When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (29 page)

On the other hand, it may be that the function of blushing is not, or not wholly, a visual one. The phenomenon of blushing need not be visible. Many people feel tingling skin—and shame— without visibly reddening. If people flushed, paled, and turned

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green with the frequency found in fiction, society would he a much more colorful place. Perhaps many species of animals hlush unnoticed. No one has checked to see if, under the fur, a raccoon tingles with mortification or flushes with pride. Whether macaws also blush on the parts of their bodies covered by feathers or whether other parrots flush beneath their feathers is unknown. But even if they do not, it does not necessarily follow that if animals do not blush, thev do not feel shame.

Tne Advantages or Sname

If shame proves to be widespread in the animal kingdom, the evolutionary approach would predict that it should confer some advantage. Just what might be adaptive about global self-accusation is not immediately apparent.

The self-conscious emotions seem to appear early in the lives of humans. In one series of experiments, researchers gave small children toys cunningly designed to fall apart and then videotaped their play. When a toy broke, some children cried; some looked for another toy; some appeared ashamed or guilty. Some children looked away, their bodies "collapsed" in what is considered a typical shame response. A child who appeared tense and averted its gaze, but then tried to fix the toy, was thought to be showing a guilt response. Helen Block Lewis, an early theorist in the field of shame and guilt, viewed human shame and guilt as regulators of social interactions that combat narcissism and punish transgressions of group mores. Blushing signals to other group members that the blusher recognizes such transgression and, therefore, recognizes the group rules.

Psychiatrist Donald Nathanson does not consider shame a social emotion. He cites an experiment in which three- to four-month-old infants could control a display of flashing colored lights by turning their heads. The babies apparentiy loved doing this and squealed with pleasure when the lights went on. When the experimenters changed the apparatus so that the babies' efforts were unsuccessful, the infants' heads and necks slumped, their breathing

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quickened, blood flow to their skin increased, and they turned their faces away. Nathanson and other theorists interpret this as a primitive shame response that was independent of whether or not other people were present, and hence argue that shame is not necessarily a social emotion. (It is not clear how disappointment and frustration can be excluded as possible explanations.) In Nathanson's analysis, shame is "a biological system by which the organism controls its affective output so that it will not remain interested or content when it may not be safe to do so, or so that it will not remain in affective resonance with an organism that fails to match patterns stored in memory." He believes that it evolved comparatively recently.

As for the advantages of global self-accusation, Nathanson argues: "If you were going to design a system capable of learning from experience and educating itself, you might as well build in the capacity to magnify failure. Shame augments our memory of failure and protects us from whatever danger might occur, when, in a moment of need, we might try something well beyond our capac-

ity."

Another possibility is that shame might keep animals from attracting the attention of predators. Humans feel ashamed not only of their actual or perceived faults, but often of their differences from others, even when those differences are neutral or even positive. To be stared at can be unnerving, even when the stare is an admiring one. Often people are uncomfortable when praised. To be singled out in any way can be acutely embarrassing—and may also feel perilous.

Predators single out prey. Some predators select prey on the basis of physical condition, thus culling out sick and injured animals, as well as young animals. They may study herds of prey animals, chase some of them, and make an all-out effort to catch only a few. An examination of the bone marrow of wildebeest killed by lions revealed that a large percentage were in poor condition. Hyenas hunting make random passes at herds, or zigzag through, then stop and watch them run, switching their attention from animal to animal, apparently looking for potential weakness. One experimenter who was shooting wildebeest with anesthetic

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darts in order to measure and tag them found that, if he was not careful, these same animals would at once be killed by hyenas when he released them. Although they looked normal to humans, and seemed to he able to run as fast as ever, the hyenas noted some difference. He had to herd the hyenas away with his vehicle until the wildebeest had more time to recover.

Predators also notice other differences. A researcher once marked some wildebeest by painting their horns white. Within a few months, almost all of these animals had been killed by hyenas. Hans Kruuk has noted instances in which hyenas pursued animals who were presumably in good physical condition but were acting oddly and were then singled out by hyenas. At night, when dazzled by the headlights of a car, wildebeest ran in an odd way—and were instandy pursued by hyenas. Away from the headlights, the wildebeest quickly got their bearings and escaped.

Kruuk also saw a herd of several hundred wildebeest in which only one was rolling and showing territorial behavior. These actions, unremarkable in another context, instantly attracted a hyena's pursuit. The wildebeest escaped easily. That the wildebeest escaped in these instances supports the idea that the hyenas were detecting difference rather than weakness.

Schooling or flocking behavior can baffle some predators in a very simple way: by preventing them from focusing on individual prey. When a few members of a school of small silver fish were dyed blue, not only were they more frequendy attacked by predators, but so were the normal silver fish next to them. Faced by a cloud of identical fish, the predator could not pick out an individual, but it was able to pick out the blue one or the one next to the blue one.

Prey animals often seem aware of the assessment of predators. In Zaire, Paul Leyhausen saw two uneasy-looking male kobs (large antelope) near a river. Presently he saw two lions lurking near the kobs, moving from behind one bush to another. The kob closest to the lions appeared to grow calmer and began grazing, but the other began to run back and forth in alarm. It soon became clear from their movements, Leyhausen says, that the lions were stalking the farther kob—and that both kobs knew this well before the human

SHAME, BLUSHING, AND HIDDEN SECRETS

observer figured out that the hons were not going for the closest prey.

Prey animals also seem able to tell when predators are hunting and when they are bent on other business entirely, and adjust their flight distance accordingly. A wish to conceal weakness and difference—behavior resulting from fear or dislike of being scrutinized —could lead animals to take actions to avoid predation. They could pretend not to be weak, minimize their difference, or hide from the view of predators.

Predators are not the only creatures who might take advantage of an animal's display of vulnerability or weakness. Animals of the same species are all too likely to be alert to signs of such weakness and to exploit them. When lions in the Serengeti were shot with anesthetic darts, some of the other lions took the opportunity to attack them (and were driven off by the researchers). Thus, shame might motivate animals to hide weakness from members of their herd or pack. If a caribou appears visibly weak or lame, it will be the first in the herd to be attacked by wolves, but the wolf who appears weak or sick may lose status in the pack. This can have serious consequences in terms of having offspring.

To survive, then, an animal must not only be fit, it must look fit. The sense of shame, painful to experience, may provide an emotional reason to hide infirmity.

Sickness and injury are often concealed. To the despair of animal breeders and veterinarians, many captive animals will diligently conceal all signs of sickness until they are too far gone to be saved. Birds are particularly adept at this, sometimes hiding all symptoms and enduring secretly until the moment when they literally topple from their perches.

Scottish red deer leave the herd when they become sick or are injured. At one time it was suggested that they did this for the good of the herd, but it seems probable that a lone deer is less likely to be spotted by a predator than a herd of deer—and if a herd of deer is spotted, then the sick or injured one is most likely to be the first animal attacked. If the deer recovers, it returns to the herd. If predators zero in on difference, not merely weakness, animals

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might feel vulnerable or ashamed of things that attract the gaze of others.

It might seem odd that shame could lead to blushing. At first glance it seems counterproductive for an animal to blush visibly or physically show embarrassment: it does not look good, and isn't the objective to look good or at least not to stand out? The tingle of the blush could conceivably signal the blusher to hide (or give them something to hide), which serves the purpose of concealing the original weakness that the blusher was embarrassed about. Most animals do not blush visibly, if at all, so it may be that humans (some of us) do have a small claim to distinction in being the most visible blushers, even if we do not prove unique in feeling shame.

Pet owners often say that their cat or dog hates to be laughed at. Elephant keepers have reported that elephants who are laughed at have responded by filling their trunks with water and spraying those who are mocking them. It seems curious that animals that do not laugh might recognize and resent laughter. But perhaps laughter should be considered the equivalent expression of something they do feel themselves, and they are better translators than we are.

Guilt

Guilt—feeling remorse for a particular act—can be trickier to pin down than shame. An action that carries overtones of guilt usually does so because our culture has informed us that it is wrong. Guilt is easily confounded with fear of discovery and subsequent disapproval or punishment. The chimpanzee Nim Chimp-sky, as we saw, was taught the sign for "sorry" and used it when he had "misbehaved," just as Alex the parrot has said "I'm sorry" after biting his trainer. The examples of Nim's misdeeds that are cited— breaking a toy or jumping around too much—do not seem to be things that a chimpanzee would naturally regard as bad. Like human children, he knew it was misbehavior only because he had been taught so. Sometimes Nim signed "sorry" before his teachers noticed what he had done. Whether Nim felt something other

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than the desire to avert possible wrath is unclear. On the other hand, this is often unclear in humans, as well.

Washoe's adopted son Loulis was teasing Roger Fonts one day, "just being a pill," and poked him harder than usual, cutting Fonts with his nail. "I made a big deal of it, crying and so on. Later, whenever I showed him that, to make him feel guilty, if you will, to use it to exploit that, he would squeeze his eyes tight and turn away. He would refuse to look at me whenever I tried to show him or talk about this old, old scratch that he had given me." There are a variety of possible interpretations for this extraordinarily familiar behavior, but guilt is very strongly suggested.

Dogs are the most familiar guilty animal for most people. Desmond Morris has argued persuasively that dogs do feel remorse for their actions at times. When a dog that has committed some misdeed greets a human in an unusually submissive manner before the person has any reason to guess what has happened, Morris says, it cannot be getting cues from human behavior. "It has an understanding that it has done something 'wrong.' "

Human shame has only recently been deemed a respectable field of study. Donald Nathanson recounts how, early in his career, he organized a symposium on shame. When it was over a friend took him aside, complimented him on the success of the symposium, and urged him not to do any more work on shame, lest he get a reputation for it. "It was in that moment that I learned that the very idea of shame is embarrassing to most people," Nathanson says. These are emotions to be hidden. Perhaps animals have been successful in hiding them from our gaze.

If social animals feel guilt and shame, other animals might learn to take advantage of this. When a young chimpanzee makes a fool of itself, as Freud did in the incident recounted by Jane Good-all, it would seem possible for other chimpanzees to ridicule the young animal, to draw the attention of their companions to the situation, and to exaggerate their reactions. There does not seem to be any evidence that they do in fact mock each other this way, and if so, in this they differ from human animals.

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Setting Sun

One afternoon a student observing chimpanzees at the Gombe Reserve took a break and cHmbed to the top of a ridge to watch the sun set over Lake Tanganyika. As the student, Geza Teleki, watched, he noticed first one and then a second chimpanzee cUmb-ing up toward him. The two adult males were not together and saw each other only when they reached the top of the ridge. They did not see Teleki. The apes greeted each other with pants, clasping hands, and sat down together. In silence Teleki and the chimpanzees watched the sun set and twilight fall.

The sense of beauty is not usually defined as an emotion. Yet it does not seem to be a wholly intellectual experience. Sometimes beauty makes people happy, sometimes sad; perhaps the experience is partly cognitive and partly emotional. Human beings have certainly always preferred to reserve the appreciation of it exclusively for our own species.

The chimpanzees who w^atched the sundown with Geza Teleki were not unique. The primatologist Adriaan Kortlandt recorded a wild chimpanzee gazing for a full fifteen minutes at a particularly spectacular sunset until darkness fell. Some who have observed