When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (28 page)

How many animals help others? How far will an animal go to help another? How much will it risk? How many people help others, against what odds? Yad Va Shem in Israel, commemorating the Holocaust, has an Avenue of the Righteous for those non-Jews who

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risked their lives to save Jews from extermination. As new deeds of bravery are discovered, trees in honor of the saviors are added. What would such an orchard for animals look like? Perhaps whales sing sagas of great acts of loving sacrifice by whale cows of days gone by.

Sname, Blusning, ana Hiaden Secrets

Darwin argued that only humans blush. In the years since, the self-aware social emotions like shame, shyness, guilt, embarrassment, and self-consciousness—all feelings revolving around how the self is perceived by others—have usually been considered exclusively human. Yet there is evidence that many animals feel them, too, and shame may prove to be a surprisingly basic emotion.

Asked whether wild chimpanzees ever appear ashamed or embarrassed, Jane Goodall laughed. "They do, actually. In the wild you don't see that very often. The best story I know of clear embarrassment was young Freud when he was about six years old. He was showing off—really, you could only describe it as showing off —in front of Uncle Figan, who was the alpha male. Figan was trying to groom Fifi, the new baby was there, and Freud was just prancing around and shaking branches and making a real big nuisance of himself. He went up into a tall plantain tree: they have a rather weak trunk like a banana. He was swaying it to and fro, to and fro, and suddenly it snapped!—and he crashed onto the ground. He just happened to land very close to me. I was able to see his face, and the first thing he did when he emerged from the grass was

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to take a quick little glance at Figan and then he crept quietly away and began feeding. That was quite clearly a big comedown for him."

Shame is one of the most vividly remembered feelings. Recalling happiness or fear or anger, people do not usually experience the emotion again at the time of recalling it. But remembering an incident of embarrassment or shame can often bring a flood of shame sweeping back. Those who blush may blush again at a memory. In human psychology and psychotherapy, shame received little attention for years but has recently begun to be considered important. It has been called "the master emotion," which societies use to enforce norms. Guilt refers to a particular event, but shame, which is more global, is said to refer to the individual's entire being. Thus a person might feel guilt about going off their diet, and shame at being fat. Guilt can also result from a private event, while shame tends to require that others know or observe or are imagined to judge.

Some argue—not especially vigorously, as they have met little opposition—that only humans have self-conscious emotions. It is said that animals are intellectually incapable of self-consciousness —although this is generally meant to show the low level of animal intelligence rather than a lack of emotion.

But while it may seem logical to conclude that such emotions cannot exist without an intellectual comprehension of how one is viewed by other creatures, this need not be the case. There is no reason to suppose that an animal couldn't feel shame without understanding why. As Darwin noted, mental confusion is a prominent symptom of shame. "I can't think clearly in the moment of embarrassment, and I don't know anybody else who can," psychiatrist Donald Nathanson has written. Emotion can exist with or without understanding the reasons for it. One animal might be ashamed or embarrassed without being entirely conscious of the reason; another might be ashamed or embarrassed and understand the reason perfectly.

Self-consciousness denotes both emotional and intellectual states. Emotionally, it can be an uncomfortable feeling of being observed (or observing oneself)—a form of embarrassment. Intel-

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lectually, it is the reflective knowledge of one's own mind, existence, and acts—a philosophical minefield.

Mirror studies with primates have been a focus of the debate over whether animals have or can have self-awareness. A chimpanzee allowed to become familiar with mirrors appears to learn that the image is its own. If such apes are anesthetized, dabbed on the face with a dot of paint, and given a mirror upon awakening, when they see the paint in their reflection they will touch their face with their fingers, examine their fingers, and then try to remove the paint. Orangutans also learn that the image in the mirror is of themselves; so far, monkeys have not done so. To some observers, this is evidence of self-consciousness. Others have sought to prove that it is nothing of the sort. John S. Kennedy follows some critics in arguing that it is more parsimonious to assume that the chimpanzee merely "forms a point-to-point association between the movements of the mirror image and his own movements." This tortuous explanation assigns mental powers to the chimpanzee that are at least as complex as saying that it knows it is seeing itself in the mirror. Its appeal is simply that it denies the possibility of self-consciousness in a nonhuman being.

The chimpanzees Sherman and Austin, part of an ape language experiment in Atlanta, are monitored by video cameras that they have learned to use in a variety of ways. After several months of exposure to their own images on the video monitors, each ape appeared to suddenly realize that the image was of himself. They then used the monitor to observe themselves make faces, eat, or swirl water around in their mouths. Both have learned to distinguish between a live image and a taped image of themselves, by testing to see if their actions are duplicated on the screen. Sherman was using a hand mirror to guide his application of Crayola makeup one day, tired of the mirror and gestured to have the video camera aimed at his face instead. He used the image to apply the makeup and to locate and remove any that had stained his teeth. Austin made valiant attempts one day to use the monitor to look down his throat while simultaneously shining a flashlight into it.

The practice of saving face is another chimpanzee behavior that implies consciousness of self. At the zoo in Arnhem, the chim-

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panzee Yeroen was slightly injured in a fight with another chimp, Nikkie. To the astonishment of researchers, Yeroen spent the next week limping dramatically—but only in Nikkie's view. A chimpanzee wishing to make peace with another sometimes will not approach directly, but will pretend to discover a nonexistent object and use the resulting gathering of many chimps to make contact with the former adversary, a strategy Frans de Waal thinks is used to save face.

In a diverse range of species, evidence that animals know when they are being observed suggests self-awareness. When a male baboon yawns, his impressive canine teeth are ostentatiously displayed. Observing wild baboons, biologist Craig Packer found that males with worn or broken teeth yawn less than males with teeth in good condition—unless there are no other males around, in which case they yawn just as often. Chimpanzees have been known to avoid glancing at a food source they know about but other chimps do not. On several occasions, lions in the Serengeti who had caught prey in high grass broke with the usual Hon habit of beginning to eat at once. Instead the lion sat down and glanced around for as much as five minutes, as if it had caught nothing. When other nearby lions departed, the lion began to eat. A mountain goat who sees a predator will often walk away calmly and slowly and then, the moment it is out of the predator's line of sight, take off, running at full speed. These animals act as if they were conscious of others perceiving their behavior and want to affect that perception. This level of self-consciousness might not permit a goat to look into a mirror and think, "That's me," but might show self-consciousness nonetheless. Self-awareness need not be all or nothing.

Snyness, Modesty, and EmiDarrassment

Embarrassment and shyness, also considered self-aware emotions, seem to be about being seen—in a bad light, or when one does not wish to be seen. Koko, the signing gorilla, has shown a rather touching form of embarrassment. Among her toys are a

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number of puppets and dolls. She was once seen signing "kiss" to her alHgator puppet. On another occasion Koko signed "kiss" to her blue gorilla doll and "bad bad" to her pink gorilla doll. Then she signed "chase tickle," slammed the dolls together, made them wrestle, and signed "good gorilla good good." On each occasion, and other similar occasions, the moment she saw that she was being watched, she stopped playing.

Animals do not wear clothing to conceal parts of their bodies that humans in many cultures consider vital for adults to conceal. They do not hide many actions that correspond to actions people often prefer to hide. This does not necessarily mean that there is nothing they choose to hide or keep private. The courtship of one captive bird may be an example.

Alex, the verbally accomplished African grey parrot, may be imprinted on human beings. According to Irene Pepperberg, he attempts to court certain of her male students. When courting, Alex may regurgitate food and do a little ritualized dance. "If he is courting one of my students and I walk in, he immediately stops," says Pepperberg. Perhaps Alex is embarrassed. If, on the other hand, he merely wants a little privacy, why does he want it? Perhaps he is trying to avoid competition. Is he shy? Shyness is an emotion that seems to shade into fear, the fear of being seen, and it may be that shame is also related to fear.

The essence of shame is the unpleasant feeling that one appears badly—^weak, stupid, dirty, helpless, or inadequate—and the dread of appearing this way. At first sight, shame need have no connection with fear. At one oceanarium (where the animals were never punished) a bottle-nosed porpoise, Wela, was trained to jump out of the water and take a fish from a person's hand. One day when this stunt was being photographed, trainer Karen Pryor was distracted and forgot to drop the fish as she usually did. As a result, when Wela grabbed the fish, she inadvertently bit Pryor's hand. Wela, appearing "hideously embarrassed," went to the bottom of the tank, put her snout in a corner, and would not come out until Pryor got in with her, petted her, and coaxed her into calmness.

Wela's behavior is comparable to that of a dog who barks and

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threatens someone coming into the house—and suddenly reaHzes that the someone is its owner. From a barking, bristling, menacing creature, the dog suddenly deflates to a wriggling, whining, tail-wagging pup. It has been argued that the comic reversal of behavior in such a dog does not mean he or she is embarrassed, only seeking to appease a dominant animal—its owner—by showing submission. Whether this is accurate or not, it does not seem to describe Wela's behavior, which looks more like embarrassment, a form of shame. The chimpanzee Washoe was seen to make a similar mistake, threatening an old friend (who had grown four or five inches since they had last met) before she recognized who it was and reacted with what would be called embarrassment if Washoe were human. One might say that such behavior is merely ritual submission, but then the same description could apply to an embarrassed human apology.

Dog trainers at Guide Dogs for the Blind say that old dogs who have lost bladder or sphincter control seem to be embarrassed or ashamed. One otherwise healthy sixteen-year-old dog in this condition refused to go indoors as she had always done.

One text on animal behavior evades acknowledging animal emotion by insisting, "It is certainly acceptable to say our misbehaving dog is acting as if embarrassed. It would be entirely without foundation to say it was embarrassed, even though we admit to the probable existence of emotions in animals."

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The blush is a primary evidence of shame in people. Charles Darwin, who investigated blushing at great length, seems to have been surrounded by people who blushed at the least provocation. He noted that it was usually accompanied by other signs of shame such as averting the eyes, the face, or the whole body. He had difficulty explaining the value of this phenomenon, and gave a rather Lamarckian explanation for it. Humans, he said, care about their personal appearance and the opinion of others. When people feel attention, especially critical attention, being directed at them,

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this "excite [s] into activity that part of the sensorium which receives the sensory nerves of the face; and this will react through the vaso-motor system on the facial capillaries. By frequent reiteration through numberless generations, the process will have become so habitual . . . that even a suspicion of . . . depreciation suffices to relax the capillaries, without any conscious thought about our faces."

After questioning British missionaries stationed around the world on this subject, Darwin concluded that people of all races blush, and that it is not learned, since people who have been born blind also blush. (His data contradicted those defenders of slavery who alleged that Negroes did not blush because they were incapable of shame and hence not fully human.) He called blushing "the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush."

It would have interested Darwin to know that animals other than monkeys also exhibit reddening skin. The ears of a Tasmanian devil (a small, carnivorous marsupial) in the Frankfurt Zoo turned red "during a state of excitement." Some birds blush, as can be seen on featherless areas of skin. Like the turkey, the spangled honeyeater and the smoky honeyeater have unfeathered wattles that blush "when the bird is excited." Macaws that have bare skin on their cheeks can be seen to blush. They do so when excited or enraged, and, according to parrot behaviorist Mattie Sue Athan, they have also been seen to do so if they fall accidentally while clambering down from a perch. This certainly looks like embarrassment. On the other hand the macaw might just be angry that it has fallen. Perhaps it will turn out to be true that humans are the only animals to blush self-consciously. Humans are unusually devoid of far, feathers, and other coverings, after all, and so provide a large canvas for this effect.