When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (30 page)

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bears in the wild speak of them sitting on their haunches at sunset, gazing at it, seemingly lost in meditation. From all appearances it would seem that the bears are enjoying the sunset, taking pleasure in the aesthetic experience. Scientists laugh at the naivete of this interpretation. How could a bear be capable of aesthetic appreciation, a contemplative state? Some aesthetes also believe other people are incapable of such a state, or such a refined one; many nineteenth-century scientists claimed that "lower" races could not enjoy the same aesthetic emotions that they (as members of "higher" races) could. One can doubtless go too far with this, listening, for example, to a bear exhaling and claiming that he is sighing with melancholy awareness of the transience of things, observing his world and thinking that one day he will no longer be present to witness such beauty—an ursine Rilke. Momentary awareness of his own mortahty is almost impossible to prove; a sense of beauty is easier.

Why should any creature have a sense of beauty? Some have claimed that human artistic creativity is rooted in exploratory play. Perhaps a sense of beauty rewards us for making our way through the world and for turning our senses upon it. Finding one's children and other loved ones beautifal is valuable. In a broader sense we may have evolved to see the world around us as beautifal, to enjoy gazing on it, listening to it, breathing it in, moving through it, feeling and tasting it. Perhaps it serves no useful purpose beyond the satisfaction it inherently provides, a value in itself.

Before an animal can find beauty in some set of sensations, sounds, or images, it must be possible for the animal to detect these things physically, to sense them and to perceive them. Animal senses are poorly understood but seem to be tremendously variable.

It is often said that animals, or some of them, are color-blind. This strangely counterintuitive assertion has been widely repeated as scientific fact for decades and has made its way into some textbooks. Despite numerous articles in the scientific and popular press reporting color vision in animals (including dogs), the idea that animals can see in color is still frequently described as a "myth."

Humans do have excellent color vision. Along with many

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Other primates, we are classified by optical scientists as trichromats, which means that we construct the range of colors we see from three basic colors. A person and an ape may see precisely the same colors when looking at a setting sun. Many mammals, including cats and dogs, are dichromats, using two basic colors. They see in color, though not as diversely as people. A few nocturnal animals, hke rats, may be color-blind. Some birds use four or five basic colors; perhaps their color vision is better than ours. It has been known for decades that some insects can see ultraviolet light; recently it has been discovered that some birds, fish, and mammals can too. At least one species of bird, the Australian silvereye, can apparently "see"—that is, detect with the eye—magnetic fields.

If animals were without color vision, of what benefit would be a baboon's brightly colored face and rump, or a peacock's tail? Yet even among those who concede the peafowl's capacity to detect plumage colors, there are some who argue that it is unlikely to appreciate those colors. A recent natural history book for popular audiences has it:

What is it about the peacock's fan that puts the female in the mood for mating: The iridescence? The graceful shape? The spots that look like eyes? The truth is, what wows humans may not impress female peafowl at all. Instead, the sheer size of the fan may be the irresistible feature because of what it says about the bird that carried it. Namely, if a bird with a large fan has survived to breeding age despite his unwieldy handicap, he must be both strong and wily. In the same way, females may value colorful plumage not for its beauty, but because the sheen shows that the bird is free from parasites. Females that can spot these superior traits are rewarded by passing on their genes to offspring that, Hke their "handicapped" father, are more likely to survive and reproduce.

How seriously should this be taken? The view that the peahen cannot^ on the one hand, be drawn to beauty, but can^ on the other, think: "Shiny feathers mean low parasite load—I'll mate with this one so my chicks can benefit from his genes," is untenable. If any

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such claim for a peahen's abiHty to draw intellectual conclusions were explicitly made, it would promptly be rejected. Yet the assertion that the peahen does not sense beauty is in line with assertions routinely made in the field of animal behavior.

If the peahen is not thought of as a calculating gene-shopper, what can an evolutionary approach suggest is going on? If the proximate cause is that she admires the peacock's tail because she finds it beautiful—and in humans it takes neither a powerful intellect nor extensive aesthetic training to do this—then she may mate with him, which has the ultimate result of selecting the male with the best genes. While human beings occasionally refer to others in terms of their genetic potential, this is not what is typically thought to go through the mind of a person smitten with either lust or love.

To return to the question of animal senses, acute hearing is usually conceded to some animals. Nonetheless it took Karl von Frisch, more renowned for his discoveries about bee language, to show that fish hear, in an article with the title "A Dwarf Catfish Who Comes VVTien You Whistle to Him." Lately it has been discovered that the hearing of an unknown number of species goes far beyond our own: elephants communicate extensively in sounds too low for us to hear, and shrews, Like bats, practice echolocation by means of sounds too high for human ears. In the case of birds, the implications of this are not always realized. Birds are about ten times better than humans at discriminating sounds temporally. Thus, in an interval in which we hear one note, a bird can hear ten notes. When recordings of birdsongs are played at reduced speed, it is found that they use this abifity—in songs that often contain sequences of notes that pass by too quickly for the human ear. A blackbird's song that sounds like a rusty hinge to us may sound quite different to the blackbird. When people listen to or imitate birdsong, they may be overlooking great complexity.

Pet birds often appear to enjoy human music. They may prefer certain kinds of music or react differently depending on what music is played. Gerald Durrell has written of a pet pigeon who listened quietly to most music and snuggled against the gramophone. When marches were played, he would stamp back and forth, cooing loudly; to waltzes, he would twist and bow, cooing

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softly. Grey parrots sometimes flap their wings in delight when they hear favorite songs. Given the difference in auditory acuity, one wonders whether much human music might not sound slow and sepulchral to birds or whether they hear sounds from the instruments that the musicians are unaware of making.

Numerous species of animals utter lengthy and complicated calls that humans enjoy hearing. It would be odd if humpback w hales did not appreciate their own songs or if wolves did not like the sound of their howling. For this to be true one must imagine that all the care with which a humpback composes, performs, and alters its song has no positive or negative import, only a communicative function toward which the whale feels nothing and that whales listen to other whale songs only to extract data from them. This view paints whales as far more cerebral creatures than people, all mind and no heart. Canid howling is not a random procedure; as anyone who has howled with a dog knows, dogs adjust their howling according to other sounds they hear. Hope Ryden observed a pair of howling coyotes who never howled on the same note. When the male's howl hit a note the female was on, she at once dropped her pitch; when she howled on his note, the male instantly switched to falsetto. Such duets are thought to convey the information to other coyotes that there are two coyotes howling, not just one, thus indicating that a territorial pair is present. This seems Hkely, but does not mean that the coyotes do not feel that the howling sounds better that way. There is no reason why the mechanism by which this advantageous behavior is obtained could not be aesthetic appreciation of song.

Similarly, the calls of gibbons seem to serve a territorial function, yet also might rise from or display an aesthetic sensibility. Gibbons sing together daily. In most but not all species, male and female calls are different. The duets of pairs, in which they exchange notes, may be sung spontaneously or in response to the songs of other gibbons. In most gibbon species, males sing long solos and females utter ringing "great calls." Juveniles often join in.

Jim Nollman, whose avocation is playing music to and with wild animals, went to Panama in 1983 to try to make music with

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howler monkeys, who Hve in family groups and call extensively. Nollman writes that a zoologist (whose study of the howlers spanned a decade) predicted that they would not be interested in his playing, except perhaps to utter a few howls as a territorial claim. Finding a tree with howlers in it, Nollman sat beneath it and played his shakuhachi flute. The entire family at first responded with loud howls. Then one monkey began to howl between the notes of the flute, in apparent response. After an hour, darkness ended the interchange. In following days, the family did not howl with the flutist's playing, but instead descended to low branches and watched him intently, despite their reputation for shyness. Whatever the howlers thought of Nollman's flute music, it seems clear that they found it absorbing although they were aware it was not produced by one of their own. Perhaps they liked it. Even if they disliked it, that might represent an aesthetic opinion.

Michael, a gorilla in a sign-language program, is fond of music, and enjoys the singing of tenor Luciano Pavarotti so much that he has been known to refuse an opportunity to go outdoors when a Pavarotti performance is on television. He likes to tap on pipes and strum on strings from burlap bags. Unfortunately, Michael is so strong that he would have a hard time not destroying a musical instrument.

What role, if any, the pleasures of taste play in animal eating is almost wholly unknown. Siri, an Indian elephant confined in a small zoo exhibit, was often seen to step dehcately on an apple or orange, split it open, and then rub the pieces into her hay. Her keeper believed that Siri did this to flavor the hay. A wild elephant eats a wide variety of plants, which presumably have differing tastes. The diet of captivity^ is far more monotonous. Most animals, like us, seem to disHke bitter flavors and enjoy sweet ones, a discrimination that has survival value in some instances. In such simple distinctions may lie the beginnings of aesthetics.

Compared with many animals, humans apprehend little of the sensory realm of smell. We possess this ancient sense, but not keenly, and make little conscious use of it. Hunters teach themselves to compensate for the superior sense of smell of many prey animals by approaching them from downwind or by disguising the

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human scent with others. Given the powerful olfactory sense of so many animals, it is possible they have aesthetic responses to stimuli people do not detect. An observer of coatimundis in Arizona reported that these animals frequently sit up or lean back and sniff the air intently, presumably gathering informati(m. He commented that one old female, the Witch, would also sometimes arise during one of the group's intervals of relaxation on a cliff ledge, go to the edge and sit for five minutes or so, sniffing calmly, slowly, and deeply. The thought that she might be appreciating and not just assessing the world around her occurred to observers, who could not resist comparing her to a concert-goer or gallery visitor.

The frequent allegation that birds have no sense of smell is simply wrong. The olfactory bulbs in a bird's brain give them this sense. Its acuity varies widely: parrots and warblers seem to have poor senses of smell, while those of albatrosses and kiwis are excellent. Not surprisingly, some vultures have been found to have an excellent sense of smell, which they use to locate carrion. It might be pleasing or merely interesting to their aesthetic sense.

Many snakes have special heat-detecting organs. An increasing number of ocean creatures are found to have electromagnetic navigation senses. There are some senses, such as the ability to detect magnetic fields, that science has only recently become aware of; there may be more. Any sense may be subject to preference and any field of preferred and less preferred points may be perceived as beautiful or ugly. Some animals may be admiring or even creating subsonic, infrared, or electromagnetic beauty.

One scientist who gathered data about the visual preferences of immature male rhesus monkeys in captivity found that they liked short-wavelength light. They preferred orange to red, yellow to orange, green to yellow, and they liked blue better still. They were more interested in pictures of other animals than they were in pictures of monkeys, but preferred pictures of monkeys to pictures of people. They would rather look at flowers than at a Mondrian painting (Composition, 1920), and pictures of bananas interested them least of all. They would rather watch a continuous cartoon than a cartoon film loop, but they preferred the loop to watching still pictures. They preferred their films to be in focus, and the

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worse the focus was on a film, the less they cared to watch it. These preferences were categorized as "interest" and "pleasure." The preference that seems the most likely to be purely aesthetic is the one for colors, since there is no reason to suppose that a plain blue wall is more interesting than a plain yellow one. Nor are rhesus alone in their taste for blue. The German animal behaviorist Bern-hard Rensch also examined color and pattern preferences in primates and in other animals. The apes and monkeys generally preferred regular to irregular and symmetric to asymmetric designs. Nor were their tastes immutable: retested after an interval, some of them made different choices. When Rensch tested crows and jackdaws, they, too, selected regular designs, but fish seemed more attracted by irregular designs.