When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (31 page)

Animals often select mates on the basis of their displays or songs. Sometimes the criteria they use can be simply quantified: they select the biggest or the loudest or the plumpest mate. Female widowbirds are attracted to male widowbirds with long tails, so when an ornithologist glued extra tail feathers onto the end of the tails of some males, those males became more popular. They tend to favor animals with a symmetric appearance, also a preference of some humans. Sometimes, however, more subtle aesthetic choices seem to be involved.

The beautiful and unusual bowerbirds and birds of paradise of New Guinea are favored subjects of ornithological study. The various species of bowerbirds do not form pairs. Instead, the female visits the display sites, or bowers, of various males and the male performs courtship displays, which may or may not induce the female to mate with him. Some male bowerbirds—generally those with the plainest plumage—construct very elaborate bowers resembling alleys, tunnels, maypoles, yards, or tepees. They embellish these with colored objects such as flowers, fruits, insect parts, or human artifacts; and they may even paint parts of the bower with charcoal and crushed berries, using a bark "brush."

Different populations of a bowerbird species prefer different colors when choosing curios to decorate their bowers. They often visit one another's bowers and steal decorations. When selecting adornments, the satin bowerbird—a blue-eyed species—likes blue

_ 199

HUES ELEPH.tSTS fCEEP

items. WTien the male bowerbird decorates his bower, and when (and if) the female bowerbird mates with the male whose bower she likes best, they seem to be exhibiting taste. When interfering biologists steal adornments from certain bowers, females favor them less and those males are able to mate less often. Perhaps for various reasons correlated with fitness, blue-loving bowerbirds have a reproductive competitive advantage. The evolutionary approach would suggest that the ultimate cause of their artistic preferences may be to enable the male to show how fit he is, how much time he has to devote to collecting decorations and defending them from theft, and for the female to assess this. The proximate cause, however, is unlikely to be anything like this. It is unlikely that the female estimates how many bird-hours went into a bower, and whether that indicates good genes. The male does not decide to decorate with blue objects because, let us say, they are rare, and he knows that will indicate to females that he ranges over a wide area due to his good genes. It is more likely—and it is a more parsimonious theory—that both female and male bowerbirds Hke the look of blue.

Naturalist Bruce Beehler observed the bowers of the streaked bowerbird, birds who are not born especially beautiful, but must create their own beauty, hence their bowers. These resemble tepees with center poles, and on the base of the pole the bird constructs a tidy wall of moss adorned with colored objects. Each type of decoration is on a different section of the wall and the effect is "quite artistic and very beautiful." Beehler notes: "Some biologists believe that the remarkable construction of the male bowerbirds is evidence of an aesthetic sense. Others prefer to befieve that this spin-off of mating behavior is the product of the remarkable sexual competition among males to mate with females—a process that Charles Darwin named 'sexual selection.' " These two explanations are not opposed, but compatible. Yet something important is suggested by the comment that some biologists "prefer" to believe in competition. This is the question of what people like to befieve or think they ought to believe about animals.

The same issue arises with respect to birds of paradise, famous for the gorgeous plumage of the males. At a display site of the

BE4U7Y, THE BEARS, AND THE SETTING SUN

lesser bird of paradise, many males gather. All of the females who visit may mate with just one male, and biologists have wondered why. Beehler writes:

Some researchers believe that it is the product of acute female discrimination and that the females are choosing the "prettiest" or "sexiest" male. I tend to beheve that it is caused, in part, by a despotic control of the lek [communal breeding ground] mating hierarchy by the dominant bird. The alpha male, by periodic physical aggression and continual psychological intimidation, is able to keep control over the subordinate males in the lek. The females are able to perceive this hierarchy in the lek, just as humans can make the same perception about dominance and subordination in a social situation. Females will naturally tend to mate with the alpha male, because his genetic material will most likely give the female the best chance of producing offspring with his qualities—the qualities that may help her male offspring dominate a lek of the next generation.

This analysis, with its focus on male aggression and its rewards, leaves unexplained the huge golden tail feathers that the males vibrate in their displays, found so beautiful by humans that the very existence of some species has been threatened by hunting for export. If females can perceive something as complex as hierarchy, and mate according to it, why is it impossible for them to enjoy and be attracted to shimmering gold?

New Guinea human tribes have differing styles of ritual costume, which almost invariably include feathers from various species of birds of paradise, usually on the men's headdresses. Bowerbirds often take human artifacts such as brightly colored candy wrappers, cartridge cases, or shiny keys to decorate their bowers. One can imagine birds creeping near human habitations to steal colored objects and humans creeping near bird habitations to steal colored feathers. When we do it, it is for art. When they do it, it is for competition. Both may be true. What is disturbing and irrational is the decision to explain human behavior in spiritual terms of a sense

H-HEX ELEPHANTS H^EEP

of beaut)', and animal behavior in mechanistic terms of demonstrating fitness. The object, yet again, seems to be to define humans as higher and unique.

Artistic Creation

The issue of artistic creation in animals is fascinating, but little work has been done in this area. This is one of the many activities that has been said to mark a boundary between humans and animals. Various apes, particularly chimpanzees, have drawn or painted in captivity, as have capuchin monkeys. Alpha, a chimp at the Yerkes laboratory, loved to draw and would beg visitors for paper and pencil—in preference to food—and then sit in a corner and draw. Once, lacking paper, she tried to draw on a dead leaf. By giving her paper that had geometric designs on it, it was found that her drawing was influenced by what was already on the paper. She filled in some figures, scribbled in the missing parts of others, such as a circle with a wedge cut out, and added marks that "balanced" other figures. Her drawings were promptly taken from her, because after she had drawn on both sides of a sheet of paper, she would put it in her mouth.

Following this work, Desmond Morris had no difficulty in persuading another chimpanzee, Congo, to draw and paint. Interrupted before he had finished a picture, Congo screamed with rage until allowed to complete it. Congo also changed his drawing depending on what was already on the paper. His favorite design or theme was a fan of radiating lines, which he made in various ways, not by a single, stereotyped technique. Gorillas such as Koko and Michael have also made many drawings. In no case have apes produced incontrovertibly representational drawings. One chimp, Moja, produced an unusually simple drawing with parallel horizontal curves, and signed that it was a bird. Asked to draw a berr}% she produced a compact drawing in one comer of her paper. Either drawing is plausible but not irrefutable as a representation, but then many humans create and value unrepresentational art.

In a later experiment Moja and Washoe were asked to draw

202

BE4UTy, THE BK4RS, AND THE SETTING SUN

Fig 10-1. Alpha, an 18-year-old caged chimpanzee at the Yerkes laboratory, for years regularly begged humans for pencil and paper so that she could draw. Once, when she could not get paper, she drew on a dead leaf If another chimpanzee was in the cage when she was drawing, Alpha would shoulder it away or turn into a corner. She made this drawing in red and blue crayon on 8" x 11" white paper, over a period of three minutes. Alpha was never rewarded for drawing and would ignore food if she saw a chance to get pencil and paper. [From the Jom-nal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association]

such items as a basketball, a boot, a banana, an apple, a cup, and a brush, either from the actual objects or from color slides. At later sessions they were asked to draw the same items and the drawings were examined for consistency. Drawings of the boot were inconsistent, but those of the cup and brush showed similarities. None of these were drawings that a human would be likely to identify as cups or brushes: requests to draw the cup always produced a centrally placed solid vertical fan of strokes, whereas the brush was denoted by vertical strokes crossing horizontal strokes. Drawings of flowers included radial patterns and drawings of birds always included "a pointed action," whether denoting a beak, the movement of flight, or something else is unknown. "The one that threw us with Moja was the basketball, in that it just was a scribble across the page," Roger Fouts said. But after Moja drew it in the same way—^vertical zigzags on the lower part of the paper—at intervals six weeks apart, researchers realized it might represent not the appearance of the ball, but its motion. Small children sometimes produce kinesthetic drawings of this kind.

While the boredom of captivity may be a motivating factor for all such animals, they appear to find the act of drawing or painting

Fig. 10-2 A. This painting (watercolor on paper) was produced by the young chimpanzee Congo. Desmond Morris, who encouraged Congo to draw and paint, notes that fan patterns hke this were one of Congo's favorite themes. The Hnes were made by moving the brush toward his body.

Fig. 10-2B. This fan pattern was made by Congo at the same session as the previous painting, but, astonishingly, was made in a completely different manner: Congo moved the brush away from his body, grunting softly as he paused to study the lines. The fact that Congo could make similar patterns by differing methods shows that he was not simply repeating stereotyped motions.

BEAUTV, THE BEARS, AND THE SETTING SLW

rewarding in itself. (As if to once again remind us that animals remain individuals, some captive chimps absolutely refuse to draw or paint.) In 1980 a young Indian elephant named Siri (the same who rubbed fruit into her hay) was assigned a new keeper, David Gucwa. Noticing Siri making scratches on the floor of her enclosure with a pebble—and then "fingering" them with the tip of her trunk—Gucwa began providing Siri with a pencil and drawing pad (which he held in his lap). She responded by producing dozens of drawings. All could be classified as either "abstract" or scribbles, but all are confined to the boundaries of the paper and, to many observers, seem lyrical, energetic, and beautiful. She was never rewarded with food for drawing, although she might have found Gucwa's attention a reward in itself.

Gucwa and journalist James Ehmann sent copies of Siri's drawings to scientists, most of whom declined to comment, and to artists, many of whom were enthusiastic. Artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, in particular, looked at the drawings before reading the covering letter, and were struck by their "flair and decisiveness and originality." Learning the identity of the maker, Willem de Kooning remarked, "That's a damned talented elephant." (Given her circumstances, Siri could hardly be derivative.) Copies of her drawings were shown to other zookeepers, who said that was nothing new: theii' elephants scribbled on the ground with sticks or stones all the time. \'\Tiy, then, had nobody written about it before?

Siri's opportunity to draw on paper ended after two years due to differences bet\\'een Gucwa and the zoo director, and to her transfer to another zoo during renovations. She was never given paper with predrawn designs on it to see how that would affect her drawing, but on several occasions she made two drawings on one sheet of paper, and apparently placed the second with reference to the first. We do not know whether Siri ever disliked any of her work—did she ever tear anything up? Gucwa always removed her drawings promptly so that she wouldn't smear them with her damp trunk when she "fingered" them. If other elephants also like to draw, how would they react to one another's drawings?