believes from experience, is dead wrong. Proving that all behavior is ultimately selfish to the bone gives some people special pleasure. Robert Frank, author of Passions Within Reason, has pointed out, "The flint-eyed researcher fears no greater humiliation than to have called some action altruistic, only to have a more sophisticated colleague later demonstrate that it was self-serving. This fear surely helps account for the extraordinary volume of ink behavioral scientists have spent trying to unearth selfish motives for seemingly self-sacrificing acts." There can be no question that, for want of a better term, the "politics" of what one selects to study plays a constricting role in understanding behavior.

Humans are usually excluded from these calculations, or are discussed only after a seemingly watertight case has been built for universal creature selfishness—whereupon sociobiologists suddenly announce either that human behavior is dictated by much the same rules, or humans are a unique exception to them.

Not all scientists fall into this snare; some have discussed the possibility of a generalized capacity for altruism. Richard Connor and Kenneth Norris queried whether reciprocal altruism is found among dolphins and concluded that it is, but also that the concept is insufficient to explain altruistic dolphin behavior. They postulate the existence of generalized altruistic tendencies in dolphins: "Altruistic acts are dispensed freely and not necessarily to animals that can or will reciprocate. They need not necessarily even be confined to the species of the altruistic individual." In dolphin society, Connor and Norris point out, individuals may be aware not only of the favor-granting status of other individuals with regard to themselves, but with regard to other dolphins in general. They concur with biologist Robert Trivers that such "multiparty situations" can

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reward generalized altruistic behavior, since individuals may become regarded by others as cheaters (or as generous). "In this case selection may favor an individual, A, dispensing altruism to another indi\ddual, B, even when A knows that B will not recompense him fully, or at all, in the future. The eventual increase in A's inclusive fitness will come from an increased tendency of those individuals who learned of A's altruism to act altruistically toward him." Once having argued that generosity is theoretically possible in animals, it can also be argued that it is a real phenomenon in some species.

In the evolutionary approach, an animal is more likely to receive compassion from a parent than a more distant relative; from a relative than from a nonrelative; from an acquaintance than from a stranger; from a conspecific than from a member of another species. One would expect even less sympathy from a species that does not guard its eggs. Even if this is true, compassion could be an overarching emotion that can and does produce behavioral altruism, even in the sociobiological sense.

Attributing altruism to animals can be wrong, as in one interpretation of the notorious dolphin slaughter at Iki Island, Japan, where fishermen killed hundreds of dolphins to stop them from competing for fish. This killing took place each year for five years, during which the fishermen had no difficulty in rounding up the dolphins for slaughter. This was puzzling to many observers who were trying to stop the killing, for it was widely believed that dolphins were extremely intelligent—perhaps more intelligent than humans. One theory to explain this held that the dolphins were being altruistic, allowing themselves to be trapped and killed in the hope that worldwide horror at the spectacle (which received international media coverage) would cause a revulsion of feeling and lead to the protection of wild animals. They were martyrs. After five years, a group of the botde-nosed dolphins, instead of allowing themselves to be rounded up, darted under the boats surrounding them and got away. Perhaps they tired of martyrdom.